Entries for January 2005
I’m a big fan of the Tube here in London, but I took a bus last night for the first time and I recommend the experience. You get a much better sense of the city than you do burrowing underground from place to place. If you can, get on one of the double decker ones (they also have the long accordian buses here, which I think are newish) and sit on the upper deck in the front. With the huge windshield in front of you (and not much else), you feel a little like you’re floating around the city. Quite fun.
Quicken is “retiring” the 2002 version of their software, meaning things like online bill pay won’t work. It’s ridiculous that a piece of 3 year old software stops functioning. If software companies are going to effectively “rent” software to people, it should cost a lot less.
I’m leaving for London in a couple of hours. I’ll probably be posting a bit while I’m there as time and connectivity permit…hopefully some photos as well.
Packing this morning, I came up with a list of the extra stuff that I need to do before going to the airport now that everyone’s a terrorist until proven innocent** and the major airlines are all about to go out of business:
- Clip my fingernails. With nail clippers verboten on planes, you need to do it before you leave.
- Silence my electric toothbrush. Last time I traveled, my toothbrush turned on in my luggage and the battery was long dead when I got home. Luckily I can plug the power cord into the brush to prevent it from turning on, lest some anxious baggage screener thinks it’s a buzzing bomb and/or illegal sexual device.
- Leave ridiculously early. I am a single male traveling alone on an American Airlines flight to Heathrow on a ticket purchased not so long ago…I’m pretty sure that I’m going to get pulled aside for a “random” screening. My only hope: my summer tan has faded and I’m white as can be (Non-Terrorist White is the hottest color for pants at J. Crew this season)…come on, wave whitey through!
- Wardrobe change. Gotta wear pants that don’t require a belt and shoes that can be slipped on and off with ease.
- Eat. You may get food on the plane, you may not. With random screenings come random feedings and I don’t like my odds in either case.
** The Jan/Feb 2005 Atlantic Monthly has a couple of great articles on terrorism…here’s a relevant snippet from Success Without Victory (subscribers only) by James Fallows:
Screening lines at airports are perhaps the most familiar reminder of post-9/11 security. They also exemplify what’s wrong with the current approach.
Many of the routines and demands are silly, eroding rather than building confidence in the security regime of which they are part. “You can’t go through an airport line without thinking ‘This is dumb,’” says Graham Allison, the author of the recent Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, and the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, at Harvard, which conducts many projects on anti-terrorism and security. “You have two people whose job it is to see if the name on your driver’s license is the same as the name on your ticket — as if any self-respecting terrorist would fail to think of that. You have a guy whose job is to shout out a reminder for you to take off your jacket and get your computer out of your bag. You’ve got one-year-olds taking off their shoes. It is hard to think of a way you could caricature it to make it look sillier.” At the same time, the ritual manages to be intimidating, as a standing reminder of how much Americans have to fear.
More on this later, but for now: Saft rocks!. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to get around to checking this out for Safari. The saving tabs feature alone is a godsend.
Amazon and A9 have created a visual Yellow Pages. Many listings have a photo of the location associated with them. Very neat.
This may be the worst movie I’ve ever watched all the way through. Highly stylized garbage. Not even Willem Dafoe as an openly gay FBI agent in drag could save it (I’m not one of those people that thinks that bad movies are good because they’re so bad). The only reason I gave it any points at all is because I watched it with friends and we heckled and it was a bit fun to do so (but only a bit).
Spiraling Fibonacci Flickr circle madness. This one is worth looking at full-sized. Wow.
Color Fields. Find Flickr photos by color and brightness.
John Naughton writes in the Guardian about the loss of public social interaction. He places a lot of the blame on technology:
It’s not clear when all of this changed, but my guess is that technology - in the shape of the Sony Walkman - had a lot to do with it. As the Walkman de nos jours, the iPod is simply continuing what Sony started. But not even Sony could have single-handedly destroyed the notion of social space. The coup de grce [sic] was administered by another piece of technology: the mobile phone.
Living in NYC, I’m well-positioned to observe the effect that mobile phones and iPods have on public interaction, but I would guess that the main factor in people not talking to each other on the street as much as they used to (in America at least) is cultural rather than technological. People move more often these days so they get to know less people in their neighborhoods. The decreasing costs of travel have filled urban streets with non-locals. “Don’t talk to strangers” is the prevailing attitude; we teach our children that strangers are to be feared. Living in the suburbs and heavy automobile usage have made Americans unaccustomed to casual conversation with strangers…we’re out of practice. Life moves a lot faster than it used to as well. We don’t have time for casual conversations with strangers anymore; our time is reserved for working, sleeping, interacting with people we already know (family, coworkers, friends, the gang at the bar), and getting to and from places where we do those things as quickly as possible.
The mobile phone, Sony Walkman, and iPod fit comfortably into that type of culture, but I don’t think they’re driving it. If any technology is to blame, I’d choose the automobile, the suburb, and the television over the three Naughton mentions.
Several months ago, I spent an afternoon tinkering with rsync so that I could back up my Powerbook to my web server over SSH and vice versa. Got it working perfectly…or so I thought. The other day, I actually took the time to look at what was actually being backed up. The web server —> Powerbook backup was fine, but the Powerbook —> web server was trying to backup everything from August 2004 to the present. When I looked on the web server, sure enough, nothing had been backed up for months. After a few moments of panic, I found out I’d been using the “-n” option while doing the Powerbook backup:
-n, show what would have been transferred
So it looked like it had been working, but actually hadn’t been doing anything. Anyway, all the files on my Powerbook are now whizzing their way to the web server and I shall once more be properly backed up. (You do back your files up, yes? You’re not waiting until you lose everything to find religion, are you? If so, I say unto you: back thy stuff up now!)
Study shows that writers who get MacArthur genius grants don’t produce much in return. “Crain’s determined that 88% of the MacArthur recipients wrote their greatest works before being recognized by the Chicago-based foundation”.
When the heat death of the universe occurs, here’s a few ideas on how we might escape. If you’re up on dark matter and M-theory, skip to the “Steps to leave the universe” section; my favorite escape possibility is “send a nanobot to recreate civilisation”.
A Flickr coincidence. “A guy from Scotland goes 5490 miles to Tokyo and takes a picture of a girl taking a picture. She turns out to be from England, 413 miles away from him” and then “he posts the picture he took on a Website (in Canada, irrelevantly) and within 6 weeks the girl in the photo finds it”.
An ethnic dining guide; Wash. DC centric but with good general info. “Ordering the plain steak in Latin America may be a great idea, but it is usually a mistake in Northern Virginia. Opt for dishes with sauces and complex mixes of ingredients.”
New Yorkers, there’s still lots of time to take advantage of Restaurant Week:
Enjoy special three-course, prix fixe menus at the city’s best restaurants. The restaurants listed below offer $20.12 lunches and/or $35.00 dinners during Restaurant Week. Duration: Jan. 24 - 28 and Jan. 31 - Feb. 4, 2005; Excludes Saturday, Jan. 29 and Sunday, Jan. 30
I can personally vouch for lunch at 11 Madison Park (three full courses with five possible choices for each course and they gave me so much dessert) and have also dined favorably in the past at Artisanal, Blue Smoke, Craft, and Gramercy Tavern. The “lunch only” places are probably the best deals…$20.12 for so much good food, it feels like you’re stealing from them.
How to get a reservation at The French Laundry using Opentable. “Watch your time.gov webpage. When 11:59:55 strikes, click ‘reload’ in your browser until you see either available tables show up or you see a ‘No tables are available’ message. If you see ‘No tables are available,’ sorry, but you lose.”
Oscar nominees are out, Aviator leads with 11 nominations. It was the most accessible, big, good Hollywood movie out in theatres…makes sense that it got so many nominations.
Comparative Morphologies. “What looks like vintage natural history studies turns out to be, on closer inspection, images of computer and technological cords and peripherals, each slightly manipulated to take on organic characteristics—a fused or sprouting growth from a stem, a viral infection, or a radial symmetry.”
Student photographer’s expulsion from his dorm for taking photos raises questions about the rights and responsibilities of photojournalists. “Vega’s pictures of partying, binge drinking, oral sex and, in particular, an alleged car burglary, thrust him into the center of a debate among photojournalists over their rights and responsibilities.”
Discarded Titles for George Orwell’s 1984. “O, Brother, Where Art Thou? Oh Right, Everywhere”
The A/C trains are massively hosed up due to a fire over the weekend. The C may be out of commission for *five years* (wtf?). What a nightmare.
The Apple Macintosh turns 21 years old today and as a birthday present, the long-lost video of its introduction by Steve Jobs has been posted to the web by TextLab on their weblog:
Fear not, faithful Mac believers. We have found it. We have found what seems to be the only copy of a public TV broadcast on that very day. It was recorded and preserved by Scott Knaster, the “legendary Mac hacker”, as Amazon puts it. Scott kept the tape (a NTSC Betamax III longplay) for 21 years since he keeps everything. Andy Hertzfeld saw it when he wrote the story “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on folklore.org. From there we followed the hints, and that’s how we found it.
We worked with Scott to convert it from NTSC to PAL, we’ve polished it, cleaned it, huged it and digitzed it. Here it is. It goes back to the people who’ve made the Macintosh, and to the world. The complete material of about 2 hours is returned to Scott, Andy and the folklore.org people, and this weblog will report the story of the “missing 1984 video” in detail. We’ll release other clips in the coming days, so bookmark and check back.
That page is super slow right now, so I’ve compiled a few links to the video (QuickTime, 20.9 MB). Enjoy:
Torrent file (use this if at all possible)
Torrent file (use this if at all possible)
preinheimer.com
cm.math.uiuc.edu/~staffin/
urbanmainframe.com.nyud.net:8090
ad.hominem.org
kappesante.com
brooksnet.plus.com
bluehome.net
afsheenfamily.com
kottke.org
cluecoder.org/~bene/
publicvoidblog.de
php-schmiede.de
mac-software-updates.de
homepage.mac.com/sdomanske/
Thanks to Peter for the pointer.
My Audioscrobbler page. Cripes, I listen to a lot of indie rock. This should be more interesting after a longer time period, when everything evens out.
The joys and challenges of using the web for linguistic research. “The web is filled with words intended to attract internet searches to gambling and pornography sites, and these can muck up linguists’ results.”
Justin notes that he’s got 43 Starbucks within a 5-mile radius of his apartment and now he’s looking for the highest concentration:
I’ve got 43 Starbucks locations within a five-mile radius of my apartment. First of all, what the fuck? Second of all, and I can’t help but to get competitive here, can anyone beat that?
Update: 162 is the new high (from the top of Regent’s street in London).
My old work address in Manhattan (45th and Madison) has 169 stores within 5 miles. Put your address into the Starbucks locator and see what your Starbucks density is. (Note: to find the number of stores, scroll to the bottom of the search listings and find the “(Showing 1-20 of xxx Stores)” text.)
Exploring the law of unintended consequences. “The law of unintended consequences shows us how many innocent innovations like email, anti-virus and DRM can become something far worse than the inventors had ever imagined.”
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