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October 28, 2003

Blurbalicious

kottke.org :: home of fine hypertext products

When you listen to the new Strokes album for the first time, you feel a little ripped off because it sounds so much like their first album. After the third full listen, it becomes as familiar as that favorite pair of jeans that somehow got lost in the back of the closet but which jeans you're delighted to find and start wearing again almost daily. Comfortable.

This is a joke, right?

Posted by John at 3:18 PM |

October 27, 2003

Idiot box

Gizmodo : No more waiting at red lights:

In which a device that allows you to change red lights to green in your car is approvingly described. I can't believe that anyone giving this more than 3 seconds thought could approve of this. It's stupid, dangerous and unsafe.

Normally this type of device is meant for rescue and fire vehicles which have a legitimate reason for running through red lights, not for some car-driving moron who thinks they shouldn't have to wait. Producing a consumer version of this device is irresponsible and the manufacturer should expect to be spending a great deal of time on lawsuits in future.

As for Gizmodo, they should also know better. Or perhaps my reaction is just more Luddite small-mindedness against the empowerment personal technology brings.

Posted by John at 11:44 AM | | Comments (1)

October 26, 2003

Talking loud

In a Dark Time: Philip Whalen Archives

I MEAN, HOW LONG CAN YOU SIT THERE LISTENING TO SOMEONE WHILE HE YELLS AT YOU ABOUT NOTHING?

Methinks someone is looking for his MDR of Poetic Meaning a little too hard.

Posted by John at 3:17 PM |

October 24, 2003

But enough about Doc

The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, October 24, 2003

Doc posts about the new Amazon full-text search feature:

You know how authors read books? Starting from the index, to see if they're quoted or mentioned.

He then goes on to moan about how infrequently he's in there. Lemme get this straight. Full text search of every book in Amazon, and that's the thing he decides to search for? It's My Google Penis is Much, Much Bigger all over again.

Posted by John at 3:10 PM |

An average over time

Jason Salavon - Every Playboy Centerfold, The Decades (via Small Values of Cool)

Interesting - you can see tastes go from dark voluptuaries to pale thin(ner) blondes. Mostly they just look like Larry Rivers painting ghosts.

Posted by John at 1:14 PM |

A bullet for every driver

A bullet for every driver

Imagine cycling down College Street on a sunny autumn day, doing your part for the ozone layer by filtering hydrocarbons through your lungs, navigating the streetcar tracks, the potholes, the drag of moving traffic, and then, up ahead on your right, you see the car parked in the cycling lane. Approaching, you check the driver's seat in anticipation of getting the deadly door prize and then, suddenly, the cyclist in front of you turns her head every so slightly toward the obstacle and horks on its windshield.

Interesting article seen via ebikes on radical cyclists in Toronto. Not sure I agree with all of it, but I certainly understand the sentiment. It really pisses me off when cars and trucks park and double-park in the bike lane. Maybe NYC needs the equivalent of Get out of the bike lane!

Incidentally, hork is slang for spitting. Soomeone on ebikes says that making the "I'm about to spit something disgusting" noise often gets jaywalking peds out of your way

Posted by John at 11:50 AM |

Aspires to the condition of porn

Hey, look, it's the first phonecamgirl:
Magical Fantasy

Posted by John at 11:38 AM |

States' occasional rights

Judge Antonin Scalia has been ridiculing the SCOTUS' ltest ruling with regards to sodomy laws. What struck me was this:

The ruling, Scalia said, "held to be a constitutional right what had been a criminal offense at the time of the founding and for nearly 200 years thereafter."

I don't buy this - laws change and our conceptions of what is legal and right also change. The most obvious that comes to mind is slavery. If there were ever a good reason to block Bush's judicial appointments at all levels, this sort of ridiculous behavior exemplifies it. We don't need more idiots like Scalia on any court.

Update: Brad DeLong spears this far more elegantly than I.

Posted by John at 10:19 AM |

October 22, 2003

snappy comebacks

From an interview with writer Julie Orringer in the Morning News:

[Tobias Wolff] finished reading and a neurosurgeon approached him and said, ‘Boy I really loved the reading. I’ve been thinking that I’d love to do some writing.’ And Toby said, ‘That’s funny, I was thinking I’d like to do some brain surgery.’

Posted by John at 11:03 AM |

October 20, 2003

Big or small 'd'?

OK, here's one I don't get. I'm seeing a contradiction between the utopian "the web levels all boats" one gets in the more rah-rah quarters of the web and the increase in the broadcast model (in other words, the web becomes increasingly like tv - one-way) one sees as you approach the A-List end of a Shirky-style power law curve. David Weinberger:

So, what lessons do we learn about leadership on the Web? That the people we pay attention to are the ones who speak not at us and not to us but with us. We listen to them carefully because they are so interesting, so wise, and even so funny. We learn that leadership isn't a quality that necessarily spreads across all areas and topics: the person who is worth listening to about, say, technology may be just another jerk when it comes to raising children. And we learn the lesson that is most troubling to marketers, businesses and real-world leaders of all sorts: We learn that we, talking together, are smarter, wiser, and more interesting than any single leader could ever hope to be.

But then we get this regarding the A-List (and thank God they finally after all this time admit one exists):

Clay in February checked Technorati to see the distribution of links and found a power law curve: a very rapid collapse and then a long, slow tail. (Clay says that Jason Kottke had the same idea at the same time.) This is definitely not a bell curve. Most bloggers have less than average traffic. Half the link density is taken up by just 5% of the weblogs. And adding more bloggers makes the curve even steeper: if you start a blog, you are likely to link to one of the top weblogs but they are quite unlikely to link to you.

The links in the tail tend to be among people linking to one another, the pattern of a dinner party. At LiveJournal, people aren't posting in public; they're posting to friends. "You could go down to the mall and sit in the food court, and listen in on a conversation among a bunch of teenagers ... but you're the weird one, not them.")

The links at the top form a broadcast pattern. Glenn Reynolds can't link back to everyone who links to him. He has too many readers to be able to open up comments.

So where, then, is this "conversation" with the "leaders" happening? Who is doing this "talking together?" Or is this just more air cover for what appears to rapidly becoming a Good Old Bloggers network? Why is the system all open in the tail, but increasingly closed as you go up? I think you also need to take into account relationships outside the blog, i.e. the professional and personal relationships in the BigBlog world which existed before or alongside the BigBlogs themselves.

Posted by John at 3:41 PM |

October 19, 2003

It feels so good when I stop.

Jim Moore: Home Page

Hey, this would be in the spirit of the people taking charge:  Why have just one World Series?

Because "the people" != "Red Sox fans."

And they call New Yorkers neurotic. I can think of no more textbook example of classical neurosis than Boston Red Sox fans.

Posted by John at 4:16 PM |

Lipstick on the coffee pig

7-Eleven Unveils New Hot Beverage Station

At 7-Eleven's new "hot beverage stations," customers will have a choice of more than 1,300 combinations. A minimum of five varieties of coffee, four flavored syrups, seven different tea bags, five toppings, creamers, sweeteners and all types of milk will be available at each station. 7-Eleven's customers will make the drinks themselves, guided by store suggestions, thus avoiding waiting in line to order. The drinks will cost about $1 per cup instead of the typical coffeehouse prices hovering between $3 and $4.
And they will all suck.

Posted by John at 4:08 PM |

Lipstick on the coffee pig

7-Eleven Unveils New Hot Beverage Station

At 7-Eleven's new "hot beverage stations," customers will have a choice of more than 1,300 combinations. A minimum of five varieties of coffee, four flavored syrups, seven different tea bags, five toppings, creamers, sweeteners and all types of milk will be available at each station. 7-Eleven's customers will make the drinks themselves, guided by store suggestions, thus avoiding waiting in line to order. The drinks will cost about $1 per cup instead of the typical coffeehouse prices hovering between $3 and $4.
And they will all suck.

Posted by John at 4:08 PM |

October 15, 2003

Priced to move

Well, the new budget Segway is out, and you'll be happy to know that the new sidewalk-friendly model is a whole $K less, at $4,000 instead of $5,000. That makes it much more affordable. Maybe Foo Camp'll move a few.

Posted by John at 4:12 PM |

October 4, 2003

The revolution will not be televised

The various BloggerCon webcasts seem uniformly fucked:

fucked BloggerCon feed

Unless there's something significant about this guy's shoulder I'm not seeing. I know it says "Stopped," but RealOne did that itself, after it had treated me to a few minutes of watching this guy's shoulder occasionally twitch. Does he know he just started in on his 15 min?

Posted by John at 1:16 PM |

October 2, 2003

The Gropenator

Where There's Smoke There's Fire - Plus: Der Schwarzengroper By Mickey Kaus

The unpleasant truth may be that Arnold can only get away with his reponse, if he gets away with it, because the Clinton impeachment trauma raised the electorate's tolerance of sinful male Darwinian behavior. Schwarzenegger stands on the shoulders of the gropers who came before him.

There is a lot of circular reasoning going on here. Basically Kaus is saying that Arnold's behavior is excusable because Clinton somehow established a precedent. It was wrong when Clinton did it, but you can't blame Arnold, because Clinton did it, so that justifies Arnold doing it, even though it was wrong when Clinton did it. Ouch.

Posted by John at 11:38 PM |