Entries for March 2006
Glenn Reynolds makes an interesting analogy about journalism and beer making in his new book:
Without formal training and using cheap equipment, almost anyone can do it. The quality may be variable, but the best home-brews are tastier than the stuff you see advertised during the Super Bowl. This is because big brewers, particularly in America, have long aimed to reach the largest market by pushing bland brands that offend no one. The rise of home-brewing, however, has forced them to create “micro-brews” that actually taste of something. In the same way, argues Mr Reynolds, bloggers—individuals who publish their thoughts on the internet—have shaken up the mainstream media (or MSM, in blogger parlance).
What, no “drunk on power” quip? Curiously, the Economist piece fails to mention the name of Reynolds’ book, An Army of Davids, although it appears over in the right sidebar, almost camouflaged as an ad.
The myth of cheap hardware. “The problem is, the cost of hardware is an insignificant part of running a computer system. See, the myth of cheap hardware is a myth because hardware (cheap) is not that cheap. It’s not 5 times cheaper, it’s half the price, or 3/4. And it’s not just slightly less reliable, it’s a good deal less reliable.” (via bp)
The Pour is a wine blog by the NY Times wine guy, Eric Asimov. Asimov joins Frank Bruni on the food and bev blogging front for the Times. The Pour includes a list of links to other wine blogs and resources as well. Nicely done.
Bitter disappointing rant from Brokeback Mountain author Annie Proulx about the Oscars. How can you trash the Oscars and then be totally pissed when you lose? Sour grapes indeed.
Lots of links about the Internet of Things, objects that blog, spimes, and Everyware. Cyberdyne Systems, here we come…blogging pigeons will beget blogging F-16s faster than you’d think.
To Dr. David Hague, human pregnancy is a struggle between the fetus and mother. Evolutionarily speaking, the fetus “wants” as many resources as possible for itself while the mother “wants” to do what she can to spread her resources across as many children as possible. In theory, this is a cause of the many serious health problems surrounding pregnancy.
Update: Carl Zimmer has more about this on his blog.
The lively pulse of New York’s new media scene. There’s something about the companies that started during the bust. They’re healthier, more efficient, the ideas behind them are more solid…they had to be to survive.
Rogers Cadenhead, after receiving a letter from Dave Winer’s attorney: “I’ve never been more retroactively embarrassed to have paid someone a compliment in my life.”
Quiz: Web 2.0 company or Star Wars character? Web 2.0 increasingly reminds me of the web circa 1999. I hope it hurts less this time.
Megnut reports that Thomas Keller (an In-N-Out fan) may be doing his own burger joint in the Napa area. He must have tired of Danny Meyer crowing about the Shake Shack at all those restauranteur slumber parties. (ps. Shake Shack reopens in 6 days!)
Eight years ago today, I started writing in this space and just never stopped. There are some rewards for compulsive behavior.
As an eight year-old, kottke.org will be starting the third grade this year and tackling such subjects as fractions, cursive writing, the 50 states, photosynthesis, and the Dewey Decimal System. It will also be taking the bus for the first time and is quite excited about that.
OMG! Rotation of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness. “As the phenomenon hit New York, millions of motorists were forced to use their headlights to navigate through the blackness. Highways flooded with commuters who had left work to hurry home to their families.”
Short Elizabeth Kolbert article on the conservative response to climate change. “The new argument making the rounds of conservative think tanks, like the National Center for Policy Analysis, and circulating through assorted sympathetic publications goes something like this: Yes, the planet may be warming up, but no one can be sure of why, and, in any case, it doesn’t matter — let’s stop quibbling about the causes of climate change and concentrate on dealing with the consequences.”
I was recently talking with an acquaintance who makes custom wedding dresses. The lead time for making dresses is typically several months and tailoring a dress that’s going to fit someone 3-4 months after the initial measurements are made can be challenging. Most brides-to-be desire to lose some weight before the big day and typically share a target weight/size with her…”Make it a size smaller because I’ll be 20 pounds lighter on the day of the wedding”.
This woman’s been doing it for so long that she’s learned to ignore what these brides say will happen and to plan for what actually ends up happening. The outcome is pretty simple, she says; as the wedding day approaches, thin women get thinner and the heavier women get heavier. The hypothesis here (expressed by the dress maker) is that the weight loss/gain depends on how these women deal with the stress of the event: thin women don’t eat or lose their appetites when stressed while heavier women eat in response to stress.
Aside from how general a statement you can make about relation of the stress/eating/weight factors, the fact that she’s able to accurately size dresses based on this simple rule is another reminder of how misleading it can be to rely on asking people about their potential behavior. As a web designer, one the most valuable things I learned when building sites was that watching people use prototypes or web sites was way more useful than asking them what features they wanted.
It finally rains in Phoenix after 143 days without precipitation. I posted about the lack of rain on my site the other day and reader Dino called the site “the modern equivalent of a rain dance” because “it finally rained here the day after you posted that article”. Heh. (thx, dino)
Early photo of Pyra Labs, circa 1999. Ev was on the startups panel this morning at SXSW, which was excellent.
Why do boys like girls books like Little House on the Prairie? When I was a kid, I read a lot of “girl” books (mostly my sister’s), including all the Little House books, all the Anne of Green Gables books, a few Nancy Drews, some Judy Blumes, and, uh, even the first several Babysitter’s Club books.
LibriVox provides free audiobooks of works in the public domain. Includes Robinson Crusoe, Call of the Wild, Treasure Island, and Pride and Prejudice.
Rediscovered this while looking for something else last night: a list of questions from a panel Jeff Veen, Jason Fried, and I did on Design for Web 2.0 in Octobr 2004. Have we made any progress?
MC Hammer has posted a love letter to Barry Bonds on his weblog. “As you close in on the record, and the day of reckoning is at hand, there will be many attemps by the bloodhounds to shake you and force you to quit.” David Jacobs thinks the fans and the media are being hypocritical about Bonds’ situation.
Video of a BMW that parallel parks itself. No word on if this was influenced by Knight Rider, starring David Hasselholf, who is big in Germany.
In Five Steps to Font Freedom, Adrian of Be A Design Group suggests some ways to improve typography on the web, noting that you don’t need to own the fonts in books, movies, newspapers to view works in those media. The fifth suggestion is interesting, even outside of that particular goal:
5. Build Free Versions of the Classic Fonts
If we can’t convince the font companies to set their versions of classic fonts free, we will recreate them ourselves. The great fonts are based on designs that are centuries old that can’t possibly be protected by copyright law. Although it would be a major task, the collective power of the online community could create quality versions of classic fonts. Little by little, we can build an open source classic font library! Does anybody have a complete set of the original Garamond that I can borrow? Let’s get started…
Applying the open source development process to make freely available and modifiable versions of classic fonts like Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni, Baskerville, etc. is a fantastic idea.
Jeremy Keith on comments: “I’d like to propose a corollary of Sturgeon’s Law for blogs: Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.”
Under Odysseus is a weblog written by Eurylochus, a Greek participating in the Trojan War. “There was a lot of shit-talking. Hector kept shouting that Ajax wasn’t much of a substitution for Achilles. Ajax would respond that Hector was just flattering himself.” (thx, mark)
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