Inexplicably, I continue to find
Inexplicably, I continue to find the Pets.com spokespuppet very amusing. In this video from Good Morning America (RealAudio), he rescues socks, plays fetch with dogs, and makes fun of Charlie Gibson. I don't know what it is....I just can't get enough of the puppet. Did you notice I even used the word "spokespuppet" without a trace of sarcasm? Jeez....
Time magazine asks Moby, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim O'Reilly, Clay Shirky, David Brooks, Mark Dery, and Esther Dyson about their views on the future: religion, culture, politics, etc. Gladwell: "If I had to name a single thing that has transformed our life, I would say the rise of JetBlue and Southwest Airlines. They have allowed us all to construct new geographical identities for ourselves."
With Web 2.0 afoot, SF dot com ghost town South Park is on its way back to boom time. Peter Merholz, a current corporate resident of South Park, recalls the good old days in the area.
Neil Gaiman has a touching
Neil Gaiman has a touching entry (May 12th, 2nd item) on his weblog about the passing of his friend Douglas Adams.
What sort of city should New York be?. "You truly become a New Yorker when the city seems more to you than your workplace and a collection of shops and restaurants, when you start caring about the city itself, beyond your daily route, outside of your neighborhood, about the city we were and the city we might become."
Story in Time magazine about Thomas Keller's move to NYC. Call me naive, but shouldn't there be a big disclaimer that his restaurant is opening in the Time Warner building?
There's a new episode of
There's a new episode of 0sil8 entitled The Minneapolis Sign Project. Basically, I hauled a camera around town and took pictures of all sorts of interesting signs. I like signs.
For those that don't know, 0sil8 is another Web site of mine, one that's been around a lot longer than kottke.org. I've been neglecting it lately (partially because of this site but mostly because of work, side projects, and general life stuff), but hopefully I'll be updating it more in the future. If you'd like to receive email when 0sil8 updates, sign up for the mailing list.
Busy day today. First of
Busy day today. First of all, I went down to my old place of employ and had lunch with some friends of mine. Always nice to see those folks. My old boss, Scooter, walked by while I was lounging in a chair waiting for Ben to finish something up. Not wanting to be rude, I said, "Hi, Scott." As he passed, he glanced in my direction, realized who it was, and kept right on walking without returning my greeting. Scott, you may be running one of the larger Web firms in Minneapolis, but does that entitle you to act like such a little kid? Grow up, please.
After lunch, Ben and I went to Any Given Sunday. Not too bad. The only real problem with the film was that it was a football movie, and hence full of cliches and such. We learned "what football was all about" approximately 12 times. And we finally get to see Elizabeth Berkley play the role she's been meant to play: a high-priced call girl who lounges around naked. Not that I'm complaining....she's a very attractive girl. Maybe if I had a $1000 lying around....
After the movie, Ben realized that he had Timberwolves tickets for the evening and asked if I wanted to go. So, we went. The Wolves crushed the Bulls. The Bulls suck so bad, I can't even believe it.
Once again, I don't what
Once again, I don't what all the fuss is about. I already have a full-sized keyboard and precise optical mouse for my PC. Of course, it'll be nice for the Mac users to catch up. Now, if only there was more than one button and one of those scrollie deals on that mouse....
The new Apple G4 Cube, however, is a thing of beauty. I'd love to have a computer that small on my desk. A downside of the Cube is that it's not all that expandable. In this Failure Magazine interview, Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, points out that one of Apple's early strengths was the expandability of the Apple II:
Woz: "Tandy, like Commodore with their Pet, was non-expandable. You would buy it with 4k of memory and you'd have 4k of memory for life. Early on we came out with our floppy disk drive. How do you add a floppy disk drive to a Tandy? It turns out there was no designed way built in. So the Tandy machines and the Commodore machines, because of their lack of expandability, lost out in the early exciting things, which were floppy disks and VisiCalc. They had to go back to the drawing board. They tried to make their products go for a while longer, which was another mistake. They would have been smarter to get to the drawing board sooner. That's really where Apple won out."
Now, the situation with the Apple II then and that of the Apple G4 Cube now is not really the same, but I think there are some interesting parallels and lessons to be learned there.
Liveblogging the Oscars
Just a heads up to let you know that a liveblog of the Oscars is going to be starting here in a little bit. Follow along as I follow along, if you know what I mean (and I think you do).
7:44a, Feb 25th: The Oscars are over. 20% of the nominees won. The cat threw up on the rug and Ollie's a bit fussy this morning. We'll see you back here next year.
11:42p: Bedtime. Last update until tomorrow morning, when I assume the Oscar ceremony will finally be over.
11:06p: None of the stories on the front page of Digg refer to the Oscars. Unsurprising that they have their heads in the sand on such an important issue.
10:47p: BREAKING NEWS: The program on ESPN2 right now is not Fisting; it's Fishing. Fishing. Also, 1363 unread items in my RSS reader.
10:28p: Fashion update. Just took off my shirt. It's hot in here, it's not just me.
10:08p: Battery life at 31% and dropping.
10:00p: Just checked the movie times at the theater two blocks from my apartment. Juno at 10:50, There Will Be Blood at 10:20, Atonement at 10:30, and No Country for Old Men at 10:15 & 10:55. Michael Clayton is on Movies OnDemand for $4.99 at any time.
9:32p: Is this a good time to go to the movies? Lots of empty seats at There Will Be Blood maybe?
9:07p: My liveblogging outfit this evening: jeans by Banana Republic, long sleeve tshirt by American Apparel, socks by Wal-Mart, boxer shorts by Muji.
8:55p: What else is on right now: The Mummy on Encore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer on Fox Movie Channel, Miller's Crossing on Encore Action, The Departed on Cinemax, episode #8 of The Wire on HBO, the Masterpiece version of Pride and Prejudice on PBS, Bulls vs. Rockets on ESPN, Godfather II on AMC, and Born Into Brothels is just ending on IFC but Spanking the Monkey starts in 20 minutes.
8:43p: Non-ceremonial bulletin: I've turned on the comments.
8:34p: I'm told that the ceremony has started.
7:58p: The Oscars have not started yet.
The realest real
So, I'm writing a script for a reality show. In it, a team of fit-but-insecure aspiring actors and models (plus one nerdy, self-confident Asian college student) work together to restore and pimp out a 1974 Winnebago motor home, inside and out, over the course of several weeks. The team will be coached by a custom car aficionado from Southern California and five homosexual gentleman, learning from them not only how to weld, but how to make their bead profiles all they can be.
During the restoration process, the team will be judged and heckled by a panel comprised of Debbie Gibson, Warren Buffett, and a weekly guest panelist of C-list status. Each week, viewers will vote on which judge they liked the least using their cell phones. That judge will have to take a whipped cream shower with Dom DeLuise and marry a random member of the studio audience. The audience member gets $1,000,000 and a phone call to a friend. That friend will choose one of the team members to be "fired" from the show. On the final episode, the last remaining team member wins the Winnebago, drives it across the country with Tara Reid and Brittany Murphy to NY to start their new job at Orange County Choppers. At some point, someone will eat a handful of live earthworms.
It can't miss.
Farecast, a site which predicts airline ticket prices so that you know when to buy them cheap, has added more than 50 cities to its roster.
The Face2Face Project takes similar photographs of Palestinians and Israelis and displays them together in pairs. "After a week [in Israel and Palestine], we had a conclusion with the same words: these people look the same; they speak almost the same language, like twin brothers raised in different families. It's obvious, but they don't see that. We must put them face to face. They will realize." (via 3qd)
Swish swish whee!
I saw the funniest thing on the way to work this morning. The car in front of me lost one of its windshield wipers...it just flew right off as the car was sitting at a stoplight. The driver got out, looking a little perturbed, yet amused, put the wiper back on, and got back in the car.
Is flea market design successful for eBay?
Victor speculates that eBay's not-so-great site design might be responsible for their success:
Conventional wisdom - at least with the folks I hang out with - says that auctions, plus EBay's first-mover advantage - is such a compelling experience that people will tolerate the bad design. But what if EBay is succeeding because of its bad design? What if, like a flea market's rough, seller-created environment, the amateur design communicates the idea of bargain?
I remember talking about this issue with Stewart and Jason in preparation for our panel on Simplicity in Web Design for SXSW 2002. I can't recall if we talked specifically about eBay, but we did discuss The Drudge Report and Google. Drudge maintains his independant DIY credibility with the site's amateur design and Google's simple design and unprofessional visual branding gained the allegience of geeks and general Web users looking for no-nonsense search results.
Like Peter, I believe eBay could benefit significantly by a "tightening up of their experience", but Victor is right in emphasizing the importance of the site's flea market feel. Useful design doesn't necessarily need to be "slick" or "high tech" (a feeling which eBay needs to stay well away from, except when it comes to their security and fraud prevention efforts). Look at Ikea. They're known for cheap home furnishings and housewares, yet they focus a great deal of attention on design, not only for their products, but for their stores, catalogs, factories, signage, etc. eBay could definitely achieve a similarly successful balance with their site.
The hygiene hypothesis of allergies "argues that exposure to more natural environments such as farms early in life helps train the body to respond appropriately to harmless microbes and pollen". Could also be called the "let your kids eat dirt hypothesis". Somewhat related story: my dad had allergies when he was a kid but then got stung by a bunch of bees one day and boom, no more allergies.
A non-exhaustive list of actors
A non-exhaustive list of actors appearing in Fast Times at Ridgemont High: Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Judge "Freakin'" Reinhold, Phoebe Cates, Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and Nicholas Cage. I think one or two of them might have made some movies at some point after that as well.
Very, Very Bad Things
About 10 minutes into Very Bad Things, I realized the title was referring to the plot, acting, and the dialogue. Touted as a black comedy, I think it missed its mark with me...I didn't laugh once during the whole movie. For those that know me well, let's put it this way: I'd rather watch Independence Day again than VBT. Bad bad.
The "lost intro" to Star Wars, a scene featuring Luke pining for adventure on Tatooine. I'm glad it got lost. (via cyn-c)
Let's talk Antarctica blogs.
Antarctic Journal is one of the best; it's written by a grad student studying penguin ecology. Big Dead Place is also great (but not strictly a blog); check out the stories and interviews section. Also of note but of varying quality and timeliness are a blog by the British Antarctic Survey, John Bean's Antarctica blog, a U of Delaware blog, Antarctic Blog, and Antarctica Blog.
I'm still looking forward to the SOUTH expedition blog whenever that happens.
Update: One more: 75 Degrees South. Very nice photos, as in this post. (thx, pete)
Update: More Antarctica blogs and such: UAB in Antarctica, Blog Rogers (which includes info about the book, Antarctica: Life on the Ice), Nathan Duke, elisfanclub, Concordia Base, Base Dumont d'Urville, Mr Rose Géophy CZT45, and Andrill. (thx, everyone)
Spiraling Fibonacci Flickr circle madness. This one is worth looking at full-sized. Wow.
Must see/TiVo TV: for the first time in years, PBS is airing Eyes on the Prize, a 14-hour series on the American civil rights movement. (via steve)
Hitotoki, short stories about New York..."short narratives describing pivotal moments of elation, confusion, absurdity, love or grief -- or anything in between -- inseparably tied to a specific place". Also available in the original Tokyo flavor.
Photo of Vermont foliage. "Among factors that combine to give Vermont an edge in the U.S.'s foliage sweepstakes are the abundance and density of broad-leaved tree species, each with a contrasting color scheme, and a climate inclined to bring out the best in all of them."
Alan Kay on scalable group collaboration (Open Croquet)
Alan Kay showed us a pre-alpha demo of some software (called Open Croquet, I think) written in Smalltalk and Squeak. The collective collaboration of Hydra + Star Trek's Holodeck + The Matrix. It looks like what he's done is create an OS based not on applications but on objects, which makes a bit of emergence possible (which, if you're drinking the Kool-Aid here at Etech, is a good thing). Quite impressive.
Some running notes:
What I find most useful about reading Jacobs is how well her arguments scale. They're scale-free arguments. Through her discussion of large cities in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and of entire civilizations in this book, you can see instantly how the problems and solutions she examines could be used to describe smaller entities like towns, families, large corporations, project teams, blogospheres, online communities, etc.
Dark Age Ahead is ultimately another in the this-world-is-going-to-hell genre of media, but Jacobs makes it seem OK somehow. Maybe it's because she's really concerned about it and not selling fear like everyone else?
Several mentions of Canada and Toronto (Jacobs' current place of residence) in the book so far. I wonder about generalizations being made about specific situations in Toronto; something to keep in mind.
Jane Jacobs hates cars. Absolutely can't stand them. I thought this book was about a possible coming dark age, not her dislike of automobiles.
As I'm reading, I'm flipping back to the endnotes. Many of her sources are either the Toronto Star or private conversations she's had with people. One gets the mental picture of an elderly woman sitting at her breakfast table, reading the newspaper to guests, and getting so worked up about it all that she writes a book about the coming dark age.
Best chapter is Dumbed Down Taxes, about how the collection and distribution of funds by the government has become disconnected with the needs of people. Jacobs makes the excellent point that maybe the rules and structure we came up with for governing the county 200 years ago isn't necessarily the best way to go about it now and should be reexamined. Why is New York City part of a state? Does it benefit the state or the city in any way? And what about states? Do they still make sense? (And don't even get me started on the electoral college.)
Before I bought this book, I looked it up on Amazon and read a review by Dr. J. E. Robinson called The Title and Book Jacket Do Not Match the Text Inside (you'll have to scroll for the review...Amazon annoyingly doesn't permalink individual reviews). When I first read the review (2/5 stars), I thought it unfair. Now having finished the book, I still think the review was largely unfair, but Dr. Robinson does have a point. In trying to make her points (which, when she stated them in chapter 1, I thought were excellent), Jacobs is all over the place and seldom manages to clearly support her arguments. Not that the examples she cites aren't eventually relevant (after all, a dark age pretty much affects everything in a culture), but they don't go directly to her main points. I would have loved more focus.
Doing a lot of complaining, but really, there lots of excellent stuff here. The individual stories and passages contained in the book would have made a great series of magazine articles or a fantastic weblog.
The Outline of History
I'm just getting into The Outline of History by H.G. Wells. Written in 1919, it's basically a history of the world from its formation several billion years ago up to the end of World War One. It's a little out of date here and there, but it's such a treat to read history written by such an excellent author.
The first thing ever sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.00.
Jason Fried was recently in
Jason Fried was recently in Europe as well and took lots of pictures which are currently featured in Jason's Europe Tour 2001.
The evolution of book cover design. Using Robert W Chambers' The King in Yellow as an example.
James Surowiecki discusses the waste of holiday giving. "Waldfogel's main finding is that, in general, people spend a lot more on presents than they're worth to those who receive them, a phenomenon that he calls 'the deadweight loss of Christmas.'" This is one of my big problems with the whole Christmas thing. Related: gift cards worth billions of dollars are left unredeemed each year.
Rebecca Mead on J. Crew's beach delivery service in the Hampton's. "It's always interesting when everyone wears the same color."
For some years now, we web designers have been operating with a rough idea of exactly what it is we do. By mimicking the practices of other disciplines, sharing knowledge via web sites & mailing lists, reading industry magazines, following design gurus, and a whole lot of making it up as we go along, we've managed to get quite a bit done. That said, in order to move forward, there's tremendous value in concisely presenting all that we've learned in one place, and that's exactly what Jesse James Garrett has done with The Elements of User Experience (Amazon link).
And he does this without pushing a trademarked process or holding himself up as a guru with all the answers. Instead, he simply describes the process that web designers have been using to get things done. I say "simply", but that word belies the clarity and thoroughness of the book in its description of user experience design. One of the book's most valuable contributions is the explanation of exactly how the various specialties fit into the larger process. Information design, information architecture, visual design, interface design, interaction design; they're all represented in Jesse's model of user experience design (shown at right).
Highly recommended for anyone involved in web design and developments, especially for managers and technical folk to get an idea of what us designers actually do. Here's chapter 2 of the book in PDF format to get you started.
New bookmark: interesting Flickr photos from the last 24 hours, automagically determined. PageRank for photos, sorta.
I posted the answer to the rope burning logic problem from last week. Note: the answer does not involve time travel or impossible knots.
Getting away from the Current
Getting away from the Current Situation and just trying to return to some sort of normalcy is difficult these days. Flight cancellations, plans postponed, television still dominated by the news coverage, events cancelled, newspapers and Web sites (including this one) still full of news/commentary, &c. Yesterday, in an attempt to escape from all that, I went to 2001 Extreme: An Arcade Odyssey. $25 for all the vintage arcade and pinball games I could play. Dig Dug, Burgertime, Defender, Asteroids, Star Wars, Donkey Kong, they were all there. They even had a Bubble Bobble machine, one of my all-time favorites. Good, clean, dorky fun.
Continual fools
Today's posts have nothing whatsoever to do with April Fools Day. We're foolish here every day.
NBA playoffs
Many basketball fans don't care for the pro game, but you'd have to be made of stone if you're not appreciating the NBA playoffs this year. Have you been watching? What a bunch of great games and series.
Round one featured an old-fashioned duel between LeBron James and Gilbert Arenas, Phoenix battling back from a 3-1 series deficit against a perplexing Lakers team (with Kobe playing team basketball!) to win, and an aging Shaquille O'Neal -- after the refs demonstrated that he was no longer good enough to bull his way through defenders in the post and not get called for offensive fouls -- going for 30 points and 20 rebounds in game six, playing a finesse game unseen from him since his college days at LSU.
And in the second round, the Clippers and Suns are going at it like cats and dogs (2 overtimes in game five, 253 total points in game 1), the defending champion Spurs are trying to come back from a 3-1 deficit to the Mavericks (3 of the games have been decided by 2 points or less and another went to overtime), and the Pistons, who by all accounts should have swept the Cavs in four, find themselves down 3-2 to a team with the best 21-year-old basketball player ever.
Despite the NBA's dogged insistence on promoting individual players as the primary reason to watch games, watching the team play has been the most compelling part of the playoffs. Detroit, Phoenix, San Antonio, the Clippers, and Dallas are great to watch on either end of the court: how a team's offense changes in response to their opponent's defense, how the defense changes to compensate for the tweaks made by the offense, and so on. I don't have a favorite team in the playoffs this year, but this is the most fun I've had watching the NBA since rooting for the Bulls in 1998. (I know, I know.)
Mena steps down as CEO of Six Apart. A good move...6A is a fundamentally different company than when it started and it needs different leadership.
Simlish is the fictional language spoken in the Sims games. Several music artists have recorded songs sung in Simlish.
William Gibson has a weblog
Sci-fi writer William Gibson (Neuromancer) has started a weblog. Long regarded as a Luddite when it comes to writing, Gibson says that's just not true:
"Google me and you can learn that I do it all on a manual typewriter, something that hasn't been true since 1985, but which makes such an easy hook for a lazy journalist that I expect to be reading it for the rest of my life. I only used a typewriter because that was what everyone used in 1977, and it was manual because that was what I happened to have been able to get, for free."
His weblog is powered by Blogger, which, I suppose, is the 2003 version of the manual typewriter: not state-of-the-art, but free. (via bb)
You'll find more in the archives or you may peruse the books, movies, remaindered links, or further afield separately.
