Entries for May 2004
As I sat at my computer last night, a cry arose from outside the window. A woman, distressed about something. Figuring it was just a television, reveler from a nearby party, or someone facetiously wailing about trivial things to a friend on the phone, I ignored it and went back to my work. But they continued, the distressed cries. I began to catch snippets of her lamentations:
“Sebastian…why…don’t leave me…accident…don’t die…can’t live without you…”
Concerned, I got up and went to the window in the living room. I could hear her more clearly here, talking to herself or maybe to God. Her dog Sebastian had had an accident of some sort. The woman was almost hysterical at this point, so it was hard to tell what had happened or if Sebastian was alive or dead.
Thinking that the dog had fallen out a window into the space between my building and the next (about an eight to ten foot distance), I opened the window and stuck my head out to investigate. No sign of Sebastian. I could hear the woman even more clearly than before, still repeating the same words over and over. I strained out the window, trying to locate her apartment; she needed some help from a calm party, someone who could call 911, 311, the emergency pet hospital, or whatever one does for critically injured pets. The sound bounces around so much between the buildings that she could have been anywhere, my building, the building across the way, even in the buildings behind ours.
I was about to put my shoes on to see if I could find the woman somewhere in our building when I heard dialing. She’d finally snapped herself out of her hysteria and was calling a friend. The conversation calmed her; after a couple sentences, her distressed voice lowered and I couldn’t hear her anymore. A few minutes passed, my heartrate slowed, and I heard a buzzer (on the floor below, I think) and then running up the stairs. As the woman answered the door and let the person in (her friend? a paramedic?), I heard very little, just a “hi, where is he?”
A lot of people in NYC live alone, and all they have to keep them company sometimes are their pets. Sounds silly to some, but a person can love a pet as much as they can a person, and their death is no less shocking and painful. I hope Sebastian is alright; it sounds like that woman really cared about him. Makes me sad thinking about it. Hope he’s OK.
Michael took some photos of Manhattanhenge. The sunset aligned with the street grid in Manhattan last week.
Excerpt of The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. “…large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant — better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future”
The Frontline special on the music industry covered a lot of ground, perhaps too much for just an hour. The main theme of the show was that music hasn’t fared too well as an industry. Media companies, including the big five record labels and the radio station chains, have lost touch with their customers, marketing what will sell instead of providing a good product. Big media blames the industry downturn on free music availability on the Internet, but as Michael “Blue” Williams, Outkast’s manager, puts it, the labels have gotten lazy and are pushing out crap; he says if the labels “started putting out good records, quality records, the public will buy”.
If you missed it, don’t worry; the entire episode is available on the PBS Web site in either Windows Media or Realplayer format**. Also on the Web site are all sorts of additional interviews and information.
** Go PBS for putting episodes online. As taxpayers, the shows are ours anyway…we should be able to choose when and how we watch them. This way, we don’t need to go downloading illegal copies of missed episodes of our favorite shows.
(Oh, and I tried looking for the weblog world’s reaction to the show, but all three of the blog search engines I tried — Daypop, Blogdex, & Technorati — were down, so you’ll have to dig that up on your own. Will someone make a reliable weblog search engine that doesn’t suck? Hello, business opportunity!)
Computer gamers are professional athletes in Korea. Some players are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, wear uniforms, and have rabid fans.
After not having a computer monitor at home for the past year and a half — I’ve been using the laptop screen instead, which has been a little sucky for doing design — I went out and splurged on a 20” Apple Cinema Display. Jesus, what an amazing monitor; I concur completely with Justin’s Apple display lust.
The first thing I did after getting the monitor hooked up was fire up kottke.org in Safari. At this point, I’d like to apologize to those of you who visit my site with a Mac and an Apple display (or a similarly bright and crisp display). Holy burning retinas! Seeing that yellow green color at the top of the site was like staring directly into the sun. When the page first loaded, I recoiled, fliched my head to one side, clenched my eyes shut, and threw my hand up in front of my face to prevent any permanent damage to my retina. My efforts may not have been quick enough…when I closed my eyes to go to sleep that night, a bright white bar bounded by a dotted line beneath pulsed on the inside of my eyelids, delaying my slumber for quite awhile.
So, apologies.
What Else Happened in America While Lewis and Clark Explored the West. “For each day of the Lewis and Clark expedition two hundred years ago I post, on the corresponding day in the present, a little summary of what the expedition did on that day and also a little summary of something else that happened in American history on that day.”
iTunes playlists by celebrities can suck. But mostly celebs listen to what everyone else listens to.
Fermilab building a 500 megapixel camera. That’s equivalent to an image 28,000 by 18,700 pixels or 32.5 x 21.6 feet when viewed on screen at 72 PPI.
Wired profile of Nick Denton and Gawker Media. Nice to see some of my work featured in Wired, the print version even uses Gawkeresque date tabs as story illustrations.
Overview of a chat with Malcolm Gladwell. Avec pictures; Malcolm’s hair is headed from afro to Kenny G.
Syllabus for college course on McSweeney’s. texts include those from Eggers, Wallace, Lethem, and Lydia Davis.
Alison Lewis’ Think of Me rings keeps you connected with loved ones. Touch one ring and the ring on the other wearer glows and heats up.
Audience, Structure and Authority in the Weblog Community. Cameron differentiates between link types to better analyze authority in the blogosphere.
Picturing Business in America, Hedcuts in The Wall Street Journal. Great Smithsonian exhibit on the WSJ’s black and white portrait drawings.
Jane Jacobs, when asked about the potential negative effects of computers on communities and neighborhoods, replied that the opposite may be true; that navigating the Web shows people how networks function and how to think in a more non-linear fashion:
[There is] a very persuasive argument that the computer, in the form of things like the World Wide Web and the Internet, is actually [giving] people firsthand experience with use of a Web and making virtual changes in a Web-like way. This is not real. But after all, quirks and quarks and atoms are not real, for all we know. But thinking of them, picturing them and seeing the world with these things, really illuminates our understanding. It may be untruthful and it may be wrong, but usually, each of these things gets a little nearer the truth. So this Web-thinking in the place of the mechanical, cause/effect kind of thinking is certainly closer to the truth. The use of the computer [may be] indispensable to this, both for the complications we have to understand and have begun to understand and also because of a different notion this gives people. You know it’s always been available to people that they be hermits. But think of how few of them have been. So, no, I don’t think the human race will suddenly be smitten with an overwhelming urge to become hermits because of a new machine.
I’m on a bit of a Jacobs kick right now, reading Dark Age Ahead and poking around online for essays and interviews I’ve missed.
Look for a slew of books from bloggers in the next few months/years. West coast bloggers write tech books, east coast bloggers write novels.
Last week’s season finale of The West Wing was on smack dab in the middle of game 6 of the Timberwolves/Kings series. I opted to watch the game instead of the Wing. Of course, since NBC wants to make their media artificially scarce, the episode wasn’t replayed later in the evening nor will it until later in the summer (if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you!). This weekend, I found a torrent for the finale…without commercials and in letterbox no less. A couple hours of downloading later and voila, my own personal rerun.
As I walked to the subway through the crowds in Grand Central Terminal last night, a police officer yelled out to a young man accompanied by his mother, “hey, you gotta take that cap off in here!” The youngster, startled, tugged on the bill of his Red Sox hat, looked at the now-grinning cop, and smiled broadly, realizing he’d been had. “That’s worth a summons around here, ya know,” the cop continued, chuckling along with boy, his mother, me, and a few other folks within earshot. In stark contrast, that same morning at the Times Square subway station, commuters gave a wide berth and apprehensive looks to a hulking police officer holding the leash of the biggest German Shepherd I’ve ever seen.
Swirling, swirling, swirling. I almost fell into a trance watching this.
Older posts
Socials & More