Swimming with the Razorfishes

AF

2011-08-17T20:43:00.001-04:00

I have to respect this position.

Straw Poll

2011-08-13T13:55:00.001-04:00

Reasons that normal, rational people should ignore the straw poll:

It takes place at a state fair (butter cows, anyone?)
Tickets are $35 -- yes, you pay to vote
…except that very few people pay: the candidates buy blocks of tickets and bus people in.
It is a fundraiser for the Republican party. No, this is not my lefty humor; it really is a fundraiser.

This sort of stuff cheapens the race.

2011-01-02T10:42:00.001-05:00

Who built this totally cool self-propelled skiing camera?

2001

2010-12-06T21:57:00.001-05:00

Excellent photos from 2001. One of my favorite films.

Snap

2010-11-24T20:01:00.001-05:00

I seem to have missed this when it came out.

Sony is basing its Snap framework on GNUstep and Objective C. Interesting.

Are they thinking that some of these people writing iPhone applications will expand into widgets for Blu-Ray players and TVs?

Dumb

2010-11-22T21:46:00.001-05:00

This is probably another good time to remind you all that all of us were carrying actual assault rifles, and some of us were also carrying pistols.
So we’re in line, going through one at a time. One of our Soldiers had his Gerber multi-tool. TSA confiscated it. Kind of ridiculous, but it gets better. A few minutes later, a guy empties his pockets and has a pair of nail clippers. Nail clippers. TSA informs the Soldier that they’re going to confiscate his nail clippers.

Whoops

2010-11-14T19:59:00.001-05:00

Mortgage Fraud

2010-11-09T21:14:00.001-05:00

Wow -- these appear to be depositions of an employee of Nationwide Title Clearing, one of the many firms involved in the mortgage fraud that lead to our current economic mess. Fascinating

?

2010-11-03T21:32:00.001-04:00

What?

Climbing Goats

2010-10-17T21:21:00.001-04:00

Wow. Crazy goats.

Mug

2010-10-05T21:41:00.001-04:00

Why was I not informed about "In My Mug?" Subscribed!

Coffee geeks unite.

Gov't

2010-09-29T20:15:00.001-04:00

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"
"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."
I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"
Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!
"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"
"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it. Too many people are living off the government."
"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole life!"
"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much."

From Matt Taibbi's article in Rolling Stone. I'm almost tempted to subscribe after reading a string of interesting articles.

New L Lenses

2010-09-04T12:11:00.001-04:00

Wow -- I missed this announcement

An 8-15mm L. Very interesting. Crazy wide.

Rob Galbraith has a good summary of the other new lenses.

Bubbles

2010-09-03T22:32:00.001-04:00

POTD

2010-08-12T22:42:00.001-04:00

Early this summer, I took a class on contemplative phtography at the Shambala Meditation Center of New York. The next few photos were an offering to the class.

click for high res

Pizza

2010-08-11T21:44:00.001-04:00

Interesting. It looks like Grimadi's hasn't been paying rent and will be kicked out of their Dumbo storefront.. Then again, the tourists make it impossible to go to Grimaldi's, so this really won't affect me.

Maxwells

2010-07-18T12:26:00.001-04:00

One of the few things I miss about living in Hoboken is Maxwells. That place is small, so seeing a good show there is intense.

Question

2010-07-18T11:36:00.001-04:00

Question: If politicians were legally prohibited from appearing on radio or television, would they act more in the country's interest?

Discuss.

Alec Soth

2010-07-17T10:26:00.001-04:00

I had no idea Alec Soth was blogging again. Fantastic.

2010-05-01T15:38:00.001-04:00

Proving, once again, that Ze Frank is brilliant, he produces this.

SJ

2010-05-01T11:31:00.001-04:00

Two words: soy jism.

This almost makes local news worth watching.

Time Warner Cable

2010-04-26T19:29:00.001-04:00

Here is my interaction with TimeWarner Cable:

Sign up for service
Immediately sign up for auto bill payment. I try to have everything charged to my credit card so I can't forget to pay things.
After two months, I get a nasty letter from TimeWarner Cable stating that I'm behind on my bill. I check my credit card statements and they haven't billed me.
I call the number on the nasty letter and get a busy signal. It is 2010, and I'm somehow getting a busy signal when calling a business. And not just any business; a business that really seems to want to be my phone company. I call for about thirty minutes and continue to get busy signals.
I log into their (incredibly annoying and awful) site, pay my balance, and re-enroll in automatic payments.
After two months, I get a nasty letter from TimeWarner Cable stating that I'm behind on my bill. I check my credit card statements and they haven't billed me.
I call the number on the nasty letter and get a busy signal. I redial several times. I finally get through, navigate the phone system to the point of "speak to a representative," hear a recorded voice say "no circuit" and the call is dropped.
Repeat.

How does one explain this kind of incompetence?

Elements

2010-04-18T13:41:00.001-04:00

This is really something. I love the creativity and excitement in the iPhone / iPad developer community.

Pizza

2009-12-29T23:37:00.001-05:00

Oh sweet Jesus -- this is serious.

Una Pizza Napoletana has closed. He claims that he'll reopen in another location. I certainly hope so.

Acid

2009-12-23T21:42:00.001-05:00

I just found out that vinegar and a marble table top don't go together all that well.

Fish and Chips

2009-12-13T12:29:00.001-05:00

Dan Jurafsky posted a fascinating article on the origin of ceviche and fish and chips. At least I think it is fascinating.

Dip

2009-09-25T22:21:00.001-04:00

Thank you for confirming so many stereotypes about the south all at once!

Douche

2009-09-23T23:10:00.001-04:00

This is the douchiest douche thing I have ever seen. I feel bad that we live in a world where actors have to debase themselves by acting in things like this to make a living.

9/11

2009-09-11T10:13:00.001-04:00

This is the first September 11 since '01 that I haven't been in New York, the first that I haven't attended a memorial. Odd, but I suppose things do change.

Map

2009-09-08T23:00:00.001-04:00

Anyone who can hand-draw a map this well deserves to be elected:

Hodgman

2009-09-07T10:00:00.001-04:00

I've had this link on my desktop for months. Just got around to watching it. John Hodgman at the Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner:

Brilliant.

Help

2009-08-23T21:17:00.001-04:00

If someone could explain this to me, I'd much appreciate it.

Pre

2009-08-17T20:47:00.001-04:00

I've been interested Palm's Pre since it was announced. Bold move, creating a new mobile OS, and a great team designing it and the new hardware. Inexplicably, Palm chose to partner with Sprint as the exclusive U.S. carrier.

I (finally) played with a Pre for a while this weekend. What a great little phone! Palm is absolutely insane to 1) stick with Sprint and its loser network and 2) not have a GSM version out. I'd gladly pay full price for an unlocked GMS Pre.

LP

2009-08-13T14:33:00.001-04:00

Wow. Les Paul, RIP.

Bon Iver

2009-08-08T11:56:00.001-04:00

Explorers

2009-08-02T14:51:00.001-04:00

"This is about being a true-blooded American guy and girl,' said A. J. Lowenthal, a sheriff’s deputy here in Imperial County, whose life clock, he says, is set around the Explorers events he helps run. "It fits right in with the honor and bravery of the Boy Scouts." [via The New York Times]

Yea. That is fucked up.

Art

2009-07-27T20:33:00.001-04:00

"This corner says that the Chelsea gallery scene will be gone within a year with the exception of half a dozen megaspaces, feeder galleriess for Fashionland and ClubLand. It is weird right now to see vast swathes of Chelsea territory which resemble the bad parts of Staten Island dotted by visually claustrophobic Frank Gehry buildings and their spawn. When everyone who still has cash is dancing in the High Line sky and staring into each other's wealthy windows, then the junkies and whores can seize the streets below. As for art galleries, a free experience, a civilizing calm, the formerly stable tiller of the Chelsea boat, they are fast becoming a memory, and a vague one at that." [via artnet]

iPhone Devs

2009-07-23T21:29:00.001-04:00

A nice crash start in iPhone development.

Cleanup

2009-07-20T07:51:00.001-04:00

This weekend I conducted a big address book cleanup, attempting to eliminate duplicates and stale entries as well as to consolidate one address book between two computers, GMail, and three mobile phones.

There is a chance that I inadvertently deleted someone or dropped off an IM buddy list (particularly on troublesome services like Google Talk). If that is the case, let me know.

App of the Year

2009-07-17T22:00:00.001-04:00

Kick ass demo:

There is incredible creativity in the iPhone space.

Phones

2009-07-08T19:59:00.001-04:00

The last four phone booths in Manhattan.

Advice

2009-07-05T11:47:00.001-04:00

From Bruce Mau:

Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

Rolling up of Sleeves

2009-07-05T11:15:00.001-04:00

At least Sarah Palin's attorney [PDF] can write a memo within the bounds of English grammar.

But "rolling up his sleeves?" When will Americans tire of this folksy bullshit?

Economist

2009-07-04T08:39:00.001-04:00

Hooray! It seems that The Economist now has a Kindle edition. The Economist was the reason I bought a Kindle. Unfortunately, I didn't check that the Economist was available. I'm very happy to see this.

Subscribed!

Now I just have to switch my FT subscription over, and I'll be mostly paper-free. (I am not switching The New Yorker to Kindle; it is too much fun reading that on paper)

Homer on Tom Tom

2009-06-28T17:26:00.001-04:00

I can how have Homer Simpson giving me directions on my Tom Tom.

This is so dumb that I might do it.

12c

2009-06-27T09:29:00.001-04:00

I just spent $15 for an iPhone version of an HP calculator. Something is clearly wrong with me.

Venn

2009-06-13T11:57:00.001-04:00

American Apparel venn diagram.

Marathoners

2009-06-05T07:44:00.001-04:00

The New York Times has such fantastic people who visualize numbers. The latest graphic is this representation of where people drop out of the New York Marathon. Of course, I couldn’t help think of Napoleon marching on Moscow.

Squares

2009-06-01T19:22:00.001-04:00

Now you got a crapload of squares.

RIP: Jay Bennett

2009-05-30T14:51:00.001-04:00

Musician Jay Bennett was found dead on Tuesday. He was 45.

Jay was a prodigious talent. The creative (and personal) tension between Jay and the rest of the band made Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot the masterpiece that it is.

Toccata

2009-05-28T19:48:00.001-04:00

I normally find this kind of thing annoying, but they rocked.

via vowe.net

Computers

2009-05-23T15:16:00.001-04:00

Some interesting graphs on the computer usage at the University of Virginia. Particularly the Laptop vs Desktop and MacOS vs Windows charts.

Win Sev

2009-05-09T11:41:00.000-04:00

I had the time to download and install the Windows 7 RC build this week and to install it on both real hardware and in a VMWare VM (hosted on MacOS).

I must say that I'm impressed. Not because it has any compelling new features; that would, it seems, to be too much to ask. But it seems to be the first Windows release since XP SP 2 that gets out of its own way.

On my fairly beefy workstation (a recent Dell Precision with 4 gig of ram), where Linux was remarkably fast, Vista was sluggish. Vista rarely crashed, but often paused, churned on IO and couldn't seem to get the most out of network transfers. WinSev seems an entirely different beast: far faster, many operations instantaneous. Chrome on WinSev has (so far) been a pleasure, reminding me of the browser on BeOS that showed me that web sites aren't slow, hardware isn't slow, but operating systems and browsers are. Good show, indeed.

On VMware, WinSev is somewhat less impressive, not substantially faster than Vista. But this might be sue to some setup / driver issues. I didn't pay too much attention to what I was doing there.

This being said, I don't know if I'll be upgrading everything to WinSev. If I need to run it both on the Dell and VMware, do I need two licenses? Are there any "family packs" or something similar for Windows? I certainly won't pay full price to upgrade two machines, given that I use the MacOS most of the time.

Soth

2009-04-26T11:42:00.001-04:00

inside the photographers_studio from andrew hetherington on Vimeo.

A somewhat-silent-movie touring through Alec Soth's studio.

In addition to being a talented photographer, Soth wrote a short-lived but fascinating blog that showed what a thoughtful, brilliant, well-read and funny person he is.

ISA

2009-04-26T11:14:00.001-04:00

Insane Scrabble Ad

Graf

2009-04-25T22:47:00.001-04:00

via the rut

Spies

2009-04-20T19:59:00.001-04:00

Wow – this is fairly awful. At least everyone looks a little dirty.

Public

2009-04-18T12:09:00.001-04:00

I like to keep up on what conservatives are thinking. There are lots of rational, thoughtful conservatives out there. And some not so much. On the Powerline blog, Scott Johnson commented on the "tea party" silliness that has come to be ridiculed as "tea bagging" in some circles.

Scott first shows his sexual naiveté by admitting that he didn't know what tea bagging was. His boring sex life aside, Scott then comes to an interesting conclusion.

The problem isn't that conservatives are, once again, fixating on something stupid while the country is facing some huge problems. Scott identifies the problem as, of course, the gays.

"There is something funny going on here, if not exactly where Cooper, Maddow and Sullivan find it. Cooper is widely reputed to be homosexual. Maddow and Sullivan are of course public homosexuals. It is funny in an ironic sort of way that these folks choose to disparage the tea party protestors from somewhere deep inside the homosexual subculture. "

Several things about his blog sadden me:

By saying "public homosexual," Scott shows us that he thinks that sexuality is something to be hidden, something shameful.

He seems to think that only gays would, you know, touch testicles.

He can't see that Dick Armey's absurd tea parties aren't a serious attempt at anything and that they deserve any more than ridicule.

Dream

2009-04-16T23:54:00.001-04:00

Also, am I the last person in the world to see this? Fantastic. Made me smile.

Din Din

2009-04-16T23:49:00.001-04:00

I'm not much for restaurant reviews, but I had dinner at wd~50 tonight; extraordinary. Creative without being overly precious, relatively relaxed, and fantastic flavors. I have never said "holy shit that is good" so many times in a restaurant.

Good stuff.

Mow

2009-04-15T21:08:00.001-04:00

No comment.

Tea

2009-04-15T18:54:00.001-04:00

Hey all you tea bag republicans: go fuck yourselves. I paid a shitload of taxes this year and I don't have a problem with it. I am so privileged to live in this country (and make a good living); paying my fair share of taxes is a patriotic duty.

Go find a real issue, you whining bitches.

Waiting...

2009-04-13T12:20:00.000-04:00

Happy birthday, Beckett.

EB

2009-04-13T08:07:00.001-04:00

The Easter Bunny hates you.

BS

2009-04-10T10:06:00.001-04:00

“This, of course, is total bullshit.”

John Gruber makes me laugh.

RIP: Helen Levitt

2009-04-06T20:38:00.001-04:00

I missed this: Helen Levitt passed away. She was an inspiration.

Camo

2009-03-28T23:13:00.001-04:00

Directions

2009-03-27T21:26:00.001-04:00

Me: Brooklyn bridge to Atlantic, left on Atlantic, right on Hoyt.
Cab Driver: I think I should take the Brooklyn bridge to Atlantic, then take Atlantic to Hoyt.
Me: Good idea.

Stupid

2009-03-21T22:44:00.001-04:00

"Apple gained about one point, but now I think the tide has really turned back the other direction," Ballmer said, via webcast. "The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."

It is amazing that the person leading this massive software company says something so stupid. Reducing the differences between Apple's products and those of other manufacturers as "a logo" demonstrates his depressing mindset of mediocrity: we won't make the best products, we will just sell the most products.

Swan

2009-03-15T13:57:00.001-04:00

(No, this isn't about Proust -- whew)

I'm reading Taleb's Black Swan. Fucking brilliant. Why did it take so long to get to the tip of my pile?

Data

2009-03-14T09:35:00.001-04:00

Excellent visualization of world wealth and health statistics from TED.

Animals

2009-03-10T20:44:00.001-04:00

Twelve animals made from a world map. Cool.

Juice

2009-03-01T11:13:00.001-05:00

Money used to be my big worry; constantly thinking about it. But now that I have reasonable financial security, something else weighs heavily on my mind: batteries.

I have so many battery-powered gadgets (all with their own idiosyncratic charger) that may or may not be charged at any given time. So I spend way too much time looking at battery gauges and plugging things into the wall (or laptop): the blackberry, the kindle, the iPods (one for commuting, one for the gym), the camera, the GPS....

Bah.

Someone needs to invent better batteries so I can relax a bit. That, or I get rid of all these gadgets.

MS

2009-02-22T11:21:00.001-05:00

Mona Simon's Transylvania portfolio is fantastic.

Jobs

2009-02-17T19:53:00.001-05:00

So General Motors wants another $16.6 billion in loans. I’m sure someone will do the real math, but by my back-of-the-envelope calculation, this is approximately $75,000 per GM job.

Is this a good use of public funds?

Index

2009-02-14T11:14:00.001-05:00

Street value of a rock of crack cocaine the size of the sun: $5.6 x 10³⁴

Harper's just opened the full history of its wonderful Index. And made it "tweetable." Cool.

Chrome

2009-02-09T21:10:00.001-05:00

My installation of Google Chrome just updated itself and now the page scaling is far better. Did those beta bits go production?

Kindle

2009-02-09T12:19:00.000-05:00

I just bought a Kindle. I m such a sucker. And Richard Stallman would be very upset wit me.

Joe Ades

2009-02-03T18:12:00.001-05:00

Joe Ades, vegetable peeler vendor, died at age 75. Truly a fixture in New York.

Whitehouse

2009-01-23T19:34:00.001-05:00

This is rather surprising.

Until recently, whitehouse.com was a porn site. However, should you visit whitehouse.com today, you’ll be treated to a stream of political news.

Is it possible that news is more profitable than porn? Is whitehouse.gov getting so much traffic that mistyped URLs make money?

LI

2009-01-23T13:11:00.000-05:00

People who prefer lazy initialization often seem to be rather strident about it.

Directions

2009-01-22T21:08:00.001-05:00

In the 42nd St. terminal. A guy picks me out of the crowd of people swarming off of the A. "How do I get out of here?!" He pleads as commuters swarm past us. It is so pathetic that I can't come up with a sarcastic answer. I point to the stairs, he turns on his heel and stomps off.

Dinner

2009-01-19T22:04:00.001-05:00

Did everyone read this “Dinner with Dubya” article in Vanity Fair? Interesting.

Stone Baby

2009-01-12T23:26:00.001-05:00

Lithopedion. This is a weird world.

Gig

2009-01-11T11:34:00.001-05:00

Beav

2009-01-10T17:28:00.001-05:00

DVD Beaver's "Blue-ray of the year" list.

I wonder if anyone questioned the name "DVD Beaver" when they were launching the site?

Clic

2009-01-10T13:20:00.001-05:00

Christiane Celle has opened Clic, a store devoted to photography books. On the corner of Lafayette and Broome in New York. Very cool.

Type

2009-01-09T21:19:00.001-05:00

20 websites with beautiful typography.

Kubrick

2009-01-07T18:13:00.001-05:00

I must say that the Blue-ray transfer of 2001 is a beautiful thing. Very nice, indeed.

SG for SG

2009-01-06T16:30:00.001-05:00

At first, I thought tapping Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General was crazy, but the more I think about it, it is a savvy pick.

TARP

2008-12-30T14:48:00.001-05:00

Can someone explain to me where The Treasury found this $6 billion to bail out GMAC? The claim that they are TARP funds doesn't make sense; phase I of TARP has been fully committed.

Mobile Me

2008-12-22T23:46:00.001-05:00

A few notes re: contacting / following me.

I'm almost always logged into Google Talk, less so AIM and Yahoo (!). Same user ID as here (but @gmail.com, of course).

I'm a fairly serious user of Google Reader. Rather than reposting stuff in blogs, I just star the articles in Reader. I really quite like it. If you are on my Google Talk list, I think it shares things with you automagically. If you use Google Reader, there is some good stuff in there.

Do feel free to add me. I quite enjoy the occasional interruption during the day, as long as it isn't one of those Twitter "I just ate some cheese!" things.

NY

2008-12-22T18:18:00.001-05:00

I sent out some cards wishing people a preposterous new year. I’d like to revise the others with the same wishes.

Photo

2008-12-21T21:26:00.001-05:00

[...] this recent "photograph"* by Annie Leibovitz for the Lavazza calendar has it all: a pandering (unto capitulation) to empty style; excessive color which is nevertheless unattractive; an attractive model who is also unattractive (though she got legs! But what the hell is with that expression?); a really woeful idea (Romulus and Remus and their wolf-mother—oh, please) that nevertheless doesn't even work; heavyhanded overproduction; no trace of irony; a blatantly fake background that doesn't even try to match the studio-shot foreground; a baby butt, for that touch of smack-you-with-a-dead-fish cuteness; campy makeup, kitschy hair; and, to top it all off, a hilariously incongruous product placement like an embarrassing pimple.

Ah. But what did you think of the photo?

YIP

2008-12-20T21:14:00.001-05:00

The year in pictures: part 1, part 2 and part 3.

Fraud

2008-12-18T21:57:00.001-05:00

Well, that couldn’t be much clearer. Love these details that are coming out.

I wasn’t in the “Chris Cox should be in jail” crowd, but it appears that the SEC might have been a bit lax under the Bush administration.

Wikipedia

2008-12-18T10:49:00.001-05:00

Cool beans. I don’t know when they did, but Wikipedia now has an official mobile site:

mobile.wikipedia.org

The regular wikipedia works passably with the browser on my Blackberry bold, but it is fairly heavyweight. The mobile site is paginated and omits images, loading quite snappily on the BB.

Berkel

2008-12-16T20:44:00.001-05:00

These slicers are so beautiful, I would go out of my way to buy from a deli that had one.

600

2008-12-15T15:50:00.001-05:00

Good God -- the combo update for 10.5.6 is 669 megabytes. That is a lot of bits.

Shoes

2008-12-14T19:26:00.001-05:00

Question: If someone threw a shoe at Obama, would he duck like Bush, or would he catch it?

Discuss.