I missed the idiotarod. I'm very upset.

Luminous Landscape has interesting info and some great photos from a photography trip to Bangladesh.

Dan Bricklin is excited because he is getting fiber directly into his home. I've had fiber directly into my building since 1999. The only thing it got me was an inability to use DSL. Verizon sucks. Don't trust them.

HP, IBM, and EMC report shortages of certain disk drives. I think it is Google's fault.

This has been a sucky week, and I almost missed the running of the Idiotarod this weekend. It would really suck if I missed the idiotarod.

POTD

click for high-res

Wow -- that isn't how I remembered it.

Man U asks for scouting tapes of 9 year-old boy.

POTD

click for high-res

Best weather forecast...ever.

[via memepool]

The Tate Modern is expanding. I'm sorry I didn't see the tate when I was in London in '03.

"That's suspicious as it is. You think a homeless man is going to stop a whole system? It's probably some faulty wiring or antiquated systems they had for a long time that they never bothered to check up on. It blew up on them and maybe they used this homeless guy as an excuse." [NY1]

How about all you fucking savages who throw crap all over the place on the subway, including the tracks, stop treating the subway like your personal trash can. Though it seems impossible, I'm sure you can bear not to eat for the twenty minutes you are on the train. I'm sure you can get your stinking, deep-fried fast food when you get off the train. How much more money would the MTA have to spend on maintenance if they didn't have to clean up after all you dirty disgusting savages?

Wouldn't it be funny if the fire was, in fact, caused by trash that some one threw on the tracks, rather than by a homeless person.

Now you know my position on this matter.

Funny: The Credit Card Prank

via A Small Life

New York's City Council is thinking of changing city noise codes to prevent the Mr. Softie trucks from being so God damn annoying. I'm all for it.

The iPod shuffle just went from Phish's version of Pink Floyd's Money to Pink Floyd doing Run Like Hell. Freaky.

Public Enemy to Dylan. This is too much fun.

Ha ha! It shuffled from Megadeath to Thelonious Monk to Banco De Gaia to Fatboy Slim to The Who! That is so wrong!

I went back to the Apple store today, as the last time I was there I didn't realize that iLife '05 was on sale. I picked that up, because I want to play with the new iPhoto, and, God dammit, they had iPod shuffles in stock. Do I need to tell you I bought one?

Luckily, they only had the 512 MB versions in stock, so I saved a few dollars.

These things are small. Very small. Much more so than I'd imagine from the photos online. Perfect for the gym. Most of the music on my laptop is ripped as 192 bit AAC. 89 songs fit on the iPod. Pretty cool.

http://video.google.com/?

Very cool. PostcardViewer from Airtight Interactive.

POTD

click for high-res

Nothing will keep us from buying cheap tickets! Nothing!

"In an effort to prevent future fare and toll hikes, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has hired two marketing firms to help sell naming rights to subway stations and other properties." [via NY1]

Uh...weak. I don't care how much he pays, I'm not telling anyone to catch the B to Trump Station.

I forgot to mention -- in the last photo I posted, I was very badly imitating Bruce Davidson. His photo of a man waiting on a snowy platform is one of my favorite images. It is burned into my brain, haunting me. It was a real pleasure to see a large, beautiful print of this photo earlier in the month. This photo is also very nicely reproduced in the re-issue of Davidson's book, Subway.

There are some great shots in the Deviant Art subway photo contest.

POTD

click for high-res

There is also a black and white version. I can't decide which I like better, though I do wish I had brought along the film camera that day. I'd love to play with some of the shots in a wet darkroom.

I braved the post-effects of the blizzard, heading over to Apple SoHo to pick up a copy of iWork '05. They were out of iPod shuffles, which was good; it saved me $150.

I wanted to take a look at Pages, Apple's just-released word processor. Though I like MS Word quite a bit, I'm not terribly happy with Microsoft's politics, and I'm always looking for viable Word and Excel replacements. These are my initial impressions.

Most shocking: Pages requires a serial number for activation. I don't remember any other Apple product requiring a serial number, though I could be incorrect on this one.

Pages is something like what would happen if MS Word made nice with OmniGraffle and had a baby. Opening a blank document, you can just start typing, like a word processor or text editor. But the document window's title bar allows you to insert a variety of objects, such as shapes, images, tables, or charts. Inserting objects is not as easy as OmniGraffle, but it is far easier than in MS Word. Because Pages isn't as text-oriented as MS Word, it is more natural to stick a box of text next to a graphic; you don't have to deal with flowing the text above, around, or below the image as you would with a Word Processor, and can place objects anywhere on the page.

Pages has borrowed the concept of an inspector: a palette or floating window with context-specific property editors. Inexplicably, though, with the inspector open, clicking on an object doesn't display its property editor or an editor appropriate for the object type. For example, I expected the "Text" editor to appear when clicking in a text box with the inspector open; this didn't happen. You have to manually select the appropriate editor from a list of icons. This took me a while to figure out.

One of the interesting things about Pages is how it handles images in its documents. Once an image is placed in a document, it can be masked, rather than destructively cropped. This makes re-cropping or re-editing a lot easier.

The Pages tour was done using Keynote. I don't know why, but I like this. Also, the built-in document templates are pretty nice.

Pages is nicely hooked into iPhoto. Very easy to place photos in documents, if you keep them in iPhoto.

Pages has most of the standard word processor text features: styles (with overrides), bullets and numbering, columns, sections (with section breaks) and auto-generated tables of contents.

Pages seems to do a good job of importing MS Word documents, and can save documents to MS Word, AppleWorks, HTML, and PDF formats, as well as to its own format.

After having used Pages for an hour, I like it a lot more than I thought I would. Most of the stuff I write using MS Word is only a few pages, and not so memo-oriented, with images and charts. I'm going to give Pages a try over the next few weeks.

RIP: Johnny Carson

I missed this when it happened: Jeremy Zawodny switched back. For extra fun, read the comments from the insane zealots.