January 2012
1 post
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“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world....”
– Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, in an interview with Francesco Guerrera of the Financial Times, as referenced in a Forbes piece introducing Roger L. Martin’s book Fixing the Game.
May 2011
1 post
7 tags
Hype →
I think what we have long been waiting for. Build dynamic, interactive, HTML5 based web content in an easy to use graphical environment. Things like this will be the true Flash killers.
April 2011
1 post
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– Ira Glass
(via nefffy)
March 2011
1 post
8 tags
“Snobs are people who make judgments for non-intrinsic reasons.”
– Kenneth Davids, nailing it as per usual, this time in a piece about Starbucks Via and other instant coffees.
February 2011
2 posts
Apple's Three Laws of Developers
yourhead:
A developer may not injure Apple or, through inaction, allow Apple to come to harm.
A developer must obey any orders given to it by Apple, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A developer must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
— I. Developer
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“In a more aesthically advanced republic, most people wouldn’t be allowed...”
– Greg Knauss, in an article on the problems inherent in user skinnable applications.
January 2011
1 post
4 tags
“I don’t eat mussels in restaurants unless I know the chef personally, or...”
– Words to live by—Anthony Bourdain, in his book Kitchen confidential: Adventures In The Culinary Underbelly, on why he doesn’t eat mussels when out at a restaurant.
December 2010
1 post
4 tags
“These attacks, in addition to being a misguided effort that doesn’t...”
– 2600 Magazine, in a press release condemning the denial of service attacks against PayPal, Amazon, Visa, Mastercard, and other entities after those entities took actions against WikiLeaks.
Obviously they are on WikiLeaks’ side, but they bristle so much at the media using the word...
July 2010
1 post
June 2010
2 posts
“So perhaps the best way for people to express outrage and inflict pain on oil...”
– Ron Lieber, in the NYTimes article Punishing BP Is Harder Than Boycotting Stations, where he explains how the byzantine structure of the fuel industry makes impossible the continued use of fuel while avoiding the purchase of BP originated fuel.
6 tags
Brewers Take Risks to Make Sour Beers →
The NYTimes on the bourgeoning Sour Beer market. Glad to see it expanding. Russian River Brewing’s delightfully sour beers fermented with Brettanomyces yeast and aged in oak are among my current favorites. Although there is also some wisdom in the remarks of Ron Gansberg, the brewmaster at Cascade Brewing, “I didn’t sign on to the hops arms race and I’m not going to go down the road of, ‘My...
April 2010
2 posts
March 2010
1 post
4 tags
“I’m a dam buster.”
– Yvon Chouinard, in an Oscars-aired-commercial where he also explains why pitons are bad.
February 2010
3 posts
“I live on bread and water, so as not to submit to the Idiots.”
– Jorn Barger, quoted by Julian Dibbell in Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man, an article which among other things, describes a web log as a modern Wunderkammer.
5 tags
In the Shadow of the Olympics →
The NY Times on the homeless population of Downtown Eastside Vancouver. So true; I’ve never seen such a throng. It made the Tenderloin seem like a vast uninhabited countryside.
January 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Gordon →
Open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript. Definitely not a full implementation of Flash, but what is present will work on an iPhone and will not be crashy (in other words, actually somewhat useful).
December 2009
1 post
November 2009
1 post
5 tags
Dress Codes - Late 19th-Century Décor and Dress Is... →
This Just in From the 1890s: the NYTimes on the latest chapter in the hipster obsession with a tough yet classy late 19th century. Rough hewn and taxidermied interior decorating has progressed to the tweed ride documented with wet-plate photography.
October 2009
2 posts
3 tags
Wall Street's Naked Swindle →
A scheme to flood the market with counterfeit stocks helped kill Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers — and the feds have yet to bust the culprits.
Hard hitting journalism covering the institutionalized fraud behind the financial system collapse…in Rolling Stone?
2 tags
Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists →
Exactly: Derek Powazek with a great explanation of why SEO is either obvious, pointless or evil.
September 2009
1 post
7 tags
Mac OS X v10.6: About Wake on Demand →
Wireless Magic Packets! [that is, on a newer Mac, with Snow Leopard, and using a newish Airport Extreme / Time Capsule]. Bonjour Sleep Proxy!
August 2009
8 posts
6 tags
Having fun with MacRuby →
From the iCoreTech Research Labs blog, how to get MacRuby working on Snow Leopard. Yes, you have build it from Git. Yes, that means first building LLVM from SVN. Yes, it is kind of a pain, but you get Ruby objects that are made from Objective-C objects, not to mention an LLVM based Ruby bytecode interpreter!
5 tags
THE COST CONUNDRUM →
What a Texas town can teach us about health care.
From the New Yorker: Maybe fixing healthcare has more to do with doctors than insurance.
3 tags
BB&T Takes Over Failing Colonial BancGroup →
Bobby Lowder has kept his touch:
The NY Times reports that after several months of embattlement, failure caught up with Colonial BancGroup as Alabama state regulators officially closed it on Friday.
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“We are bound to disagree, but let’s disagree over issues that are real, and not...”
– Barack Obama, as an Op-Ed Contributor to the NY Times—Why We Need Health Care Reform
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Graffiti art at Birmingham's Bare Hands Gallery... →
Mostly rational review of the Graffiti Show in the Birmingham News. Related: I’m a published hack photographer!
4 tags
Os Gêmeos - Slide Show →
The NY Times, with some images of the first public artwork in Manhattan by the Brazilian brothers Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, who call themselves Os Gêmeos. Roberta Smith describes the mural, which went up at the northwest corner of Houston Street and the Bowery on July 17, as bringing graffiti art to its Rococo phase.
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July 2009
5 posts
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The Beer Summit →
From The Daily Beast:
Usually, the beer drinking precedes the disorderly conduct charges, but the unfolding Skip Gates brouhaha is no ordinary chain of events. And so Thursday evening comes the strangest beat yet: President Obama is hosting a racial summit/ happy hour that brings to one table these three men—a policeman, a professor, and a president—and their preferred brands of beer.
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“And if medicine is for profit, and war, and the news, and the penal system, my...”
– Bill Maher, in an article entitled New Rule: Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.
6 tags
Going Back in Time to Old England, Sip by Sip →
The NY Times posits that as time continues and the English can define themselves less and less as being British, perhaps the traditional English pub offers itself as a defining cultural institution to cling to.
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“We don’t want to make the best the enemy of the good.”
– Barack Obama, adapting Voltaire to explain his position on the recent climate change bill. I think it probably a good viewpoint to take on most any issue of progress.
Very tired. Little sleep since being woken at 1:40 AM by a nefarious male and female duo trying to gain entrance through the front door. Luckily I remembered to lock the door, but that didn’t make the minutes of watching the door knob twist while the door creaked any less nerve wracking. I think it may be time to move…
June 2009
8 posts
3 tags
Birdfeed: A very nice Twitter client for your... →
A new Twitter client for the iPhone by a company called ‘System of Touch’. Yes. App actually does look much nicer than other apps.
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Melody: Community Powered Publishing →
Hopefully this catches on—seems to address the one shortcoming Movable Type had, as compared to Wordpress.
Once again, to the jerk who ripped off my car stereo: fixing the window you broke will cost $220; yes that is twice as much as the stereo cost when it was new. Brilliant. :(
Dear jerk who broke into my car: that CD player cost $100 in 2002; I’m sure it’s worth all of $20 now. Hope it was worth your while…
11 tags
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Health Benefit? How About Pleasure? →
The NY Times’ Pour Blog has it: happy people live longer. Any analysis of wine deeper than that and it gets too complex to ever really figure out. Reductionist science almost never really works (it just seems to until 50 years later when more is known). Not that this type of science should be discouraged—it is an important means of progressing understanding on very complex interrelated...
6 tags
HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight?
→
Exactly. And Air too. Browsers work quite well. No need for buggy runtimes that in reality exist only because they offer alternate development environments. Ease of use for users is more important than the same for developers (it’s a utilitarian argument but there are vastly more users than developers for any given product… :) ).
6 tags
Hide Time Machine's icon in the Finder →
Macworld’s nice little how-to on making a Time Machine backup invisible so it doesn’t intrude on one’s desktop when backing up. Particularly useful for the Sparse Volume used by Time Capsules. Actually, this will work for any volume (read: disk) that you would rather not have appear in Finder. Note: I’ve seen many other guides for doing this that involve the developer tools...
May 2009
3 posts
3 tags
A Limited Philosophy of Software Development
Technology has become a very complex area. It is my belief that technology professionals should serve to insulate the general population from the myriad protocols and specifications and engineering. To operate a product correctly should not necessitate an understanding of the systems and principles the product is based on. Things should just work, or else provide an intuitive and high level...
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Out of Tequila’s Shadow - Mezcal →
The NY Times on the other Mexican spirit:
Like tequila, mezcal is distilled from fermented juice of the pineapple-shaped core — piña — of a succulent plant called the agave. (Tequila, made in Jalisco and a few other states, uses only a variety called blue agave.)
Tequila makers cook the piñas in ovens, sometimes in tequila factories. But mezcaleros roast the piñas in earthen mounds over...
5 tags
Shaken and Stirred - Vodka Dead? Not So Fast →
The NY Times ponders the possibility of good vodka cocktails.
when sizing up a bar, he looks for a few crucial signposts of quality: fresh juices, rather than pre-made sour mix; bottled bitters and chilled glasses in evidence; and the bartenders’ use of jiggers, to measure a drink’s ingredients. Oh, and one more thing: “A lack of vodka.”
I wouldn’t go quite that far, but marketing the...
April 2009
3 posts
6 tags
6 tags
36 Hours in Birmingham, Ala. →
The NY Times travels to BHM for a brief visit. Mostly what you would expect—Vulcan, Highlands, Civil Rights, Continental, Barber, Miss Myra’s…
So really, I do totally get why the stereotype fitting, hole-in-the-wall barbecue joint appeals to an out of towner, but come on Jim Noles, couldn’t you have wandered next door? Ok, so maybe 2 or 3 doors down, but still, why not give a...