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JetBlue’s CEO regularly serves as a flight attendant on his company’s flights. “Hi, my name is Dave Neeleman, and I’m the CEO of JetBlue. I’m here to serve you this evening, and I’m looking forward to meeting each of you before we land.”
100 Most Often Mispronounced Words and Phrases in English. Some of these are surprising (not “suprising”).
Veen: “when Web design is practiced as a craft, accessibility comes for free”.
tastingmenu.com looks like an excellent food weblog. One of the entries on the site is up for a James Beard Award for Internet writing.
2004 James Beard nominees announced. Nominees include Steingarten, Colicchio, pal Pableaux Johnson, and someone for a post written for their food weblog.
Fundrace2004, which is shaping up to be an extremely interesting and unique source of election information, has a new feature called Neighbor Search. You put in an address (or ZIP) or the name of a friend/neighbor/co-worker/celebrity and it returns the names, addresses, company names & job functions, and campaign contributions for persons matching the search criteria. Like all public data sets that have previously been available only in dusty books or individually by request (allow 6-10 weeks for delivery), the effect of seeing this data in aggregate and being able to slice it and dice it at will is both thrilling and a little unnerving. Ain’t the Internet grand?
Here are a few people and their contributions:
Bill Gates: George W. Bush, $2000
George H.W. Bush: George W. Bush, $2000
Craig Barrett (Intel CEO): Joe Lieberman, $2000; George W. Bush, $2000
Harvey Weinstein (Miramax): Howard Dean, $2000; John Edwards, $2000; Dick Gephardt, $1000; and possibly Wesley Clark, $2000
Larry Lessig: Howard Dean, $2000; John Edwards, $2000
Warren Buffett: Bob Graham, $2000; Wesley Clark, $2000
Jimmy Buffett: Bob Graham, $2000; Wesley Clark, $2000
P. Diddy: Al Sharpton, $2000
Also of interest is this map of Manhattan showing political contributions by building. Lots of Republicans on the UES and lots of Democrats below 14th Street…no surprise there. (via reBlog)
The Skyscraper Museum has a new home in Battery Park City, opening April 2nd.
Loads of good stuff at GUIdebook, a graphical user interface gallery.
Hello Kitty USB hub talks, moves, and vibrates while you work.
Apple’s Spoken Interface aims to improve accessibility in the next version of OS X.
Translation guide for Perl and PHP. Would be great if this included several other popular languages.
Wow, there’s a lot of books about sneakers. Well, more than I would expect anyway.
My favorite sneakers were a pair of Nike Air Darwin shoes I bought back in college. They were all-black low tops with a smallish white Swoosh placed backwards right below the ankle, simply designed, very cool-looking, and comfortable. Sneakers these days look either like Jackson Pollack paintings or classic cars (complete with shock absorbers), making it hard for me to find something I like. I’ve kept my eye out for a pair of Air Darwins in a 9.5 on eBay and vintage sneaker sites, but no love so far.
According to IFC, the word “fuck” and its derivatives was uttered 138 times during the course of the film.
- Fly your flag proudly!
- Stay cool for deep, restful sleep.
- Think again, before it’s too late!
- Don’t hit the garage wall!
- Organize your priorities.
- Hold that thought!
- Drink no wine before it’s time.
- Express your love.
- Spend some time in England.
- Get smart!
- Keep 18 pairs of shoes handy.
Michael Jackson’s official Web site features him standing in what looks very much like a crotch. Just beat it!
“I want a turtle named Garamond” and other pets named after typefaces.
Malcolm Gladwell on the guy who invented the mall.
Boing Boing finally moves to a more powerful, stable blogging system. Monthly/weekly archives are missing tho…I was gone for five days and missed a whole mess of posts.
Sugar, a photo gallery of rusty boats by Marshall Sokoloff.
David’s trying to organize a GBA Pokemon playdate on the N train.
The title of this post is wrong, should be “syndication via HTTP is raging”.
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.
How to hack a Super Mario Bros cart to erase everything but the clouds.
Get you own reBlog. For those bloggers that “prefer curating content to writing original posts”.
Gel (Good Experience Live) is a one-day conference being held at the NY Historical Society in Manhattan at the end of April. The focus is on “experience”, which is a bit nebulous in comparison to a conference on technology or design, but that’s what makes it fun and interesting. Highlights from last year’s event were Ken Jackson’s talk on New York City, Jim Kunstler’s skewering of contemporary urban design, and a live performance by The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players.
Scheduled to appear at this year’s Gel are Christo, Scott Heiferman from Meetup, and Andre Haddad, VP of User Experience and Design at eBay. If you register for Gel, tell ‘em Jason sent you (they have a referral program).
Play old school video games at the Blip exhibition at the American Museum of the Moving Image in NYC.
Kill cable clutter with Zip-Linq retractable cables. Available for all sorts of devices.
Apple industrial design photos from out-of-print AppleDesign by Paul Kunkel.
Belkin Media Reader for the iPod. Use your iPod as a portable storage device for your digital photos.
1998 New Yorker profile of Victoria Gallegos, top Prada salesperson, moved $2 million in one year. This woman could sell (very expensive) ice to (very rich) Eskimos.
Since my current mobile phone has been busted for almost a year now, I recently purchased a new phone from Amazon. I got the Sony Ericsson T610 with cell service from T-Mobile. Amazon is currently offering the phone for $154.99, which is $45 off the regular price. Two rebates are available when you purchase this phone, one from Amazon for $130 and one from T-Mobile for $100 (if you “activate a T-Mobile plan of $39.99 or higher”). T-Mobile charges $35 to activate your account.
When you do the math, Amazon, Sony Ericsson, and T-Mobile end up paying you $40 to buy a $200 phone. If you’re like me, when a large company wants to give you something for nothing or wants to pay you to purchase a product, you start thinking that someone somewhere is getting screwed.
Gillette recently sent me a $10 razor for free, presumably so they can sell me replacement blades at $2 apiece, a price I’m assuming includes a ridiculous profit margin. My credit card company is constantly bombarding me with offers to pay me to try their services, which they can afford to give away because we’re paying them 18% interest on our purchases and we’ll forget to cancel these “free” services to the tune of $11.95/mo. (which monthly service fee is subject to the 18% interest and is both brilliant on the part of the credit card companies and maddening to their “customers”). My bank gives me free checking, but they sell my personal information to companies that send me junk mail and overdrafts cost me $20…which is why it’s a good thing they also offer overdraft protection for a “low” monthly fee (this is what my dad would call “straddling the fence”).
And now this cell phone thing. With this deal, the buck ultimately stops with T-Mobile. They’re getting $40/mo out of you (with taxes and the extra service charges that all the phone companies throw in probably brings the bill up into the $50/mo range), $35 for activation (way too much…is this not a cost of doing business?), you’re locked into a contract for 1-2 years ($200 early cancellation fee), and they can then charge you $3-7/mo for each of the following services that should be part of any modern cell phone service: SMS messaging, Internet access, sending photos via SMS or email, and unlimited in-network calling.
However you slice it, let’s put it this way: they (and the other mobile communications companies) are making so much money selling their service that they (with the help of Amazon and Sony Ericsson) can give you a free $200 phone and $40 cash. I wonder what phone service would cost if I had more than a mere handful of companies to choose from?
Entries in a contest to redesign the Project Gutenberg Web site.
Interview with a computer security specialist on script kiddie culture.
Tomas doesn’t let Real off the hook for their improvements to the newest version of Real Player.
CAP report on the Passion of the Christ. They recommend caution in deciding whether or not to take the kids to see it.
Women’s Wear Daily is reporting on a proposed magazine by O’Reilly called Make (links mine):
Even O’Reilly, the favorite book publisher of geeks everywhere, is thinking of jumping into the DIY pool. It’s exploring the idea of a publication called Make that would be the anti-Cargo — the latter tells its readers which DVD player to buy, while the proposed one would tell its own how to rip that DVD player open and hack it. As uncommercial as it sounds, the project has attracted help from some big names in tech publishing circles: former Industry Standard chief executive officer John Battelle and former Boing Boing editor Mark Frauenfelder.
Sounds like ReadyMade for the hacker set. If they get the first issue out by the end of the year, I can add it to my reading list.
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