June 25, 2005

Hyperlinks for iTunes

Here's something simple: why doesn't iTunes link to the web? While writing yesterday's post I really wanted to find the webpage from which I downloaded the Malcolm Gladwell talk that inspired the idea so that I could link to it. In order to do so, I had to go to the IT Conversations home page, do a search, click a couple of times, and decide which of two Gladwell talks were the right one.

It should be as easy to get from a track in iTunes to a webpage related to that track as it is to get an mp3 on the web into iTunes in the first place: it should only take one click. It would also be really easy to accomplish. If there was a "URL" item in the id3 tags, iTunes could then use it to provide links to the web. Bands and podcast-makers could fill these in with their homepages or pages specific to each track. If empty, the links could be auto-populated with the page from which the download originated by iTunes itself.

With podcast subscription capability soon to come it seems inevetiable that iTunes will become more and more connected to the web. The process began when it became a user agent in the first place in order to implement the Music Store. And this seems like a pretty obvious next step.

Note: It's not nearly as good as Apple doing it, but this would probably be pretty easy to implement hackishly right now via an iTunes plugin that searched the song's comment field for a valid url and then added an "open link in browser" item to its contextual menu.

Tagged: itunes, mp3, music, podcast, id3, tags, metadata, url, apple

Posted by Greg at 8:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 24, 2005

Why Learning Art Leads to Bad Art

Anyone who's ever taken or taught an art class knows that art education is at best more complicated than other kinds of organized learning. James Elkins, a brilliant art historian and professor of visual theory at the Art Institute of Chicago has even convincingly argued that Art Cannot Be Taught at all. I think that one of the reasons for this difficulty, at least in serious college and graduate level art education, has to do with the emphasis on teaching students how to talk about their work and evaluating them on how well they do so.

In a talk on Human Nature he gave at Pop! Tech 2004, Malcolm Gladwell told the story of a sociology experiment in which college students were given free posters to put up in their dorm rooms. In exchange, the students had to agree to live with the posters on their walls for three months. The students were divided into two groups. The first group was sent alone into the room with the potential posters, told to pick whatever poster they wanted, and take it home. The second group was given the same instructions with the addition that, before taking their poster home, they had to explain why they picked it.

When the three months were up, it turned out that the students in the first group still liked their posters. They'd largely picked reproductions of impressionist paintings and suchlike. The second group, who had to explain why they liked the posters they were taking, hated them, couldn't wait to take them down. They'd chosen hang-in-there-kitty-style inspirationals and pictures of sunsets. In other words, they'd chosen posters for which they could easily explain their affinity: 'it's pretty', 'it's happy'. Having to articulate their reasons for liking something had changed their criteria for choosing from whether or not they liked it to whether or not they could think of something to say about it, two criteria between which there is no strong reason to expect a correlation.

I think something very similar happens in most art education. As a student, you make work with a giant neon "Why?" hovering over your shoulder, always thinking about how you'll explain the things you make, communicate their meaning, in critiques and artist statements, and residency applications. The skill you master is being able to make work about which you are good at talking. This is not the same as mastering the ability to make work the even you like, let alone anyone else. I am very good at talking about working as a waiter at a a french dessert shop, but that doesn't mean that working there is the thing I most enjoy doing.

In the real art world, the artists that succeed are not necessarily the ones that are best at explaining why they make the things they do. Often times they are the ones who either are completely incapable of talking insightfully about their own work or intransigently refuse to do so, Jackson Pollack or Mathew Barney. The division of labor is split between people who make work that is liked (artists) and people who eplain why we like the work we do (critics). In my own experience both as an art student and an avid amateur, I've found that the items amongst my own work that I like best in the long run are the ones that just pop into my head as things I'd like to see rather than well-thought out concepts about what would make good or, even worse, interesting or meaningful work.

I'm not trying to advocate for unfiltered stream-of-consciousness in art making or the power of intuition or anything like that. The issue is simply articulability: there is plenty of good art that for which there is no pre-existing pitch and for which had the artist tried to come up with one, they could never have made the work. As Gladwell so effectively points out, one of the biggest obstacles to knowing what things we actually like are the things we think we like or those think we should.

Tagged: Malcolm Gladwell, art, education, criticisim, James Elkins, human nature, intuition

Posted by Greg at 12:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 21, 2005

Borenstein's Law

Around the time of my birthday in February, my dad came up and visited me in Portland. We had a great couple of days doing things in the city and spending time together. We don't always get along famously, but this time we did. One of the things we did while he was up here was start him a blog.

He's always written. Fiction, movie reviews, essays, whatever is on his mind. He's got one almost finished novel, one completely finished one, and enough insight squirelled away in old Word Perfect documents to make a Borenstein Reader not the worst buy in the college bookstore. He's been a defense attorney for more than thiry years from the Manson case through countless death penalty defenses and a successful argument in front of the California supreme court. One of the things he writes about is the law.

But he's never really had a public venue for any of it, so he wanted a blog. I helped him set one up on Blogger with the name he had all picked out for it: Borenstein's Law. Then months passed with no posts. I subscribed to the feed, but it stayed empty, until today.

I am not my dad's most generous critic -- he gives me his fiction to read and it starts fights -- but I have to say that this first essay is terrific. It takes on one of the central questions raised by his substantial experience in the criminal justice system, as he puts it, "Why our clients act the way they do?" Another way to say that would be: What is the origin of crime? A tough, if not outright intransigent topic that he takes on with clarity, insight, and, hard as it is for me to believe, wit.

So what's his answer to the question? I'll let him tell it:

It boils down to what I have called Borenstein's Law: our clients are more likely than others to act in ways contrary to their best interests. That is how they have become our clients and that is why they often lose their cases, and come to a bitter end.

And in reality, most of us have acted impulsively against our best interests at one time or another. Mostly, we get away with it. Drink and drive, unsafe sex, cheat on exams. Adolescence would not be worthy of the name without these "experiments." An athlete endangers career and the millions that he dreamed of and worked for all his life in order to get high with the homies. A man risks love, family, security for a fling. He might even lose the presidency over it.

Which brings us to a deeper question: why don't our clients learn from their bad experiences with the law? Why aren't they deterred by terrible consequences they know or should know are to come from misbehavior?

He proceeds to wrestle vigorously with these questions, but you the value of his perspective is plain: it lets you see people who commit even the most heinous crimes as human. Not with condescending pity or righteous anger, but with mundane compassion.

I don't know how many readers he'll end up with, but as for me, I'm hooked.

Tagged: borenstein, law, california, supreme, court, death, penalty, defense, attorney

Posted by Greg at 6:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 18, 2005

Batman Begins, Again: The State of the Blockbuster

I went to see Batman Begins yesterday with Cary and Will in the midst of a long day -- right between helping Chris, Lindsay, and Amy move into their new house, and a long shift closing the shop. After the movie, we got into an interesting conversation about blockbusters.

All three of us walked out of the movie thinking it was "pretty good" and feeling a sweeping sense of delight (relief?) totally out of proportion to the movie's quality. Our hopes have gotten so low for these kind of high rent summer 'event' movies that seeing one that plain doesn't suck exceeds expectations. The Daredevils, Electras, and Catwomen have really done a number on us.

I started reminiscing for the days when summer blockbusters seemed fresh, even exciting, or at least yielded even the most occasional surprise or variation in the formula. We tried to make a list of 'interesting' or 'mold-breaking' blockbusters and we got as far as putting Jurassic Park, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and The Blair Witch Project up as candidates before diverting into a discussion about the definition of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Now, with some more reflection, I think I can make a stab at explaining what's caused this case of Blockbuster Fatigue of which our perverse over-enjoyment of Batman Begins seems to be symptomatic. I think it may have been The Trilogies. Star Wars: Episode I, with its almost endless avalanche of hype came out in 1999 and the Sith are still in the final throes of acheiving their Revenge as I write this, six years later. In those six years, the three Star Wars movies and the three Lord of the Rings movies earned a total of almost 5.2 billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales (with people still tearing Sith stubs at this very moment), putting all six movies in the top 25 all-time money earners (Episode 3's gross, not yet on that list since it's still going strong, is here) and accounting for almost five percent of total US domestic ticket sales during that period.

Basically, the story is that Star Wars and Lord of the Rings have sucked up all of the oxygen in the blockbuster stratosphere for the last six years leaving the aesthetics of these movies exactly where they were before The Trilogies appeared, only more atrophied, barely breathing. The Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter aside (both are slightly choppy seas on the far edge of The Trilogies' sunami), Star Wars and Lord of the Rings are what scientists call a 'non-repeating phenomenon', which means something extraordinary and unexplainable that we're unlikely to see again.

When you subtract The Trilogies from the equation, the evolution of the Blockbuster Industrial Complex makes a lot more sense. In the late nineties, it had found the Comic Book movie as a kind of stable platform and formula on which blockbusters could be based and made sustainable (through sequels and slight variations on successful formulae), rationalizing what had, up to that point been the frightening purview of a small number of 800 pound industry gorillas (Stephen Spielberg and James Cameron) and incomprehensible grass roots media trends (The Blair Witch Project). Hollywood -- being, after all, a bank -- looks for predictability. It breaks new ground (or watches someone else do it) and then rapidly moves with formulae and franchises to protect it and monetize its every available inch. In the process it wears ideas out of their freshness. Formulas become cliches. Franchises get stale. Something new comes along.

We have, after all, since Jurassic Park (as good a point as any to mark the beginning of the contemporary blockbuster), had five Batman movies, two X-Men movies, two Spiderman movies, the Matrices, two Daredevil-related movies, the Hulk, and countless more forgetable others (including at least three Blades). We're right now on the verge of The Fantastic Four and Superman, the father of them all. This formula is stale. Even the best of these movies (like Batman Begins) are so bloodless that they feel more like actual zombies or vampires than any creature from their own genre. And some of them (Daredevil, Electra, Catwoman) have begun to fail at the box office, even with big name stars.

It's just that because of The Trilogies no one noticed that this blockbuster formula had shriveled up and died and it was time for a new one. Ticket sales were beyond strong (remember, this period we're talking about is the highest grossing one in the history of movies), the movies were relatively well received critically (at least LoTR was), and seemed full of variety (Wagner in space or in New Zeland or Mutants). Now that they're gone, though, it feels like we've been watching the same mediocre cardboard cutout comic book movie over and over for ten years. Look even at the Tim Burton/Michael Keaton Batman movies. They seem like edgy art films, character studies compared to this new edition, which is amongst the best of this recent batch. Anyway, here's hoping that it doesn't take Hollywood too long to unlearn the lesson of the last five years and that we start seeing new kinds of blockbusters, rather than ever-more anemic versions of existing ones, soon.

Tagged: batman, begins, summer, blockbuster, comic, book, movies, star, wars, lord, of, the, rings, jurassic, park, daredevil

Posted by Greg at 6:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 12, 2005

Widget You Like to Know Where I Find the Time

Now, I know that this post completes a five-fecta of navel and semi-navel gazing posts about myself and projects I'm involved with, and I'll be returning to the pretentious and emotionless pseudo-essays you've grown to love shortly, but I had to write a brief note about the little show of geek bravado I put on last night.

Friday night, Cary made an idle email suggestion to the PDX Pop organizing group that someone might want to write a Dashboard widget counting down the days to the festival (and bringing you to pdxpopnow.com if you click) as a kind of silly and pointless promotional effort. Having written a Konfabulator widget in the past, this seemed just my speed. Last night, after getting home from work at 3:15am, I jammed for three hours and got it done. Putting together the graphic from a chunk of Tyler's design for the PDX Pop ballot took about a half an hour and the rest of the time was spent figuring out a quirk in Dori's javascript (Dori is the random stranger on whose Serenity Countdown widget code I based the date math).

By the time everyone else had gotten up in the moring the thing was working. Today, I uploaded it to the PDX Pop Now! website and submitted it to Apple for inclusion on their Dashboard download page. And now I'm proud to say you too can download the Totally Unnecessary PDX Pop Now! 2005 Countdown Widget. I just checked it for the first time after midnite on a day not the one on which I wrote it and. . .It still seems to work.

Tagged: pdxpop, dashboard, widget, countdown, portland, oregon, music, festival

Posted by Greg at 4:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 9, 2005

Disjecta In Progress

Today, I realized that there've been a bunch of really exciting things happening for Disjecta that I hadn't mentioned on here and so thought I would do a little survey of recent advancements.

If you haven't heard of it before, Disjecta was a gallery and performance space in Northeast Portland for the last four years. It hosted some of the best contemporary art in town during that period. Also, during its run, its staff helped put on The Modern Zoo, a temprary large scale exhibition of 125 contemporary Portland and Pacific Northwest artists held in the summer of 2003 in 120,000 square feet of wharehouse space in the St. John's neighborhood of Portland.

Late last year, Disjecta's space in Northeast Portland closed down due to a change in the building's ownership and Disjecta director Bryan Suereth, along with long time collaborators Sonya Masinovsky and Paul Mittendorf, began planning to expand Disjecta into a professional mid-level arts institution, the first of its kind in the city.

I have been part (to differing degrees) of the effort to acheive just that since last fall. Lately with the rise of PDXPop, I've had less time to spend on Disjecta and so have had to watch the project's recent successes in delight, if from afar.

The big goal for Disjecta all since about December been to raise enough money to sign a lease to occupy the Templeton builing, an historical building that occupies the first frontage on the eastside of the Burnside bridge in the center of Portland. After a somewhat difficult time getting started with organizing and fundraising (including doing setup work such as applying for 501(c)3 nonprofit status), Disjecta's staff, pulled off the coup of convincing the building's landlord to give them access to it for three weeks in order to show what they will be able to accomplish if their fundraising efforts do succeed. We are right in the middle of the first week of the occupation and what they've accomplished turns out to be pretty impressive.

They've arranged a truly staggering number of art events including exhibitions by Mary Mattingly and Theo Angell, a concert featuring Tara Jane O'Neil and the Get Hustle, and an art auction hosted by local art impresario AC Dickson and city coucilor Sam Adams.

The quality of these events has been widely acknowledged in the local press. Today, OPB Radio ran an interview with Bryan. This past weekend, the Oregonian Lifestyle section ran a feature on the project and the Mercury put it on the cover.

Now, whether the whole thing becomes a reality or not just depends on if all of this attention can be transmuted into gold before the month runs out. So, get down there and take a look at this vision of what the city's artistic future could be like while it lasts. And bring your friends with deep pockets with you so that it will.

Tagged: Portland, Disjecta, art, contemporary, OPB, Mercury, Oregonian

Posted by Greg at 9:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Some Self-News

Something exciting happened to me yesterday: the good people over at UrbhanHonking invited me to move IDFDZ over there. UrHo is a blog ring that includes some of the most creative people in Portland so it is an honor to be joining them.

In addition to hosting great blogs, they just finished the first season of their smash hit "reality blogging competition," The Ultimate Blogger. UltBlo was funny and irreverent as well as involving and compelling, something few reality TV shows acheive. The competition sparked a log of interest across the net and deserved every character of it.

I'll provide more information about the timing and details of the switch-over when I know them.

Tagged: UrbanHonking, blog, Ultimate Blogger, UrHo, UltBlo, IDFDZ

Posted by Greg at 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 8, 2005

PDXPop Now! Votin' and Promotin'

So, today is a very exciting day in the PDXPop-o-Verse. The online voting to help determine which bands will play the festival goes live. Click on over there, select your favorite bands, and we'll try and get them to play the festival. That's kind of the point of PDXPop, putting together a festival with bands (at whatever level of success) that people actually like, not just that have been picked by booking agents and PR reps, agents and maangers.

Also, there's a great little blurb about the festival and compilation in Pitchfork. Since we started this thing at about the peak of its hipness arc, getting mentioned on there has always been a kind of goal for us, and it feels really satisfying and reassuring to hit that landmark just as we're really getting into gear on this year's festival.

Now, go vote!

Tagged: pdxpop, portland, oregon, music, Pitchfork, compilation, indie, rock, free

Posted by Greg at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 31, 2005

PDXPOP Now! 2005 Compilaiton Tracklist Announced!

After much waiting, ear bleeding, hair pulling, and paperworking, the 2005 PDXPOP Now! compilation has finally gone off to the duplicator and printer. As with any process like this, there was a lot of great music that didn't make it and not every track on there is for everyone, but I think the overall level of quality and divsersity of stlye is pretty amazing.

Also I'm totally in love with the album art (the image here is the cover) by Portland's own Tyler Stout

So check out the list, keep an eye on the PDXPOP Now! website for upcoming announcements, including a release date for the CD (we're gonna have a party!) and the bill for the festival. Enjoy!

An asterisk denotes a previously unreleased track.

Disc One

• "Rollercoaster" - Sleater-Kinney
• "I'm So Low" - The Minders*
• "While We Have The Sun (4-track home)" - Mirah*
• "Pile of Gold" - The Blow*
• "Uh-Oh" - Nice Nice
• "To Destruction" - Dolorean
• "Radio Radio" - Swords
• "Clawz" - Please Step Out of the Vehicle*
• "Second Sickness" - Desert City Soundtrack
• "Evil Falls" - Holy Sons*
• "Windows & Walls" - Modern State
• "Daydreams With Daffodils (Stepperz Remix)" - YACHT*
• "Lovin' Machine" - Glass Candy
• "No Sound" - 31 Knots
• "Just Expect" - Copy*
• "Why'd You Have to Die?" - Toothfairy*
• "Descender" - Point Line Plane
• "These Trees Are For Resting" - Alan Singley
• "Mountaintops in Caves" - Talkdemonic
• "Chemical Reaction" - Spooky Dance Band

Disc Two

• "Alive With Pleasure" - Viva Voce
• "It's Over" - The Gossip*
• "God and Country (live)" - The Thermals*
• "A Plague Upon the White House" - Blues Goblins*
• "Sista Social Theme Song" - Menomena*
• "Gore Appeal" - Die Monitr Batss
• "To An Angel on No Condition" - Lkn
• "The Untold Story" - Myg feat. Mikah 9, Sleep*
• "Hi-Fi" - M. Ward
• "Emma" - Sexton Blake
• "Smallest Man" - Sunset Valley*
• "Move your Body" - The Snuggle Ups*
• "Freilechs Von Der Chuppe" - Shicky Gnarowitz and the Transparent Wings of Joy*
• "Laughing Gasping" - Wet Confetti*
• "What We'll Admit" - Jessica Jones
• "I Am the Only Master of the Ten-Key" - Binary Dolls
• "Cardboard Box" - Point Juncture, WA
• "A Gilded Age" - Norfolk & Western
• "Homebody" - Cajun Gems
• "All of These Things" - The Helio Sequence*
• "From My Own True Love (Lost at Sea) (Demo)" - The Decemberists*

Tagged: PDXPOP, Portland, music, compilation, Tyler Stout, CD

Posted by Greg at 4:45 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2005

The Films of PES

There are two particularly powerful aspects of the best miniature-based animation: a kind of revelatory hyper-real perspective that comes from the relative size of the lens to the objects being represented (using a normal camera on miniature skyscrapers can give a level of detail and a texture of perspective equivalent to shooting a real skyscraper with a camera that is four stories tall); and the thrill that comes from recoginzing one material as the image of another (the moment when you see the puppet as both wooden and flesh, when you see the strings and simultaneously believe in its internal life).

The films of the PES animation collective profoundly excel in this second aspect. They make short witty stop motion films that tightly intertwine their materials with their subject matter, often in breatakingly surprising ways.

For example, in Kaboom, they give us a skyline made of oil cans, salt and pepper shakers, trophies, drill bits, tea balls, and old fashioned razors. The surrounding city grid is perfectly implied by loaded circuit boards. When the (peanut shell) bomb lands, shiny spherical Chrismas ornaments make for an especially cheery explosion. Rendering skyscrapers and bomb blasts with such transient and informal objects is a perfect match for the movie's apocalyptic narrative since it both underlines the fragility of even large scale human endeavors and simultaneously adds an irony of underemphasis to the destruction of the city, transforming it into a child's trashing of his model town.

This obsession with toys and brightly-colored baubles, is especially evident in another film, Fireworks.

This film follows the progression of a fuse setting off fireworks-launching coin wrappers whose amunition explodes into concentric bursts of children's candy and shiny change. At the start, two back-to-back yellow and orange candy corns make for a highly believable lighter's flame. The materials make physical the childlike wonder we feel at fireworks while playing with their sentimental and nostalgic resonances.

A third film, Wild Horses Redux (originally made as an ad for Nike), uses this material intelligence to explore classic themes of the Uncanny.

The film shows a team of toy football players stampeding across a furry landscape before passing through an opening into a cave with walls of meat (tunnels constantly recur in PES's films) before exiting back into the landscape and disappearing into the distance as the slogan "made to move" fades up along with the Nike "swoosh." All of the material choices, from the people represented by dolls (Hans Bellmer) to the furry ground with its exposed fleshy interior (Meret Oppenheim), use classic surrealist strategies for creating an Uncanny confusion between human and animal, living and inanimate. The frozen plastic football team rumbles like a herd of animals while the meat inside the cave implies that the whole landscape is itself a (formerly) living thing. All of these factors combine to create a confusion between a football game and a primal animalistic charge, which exactly fits Nike's larger branding aesthetic.

PES's films tend to last exactly long enough for you to notice what everything in them is made of and no longer (with the exception of Pee-nut, which rambles on trying to wring something more out of what is essentially a bawdy one-liner). Although this short format perfectly suits their reliance on these rich uses of materials, it would be exciting to see PES try to sustain a more complex story over a longer film, using multiple environments and sets of materials. With the right subject matter, PES could make a film that would find a place alongside The Triplets of Belleville in the growing niche in mainstream moviegoing for quirky and independent animation.

(via MeFi)

Tagged: PES, animation, stop motion, Nike, short, film

Posted by Greg at 5:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 27, 2005

Guest Check PDA

A while back, Merlin Mann at 43 Folders came out with an idea that's since caught fire: the Hipster PDA. The idea was that, instead of using a complicated digital handheld that made you learn a secret scrawl and a special stylus to write things down, you could just use a piece of paper. And if you clipped a bunch of small pieces together (say in the form of index cards) then they'd be easy to organize or give away or do with what you will.

Recently, I've noticed friends of mine who work as servers (for example Chris and Amy) have been ending up with Guest Check pads at home, and they're using them. Sometimes they end up at home by accident, by ending up forgotten in a back pocket. Sometimes they get brought home on purpose because they seem useful or have useful notes in them.

What we've been finding is that they're great as PDAs.

(Here you can see some notes I took in my Guest Check PDA while working on the MFDZ player.)

You're used to carrying it in your pocket, so it feels comfortable there. The pages are perforated to rip out easily so if you need to give someone a note or organize some individual notes into a group by stapling them it's nice and neat. I haven't really done this yet, but you could use those boxes and categories at the top as organizational categories or space for metadata.

What got me started using the Guest Check pads as a PDA was using my pad at work for non-work-related things: giving out the name of the currently-playing band to customers who asked (especially when it happened to be a Music For Dozens artist) writing down ideas that occur to me, or taking note of some memorable thing that someone said or that happened. I started finding that at the end of my shifts I'd have pockets full of little notes that needed processing (that's another satisfing thing about the Guest Check format -- easy-of-rip-out-and-crumple makes for a very satisfying way to cross something off a to do list) and I just got used to building my whole system around it. I still use my Moleskine a lot of the time. It just feels more dignified, part of the luxury of wearing non-stainproof clothes and sandals on days when I don't have a shift. But when I need something that's totally utilitarian, that I'm not afraid to destroy or cross things out in the Guest Check PDA is like the comfortable pair of New Balances that I wear to work: they're a little worn and not as white as they once were, but they make it easier to get the job done.

You can see some more pictures of my Guest Check PDA in action in my relevant Flickr photoset. I'll be adding more pictures next time I get some time to shoot some of the pages I've got sitting around or when I generate more.

Tagged: hipsterpda, hipster, pda, Guest Check PDA, server, waiter, restuarant, service industry, 43Folders

Posted by Greg at 7:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2005

Star Wars Arcade World Record Tragedy!

This past Monday morning, Brandon Erickson, a friend of Ethan and Cary's from college and a teacher in the Portland Public Schools, began an atttempt to break the all-time record on the 1984 Star Wars arcade game. I just read the following heart-breaking announcement on Ground Kontrol's site (the retro-arcade at which the attempt was made):

After over 54 hours of continuous gameplay, Brandon was overcome by a combination of fatigue and especially difficult gameplay and was forced to end his game just 18 million points shy of the 300 million point record and settle for second place...an amazing accomplishment in itself. Congratulations, Brandon!

Cary and I went and visited Brandon last night at about 10pm and he seemed to be going strong, using a back brace to stay upright at his stool and dependably beating the game every two or three minutes.

The most tragic part of Brandon's noble and quixotic quest was the fact that he has already seemingly been cheated out of a quite similar record. In February, he set the record for "Tournament" mode on the same game with 20,891,403 points. Then, one David Palmer "remembered" that he had, the previous year, scored 31,660,614 points. He could provide no other source of verification besides "witness" whereas all of Brandon's attempts have been verified on video and all the other top scorers seem to have been checked by referees. Check out Twin Galaxies for the unbelievable proof.

To now get so close to the unapproacable 300,007,894 record (suspiciously held by the same David Palmer) and not get there is just too much for one person to have to take (especially when the third-placers are so far back). Until that Palmer character can produce a video of either of his records, I'm going to consider Brandon the official IDFDZ Star Wars World Record Holder (for whatever that's worth).

If you want to find out more, you can get a DVD of Brandon's Tournament Mode record game and read an article about Brandon's record setting attempts in the Willamette Week and see Brandon's original announcement of his attempt on classic-games.com.

Also, Brandon (sort of) did the whole thing as a fundraiser for Portland Public Schools (I kicked my ten bucks in to his $746.25 total) and the contributions are still open. Email him at starwardspledge@gmail.com to contribute.

Tagged: Star Wars, world, record, arcade, video, game, Brandon Erickson, Ground Kontrol, Portland, Oregon, Twin Galaxies

Posted by Greg at 5:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Best Of IT Conversations

I've mentioned IT Conversations here a few times before in the context of other subjects, but I recently recommended a bunch of my favorite episodes to a friend for a trip he was leaving on and he suggested I reproduce the list here. Some of these talks played a big part in getting me excited about some of things I've written about here, so I thought that made some sense. Here goes (it's in approximate order of "favorite-ness"):

George Dyson

the son of Freeman Dyson, on John Von Neumann and the origin of "hacker" culture.

Philip Greenspun

a web publishing pioneer and creator of Photo.net, one of the first online communities.

Neil Gershenfeld

chief of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms on the future of desktop fabrication: the coming ability of anyone to design, make, and build anything. Mind blowing.

Paul Graham

founder of Viaweb and excellent tech-essayist, about genius generally, and great hackers, in particular.

Bruce Schneier

a web and computer security expert. Sounds dry, but is actually filled with some rare rational insight on the post 9/11 security world.

Larry Lessig

creator of the Creative Commons. The material may be familiar but it's interesting to hear how much of a firebrand Lessig is, and how convincing.

Steve Wozniak

brilliant, nutty inventor of the Mac on his whole life story and interests.

Malcolm Gladwell

New Yorker reporter and author who investigates the surprising ways we think and make decisions

Cory Doctorow

sci-fi author, BoingBoing-creator, and EFF advocate on the problems of controlling complex systems and the threat to IT from Hollywood.

Clay Shirky

insightful stuff on new uses of cell phones. Short.

Doc Searls

One of the original bloggers talking about DIY IT.

This is only just a sample, click around on the site and you'll find a bunch more interesting things on any of a number of tech topics. Lots of good stuff to fill your iPod with.

Tagged: IT Conversations, podcast, tech, lectures

Posted by Greg at 1:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 17, 2005

Tutorial: Blosxom

I've been thinking lately about my experience learning to do things on the web (both in the past and the more complex things I'm trying to learn how to do now) and it seems that I'm in kind of a good place to write some really useful tutorials. There's some things that I know how to do that a lot of other people don't, but I only learned how to do them pretty recently and so none of the skills involved seem natural (and therefore not requiring explanation) to me. Also, I still remember really wishing that there had been clear explanations of these things around when I was trying to do them. Where "geeks" relish figuring out fiendishly hard technical problems without any help from anyone, I think there are a lot of people like me who just want to get things done with some web technology without having to re-invent the wheel themselves on every project. There may be a market larger than just me for tutorials aimed at "beginners" that don't talk down, that don't just walk you through doing things without explaining what's happening, and that do let you accomplish some useful things on the web while learning as much more as you can take about the larger contexts.

Recently, a non-technical friend with a growing interest in the web, asked me to tell him about the system I use to publish this blog. I thought I'd try to turn my response into my first tutorial aimed at meeting the criteria I just set out. So, without further ado, a tutorial on the blog hosting system, called Blosxom.

I run Ideas For Dozens via a blog hosting system called Blosxom (pronounced "blossom", but spelled with OSX in the middle). It was designed by Rael Dornfest, one of the guys who runs O'Reilly (a technical publishing, conference, and education empire).

The way Blosxom works is through plain text files and something called a CGI script (stand for Common Gateway Interface). Basically the CGI is a little program that processes the posts I write as individual text files into the blog that ends up getting displayed when you come to Ideas For Dozens. What that means in practice is that there's a file called blosxom.cgi that lives on my webspace (which is provided to me by Speakeasy, my service provider, and which I access through an SFTP program called Fugu [SFTP stands for Secure File Transfer Protocol -- i.e. a thing for moving files around which keeps your secrets]). Bloxom.cgi is just a text file has two parts, a human readable part at the top where you enter in information to set certain options and to provide details about your situation, and a bunch of code underneath that actually does the work and that I don't ever worry or think about (mostly because I don't understand it).

So, here were the steps for me to get my blog up and running:

1. I downloaded the blosxom.cgi script from their website
2. I copied it onto my Speakeasy hosting space using Fugu
3. I created a folder on my Speakeasy space called "blosxom"
4. I created files inside that folder called head.html, date.html, footer.html, and story.html (as instructed by the tutorial on the blosxom website)
5. I edited blosxom.cgi to enter in the name of my blog, the location of the folder that I'd created, and a few other things that it asked for (the Jefferson quote at the top, etc.)

Then, in order to post, all I have to do is to put a text file in the blosxom folder on my Speakeasy space. The blosxom.cgi script turns any text file in that folder into a post. It takes the top line of the file as the title and the rest of the post as the body. If I create folders or sub-folders in the blosxom folder and put posts in them, the script treats those as "categories" (that's why posts will say "/useful/web" at the bottom of them).

Now, having done all this will not result in a blog styled like mine. It will result in a plain text blog with the title at the top and the posts stretching the whole length of the window, and the sidebar stuff who knows where (although there is something appealing about plain html layout in its cleanliness). The last big step, which is where the styling and layout come in, is to edit the three template files you created in the setup: head.html, date.html, footer.html, and story.html.

Accomplishing this section of the setup is going to require writing some HTML and CSS, two flavorsx of "markup," the system for creating written instructions that determine the design and layout on the web. It is obviously somewhat beyond the scope of this tutorial on Blosxom to include a full tutorial on either HTML or CSS. Many excellent tutorials are available (W3Schools is a good place to start). That said, I'm going to give you a tiny taste of CSS just to explain some of the context of how it works within Blosxom (hopefully if you're not familiar with HTML or CSS it will be enough to almost give you a sense of how Blosxom works and if you are already fluent in them it will be more than enough to really annoy you).

The way blosxom displays your blog is as follows: it starts with head.html, then it displays all the appropriate posts (based on the options you selected in the cgi) using story.html as a template. Then it puts in date.html every time a day changes (i.e. between posts that were written on different days). And it finishes up by putting in footer.html at the bottom. The entire style of my blog comes from some CSS that I wrote that goes at the top of head.html. CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets and is a relatively new (3 years?) system for doing layout on the web. The way it works (in super-oversimplified-summary mode) is that you define individual styles, by dictating their design characteristics, at the top of your document and then apply them wherever you want on your page. Here's an example from my blog. At the top of head.html (because that's the file that the script is going to look at first) I wrote:

#sidebar {
            width: 20%;
            float: left;
            padding-left:.5em;
            padding-right:.5em;
            font-family: sans-serif;}

What's happening is that I'm creating a style called "sidebar" (which is, obviously, intended for my sidebar) with certain attributes. It should take up twenty percent of the width of the page; it should "float left," which means that other content should flow around it to the right; it should have internal padding (the distance of the internal content from its bounding rectangle) of one-half of a tab on the left and right sides; and it should use a sans-serif font.

CSS is not a very complicated subject but it is a very large and detailed one, so all I'm going to say about it here is to explain way you apply these styles in the rest of your page. All you have to do is put <div="sidebar"> before the content you want to be displayed in this style and then </div> when you want to stop displaying stuff in it. In practice, it looks like this:

<div id="sidebar">
    <h6 style="margin:0px; padding:0px;">ABOUT</h6>
    <hr>
    <img src="http://www.speakeasy.org/~gborenstein/profile.jpg">
    <p style="font-size: 10px;">
    I like things that work.
    <br>

. . .

    <hr>
    <a href="http://www.haloscan.com/"><img width="88" height="31" src="http://www.haloscan.com/halolink.gif" border="0" alt="Weblog Commenting and Trackback by HaloScan.com" /></a>
</div>

If you look at the code inside the <div> tags, you can see the beginning and end of my sidebar (I've skipped most of it since it's really long): the first line displays the word ABOUT and sets its size, margin, and padding; the third line (that starts <img src=. . .) displays that picture of me, etc. At the bottom of the sidebar, right before the </div> tag, you can see that I'm displaying the Haloscan logo as a link to their site (the <img> tag is surrounded by <a href> and </a> tags).

I find that the best way to proceed with CSS is trial and error. It's often hard to predict just what a change in a certain attribute is going to do, so you end up going ahead and making the change, checking to see if the result is what you want, and altering it if it's wrong. The advantage of CSS over old-fashioned table-based ways of doing HTML layout (for example, the At Dusk website) is that it is more "liquid", things move around more fluidly based on how big the things around them are. The disadvantage of this is that everything's position is dependent on everything else's.

The other word of advice I'd give for someone trying to style a Blosxom blog, is just imagine that the whole thing was one big text file with story.html appended onto the bottom of head.html and footer.html appended onto the bottom of story.html, and so on. That will often explain why strange things are happening to your layout.

Now there are a couple of other things that I do on my blog that I won't go into detail on here. The "ARCHIVES" section is run by a Blosxom plug-in that is pretty easy to figure out if you read the details on their site (I think I may also use a time plug-in to display the time stamp on each post, but I can't remember). Also, I display RSS Digest that parses RSS feeds and lets you style and display them. They explain how to use their service pretty well. And my Flickr images. come from a Flickr "badge" they provide, which is also not hard to figure out. There are a lot of things like that designed to help you display certain kinds of info on your blog.

So, I guess it makes sense to conclude with some of the pros and cons of blosxom. The good things about it are that the posts are just plain text, so you can create them offline in any text editor of your choice and you're not dependent on some bloated web interface or a program that you have to pay for. Also, you have as total control over the display as you would over any other webpage you might make. You don't have to fight a premade template or design via a limited set of options in a web form. It is also totally free (not counting hosting) and native to OSX. The disadvantages are that post management is basically non-existent. For example, recently I accidentally opened and re-saved an old post (Quicktime. . .emitkciuQ), and since the date/time was reset, it jumped to the top of the blog. There's no way to move it back now or manage post order in anyway as far as I know, which also means you can't do timed publication or any other sophisticated thing some other systems let you do (you could accomplish some of these things using more advanced operating system technologies [chron jobs] but if you're at that level of sophisticaiton, you probably didn't need this tutorial). Also, since there is basically no interface (bloated or otherwise) it doesn't offer any of the features that a lot of the more hand-holding systems offer: like automatic pinging of Technorati and other blog tracking services, category management, easily implemented search, etc. All said, Blosxom does provide a good combination of low price (being free), simplicity of use, degree of control, and relatively full set of features. It is not as strong in any single one of these areas as some other solutions (a full comparison of most options is available here), for me I found that it held the best combination.

Tagged: Blosxom, tutorial, blog, content management system, cms

Posted by Greg at 5:24 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

May 15, 2005

Braman Song Blog Online

Jon Braman, whose website I designed and whose music I recorded, has started an audioblog on my suggestion. Jon makes great ukele-rap and has a habit of calling and leaving songs as answering machine messages for his friends, so I thought Audioblogger would be perfect for him. I'm going to do a little jiggering to see if I can't get his audio posts to appear on his website as well. They're definitely worth listening to. Especially, the first one which is a capella. (You can subscribe to Jon's songs here)

Tagged: Jon Braman, music, audioblog, blog, mp3, ukele, rap, Audioblogger

Posted by Greg at 5:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 12, 2005

This is a test of SSI includes

Posted by Greg at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 10, 2005

I'm holding my commas: Update

The Great Comma Crisis of 2005 has ended. Plus, I now know all about the mechanical working of Powerbook keys. They've got two crossed loop-shaped bits of plastic which interlace at a jointed-intersection. The one closer to the top of the keyboard slots two small pegs into two small holes and the one close to the bottom of the keyboard has a bar that hooks under a protruding metal catch. Then, the key itself clicks onto the top of the whole thing and sits right on top of the weird jelly-like substances that actually triggers the keystrokes, and that I've probably now permanently polluted with my finger oils (though their already was a surprising amount of hair in there). . .

Tagged: comma, powerbook, keyboard, fixed

Posted by Greg at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

I'm holding my commas

The comma/open-bracket key fell off my Powerbook's keboard. Now, whenever I want to type a comma, I have to press this strange jelly-like thing. Weird. It wouldn't be so bad if it was at the same level as all the other keys.

Tagged: comma, powerbook, broken, keyboard

Posted by Greg at 9:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Quicktime. . .emitkciuQ

Just noticed something odd watching a Quicktime movie in Safari. If, at any time while running the movie or after it's stopped, you hit cmd+BackArrow, instead of going back to the previous page as usual, the clip plays in reverse. In order to go back you've actually got to mouse over and hit the back button, which then works normally.

Although this seems like a bug, I've been having just the most fun with it playing things backwards. Check this out to get started. Let it load all the way through without watching it. Put the cursor at the end, hit cmd+BackArrow, and enjoy.

Tagged: Quicktime, backwards, video, trick

Posted by Greg at 9:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

RSS Recomendations

If RSS is really "TiVo for the internet", when does it start making recommendations? TiVo is basically an aggregator, just like NetNewsWire. It keeps track of the shows you "subscribe" to, checks to see when new "items" are available, and downloads them for you to look at when you're ready.

One thing TiVo does that NetNewsWire doesn't is recommend shows you might like that are not currently amongst your subscriptions. No aggregaror does this, as far as I know. Although these recommendations don't always work perfectly and you may get stuck with TiVo thinking that you're gay (registration required), they seem like a pretty good idea.

Our aggregators know a lot about what we like. Mine knows that I read a lot of posts about music distribution, intellectual property, arts administration, and animation, and a lot of other posts that have podcasts from public radio shows attached to them. If NetNewsWire maintained a database of RSS feed providers (or collaborated with someone who did) it could tell me when someone started a new podcast about the administration of animation non-profits, say, or even if a single post appeared on some obscure blog about a new Creative Commons-licensed mp3-sharing site. If NNW, or one of the other news readers, didn't want to do it, it wouldn't be hard to create an online "RSS Registry" where people could submit their feeds with keyword descriptions and their individual posts with Technorati Tags via ping. Then a user could go to the site, enter the list of feeds they subscribe to and receive in return a new RSS feed that notifies them of new posts and new blogs that the Registry's recommendation engine thinks they might like. The big disadvantage of this system (that you would have to constantly return to the site to keep it updated on the feeds your subscribed to, weakening the feedback mechanism which would make it truly powerful) might be mitigated by the use of aggregator plugins that would keep your Registry account up to date. The plugin could also do things to refine your recommendations like keep track of the posts that had links you clicked. A big advantage of implementing the recommendations through a website rather than a service provided by an aggregator might be that the site could take advantage of the social network of its users to give better recommendations (i.e., "people who subscribed to this feed also read. . .") in addition to taxonomized (or, maybe, folksonomized) labels.

Some people might be concerned by the idea of their RSS reader starting to talk back, sending information about their interests off to some sketchy outside entity, just at a moment when so much brainpower is going into trying to figure out how to make money from syndication. But I think that there's something really powerful to be gained in the tradeoff: closing the feedback loop, getting more and more useful information with less work. And privacy concerns are just more of a reason to implement something like this yourself, so that it will be free, fair, and open rather than owned by one of the aggregators or someone even less trustworthy. Because with all the work, thought, and investment from people a lot smarter and more knowledgable than me going on in this space, someone else is going to think of this before too long and who knows where they'll take it.

Tagged: RSS, TiVo, NetNewsWire, aggregator, recommendations,

Posted by Greg at 2:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 9, 2005

Quicksilver and Text Wielder: All of the Services

My mind is still a little boggled by this, but I'll try to explain it the best I can. Last night, I opened up the Quicksilver preferences to see if there were any new plug-ins available (in the new Tiger version, you get plug-ins from an internal menu rather than from their website). Specifically, I was looking for one that would allow me to ftp a particular file to a particular location (check out my last post to find out why).

Some new plug-ins had appeared (including the del.icio.us one, which I'd been waiting for), but nothing for ftp. One of the new plug-ins was called "Services menu module". Immediately, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

You see, a while back, I downloaded a little app called Text Wielder. What it does is make avilable more than 120 actions from the Services menu of every application. Most of them act on text: get a URL, search in any number of search engines, look up a map from a given zipcode or a zipcode from a given address (I think that one was why I got it in the first place), etc. You can also write your own actions.

So now that I can use any applicable service from within Quicksilver, I have all of these actions at my fingertips at all times. So, beyond having solved my instant-ftp problem (Transmit.app offered "upload file" as a service), I now have a very deep pool of things I can do with text (the number of options on text went from in the teens to 89). Plus I have the ability to create any new actions that I want, so the pool is actually theoretically bottomless. Just when you think Quicksilver's run out of new ways of blowing your mind, it finds those last few shards of attached skull and sends them skittering.

Tagged: Quicksilver, QS, Text Wielder, text, Services, OSX, 43Folders

Posted by Greg at 2:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Upcoming

I've added a new section to the bar of contextual info at the left there, under the title of "upcoming". For a while now, I've kept a list of ideas for posts in a text file. Using the Quicksilver append trick, it's super easy to record a quick description of an idea in the moment I'm having it. Then, when I've got some time to write a post, all I've got to do is view that list (usually using Quicksilver's right arrow functionality) to see the post-seeds I've got sitting around to get me started.

For some reason, I thought it might be a good idea to display this very list on the site itself. At times my internal shorthand may be inpenetrable or the content may overlap with the summary of my del.icio.us posts that appear right below it (and often hint at my future plans for posts), but when thrown into the mix, the list will make the sidebar a pretty good snapshot of what I'm thinking about right now. Hence you can point me to links or send me your thoughts ahead of time in order to contribute to posts, not just in comments, but before they're even written. Just another step towards making this blog into more of a conversation instead of a monologue that reverberates into empty space.

Right now, I've got a couple of technical glitches getting in the way of having this working as smoothly as I'd like: Speakeasy doesn't seem to actually support html includes even though they say they do, or, more likely, I'm doing something wrong (even though I'm using the syntax everyone seems to recommend: <!--#include file="file.html" -->), or, even more likely, some setup remains for me to do to get SSIs working in general on my Speakesy space. Either way, it's not working right now. Ideally, I'd like the workflow to go as follows: edit my "toblog.html" file with Quicksilver; then ftp the file up to its proper location with either a widget or, even more preferably, with QS itself. Soon, soon, soon.

Tagged: plain text, Quicksilver, QS, SSI, Speakeasy, upcoming, posts, blog, 43Folders

Posted by Greg at 5:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 4, 2005

Give-a-Disc, Take-a-Disc

I had another, lower-fi, idea yesterday in the car on the way to the airport that could supplement the idea of distributing music through local wifi networks. I call it "Give-a-Disc, Take-a-Disc":

Since I first discovered podcasting back in December or January, I've started to accumulate a pile of CDs that I've listened to once and never plan to again. What happens is that, since I haven't yet iPod-ed my car, I end up burning CDs of podcasts that I want to listen to in the car (or at work, or any other non-headphone-safe zone). Then they just sit around filling up my room and occasionally tempting my housemates into bending them until they explode into clouds of dangerous shards.

The library (or some other public place, like a cafe) should set up a system where people with content-filled discs that they no longer want can drop them off to be found by people who are looking for something to listen to. The things have gotten so cheap that it would be like the Give-a-penny, Take-a-Penny system at convenience stores, a kind of physical analog to online peer-to-peer networks. To bastardize a phrase from Nicholas Negroponte, we would be 'trading atoms in order to trade bits'.

In the midst of all the work to get cultural products to flow freely through the web, it's easy to forget that most people still find their music, books, and movies on little bits of plastic and trees floating around out there in the world.

Tagged: CD, music, podcasting, lo-fi, distribution, wifi

Posted by Greg at 4:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Very Local Music

After I told him about my idea for bloggable public space, my housemate/bandmate, Cary, thought of an interesting extension to it. In addition to creating a community bulletin board-style blog, the venues could use their wifi hotspots to distribute music. Just as the Austin Wireless City Project did during the recent SXSW interactive media conference, these businesses could set up Rendezvous networks and use them to allow customers on their wifi networks to listen to a particular set of songs they made available.

So, you'd sit down in Pix, open your laptop, fire up iTunes, and you'd see a shared-playlist with songs from Laserhawk, Strength, Amy Subach, and, of course, At Dusk (all bands with members who work at Pix). There might also be some promotional songs of the upcoming PDXPOP Now compilaiton.

At SXSW, they took things a step further. AWCP actually set up a central server that each of the businesses could access which would then in turn make the songs available to their customers. Ever since BMI started threatening to sue Pix over our practice of playing music in the shop, we've (mostly) converted over to playing only local music for which we have explicit permission from the artists. Sarah, my boss, has talked about setting up a network of local restaurants and cafes that have received similar threats from BMI that would share a common library of permissioned-music. Using this Rendezvous system, we could make that metaphorical network into a literal, or at least digital, one.

Tagged: SXSW, wifi, music, hotspot, Pix, Patisserie, Laserhawk, Strength, At Dusk, Portland, Austin, TX

Posted by Greg at 2:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 2, 2005

Personal Telco Project

This isn't my normal kind of post. There's not really an idea here, more of just a standard-practice blogish act of pointing to something cool on the web. But, it does relate to a previous post on bloggable public space and it's for a good cause, so here goes: the Personal Telco Project

In the last couple of years, I've heard over and over from various sources that Portland is "the most wireless" city in America -- that is, the city with the greatest wifi penetration per capita -- and that it had become such largely because of a grassroots effort. But I'd never known anything about the particulars of PTP until reading their website just now. They work with businesses and individuals interesed in setting up publicly available wifi nodes and have so far created more than 100 nodes around the city. They provide technical know-how, education, and maintenance and channel volunteers and enthusiasts of whatever technical level into useful activities. They also hold weekly and monthly meetings as well as "play days" (educational/technical/bullshit sessions).

From their site, at least, they seem to be a relatively well-strucutred and highly functional non-profit, which, as a person currently working to turn an organically organized local cultural organization into a real and lasting 501(c)(3), I both admire and envy.

It would be cool, if UrHo takes me up on implementing my bloggable public space idea, to partner with PTP to accomplish it. Also, we should have a wifi node at work, but I guess we'd need to get the wired internet there first.

Tagged: Personal Telco Project, wifi, portland, internet, access, telco, PTP, free

Posted by Greg at 3:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 30, 2005

Text: Plain and Simple

In the last few weeks, a trend has been growing towards simpler web design that looks more and more like unstyled HTML. Influential designer Tom Coates recently switched over to an extremely simple, almost austere, format for his blog and philosophized about it. Two days ago Ben Hammersley joined the fray with his essay on why simple is the new black.

I've been feeling a similar desire to simplify things when it comes to all of the web designing I do and I think it has a couple of sources. First, doing more and more of my online reading in my RSS reader means that my eyes have gotten more and more used to plain unstyled text, making the graphical web feel like a loud and shiny carnival show, when I click over to it. Sometimes, that's what I'm looking for, but it's not necessarily the most efficient mode for information transfer.

Also, as I've been using my text editor for more and more projects, it (rather than Microsoft Word) has become the thing I reach for to make daily text documents for whatever purpose. And thus, when it comes to printing things out, I find myself using HTML and CSS. Even though, on first glance, this sounds more difficult, since I've gotten to the point where I don't have to really think about the markup too much, I actually find that making documents this way can be simpler and, believe-it-or-not, faster, than using a behemoth like Word since SubEthaEdit doesn't fight me at every turn.

Finally, this shift towards the look of unstlyed HTML (because that's really what these new simple designs are approaching) fundamentally jibes with the practice of the alpha geeks. Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann have argued that the tips and tricks alpha geeks come up with end up eventually trickling down to the rest of us because they're the ones that first encounter new problems (spam, organization or large amounts of email and files, constant interuption from IM, etc.) and because they're more likely to have the tools to solve them. For all kinds of reasons, alpha geeks seem to love plain text it helps them "see the trees for the forest, so to speak, without the GUI getting in the way of their work." This applies equally well to the reading of web pages, especially blogs which can prickle with tiny design elements just the way GUI apps suffer from feature bloat.

Basic HTML (or something that looks like it) is a way to reduce the amount of "GUI" on the information that you're trying to get to (or, conversely, to distribute). After all, even though the graphical web is a great thing, when it comes to text, I think that the book has got it beat.

Tagged: plain text, 43folders, lifehacks, Tom Coates, Ben Hammersley, plasticbag, HTML, web, design, style, simple plain, text

Posted by Greg at 5:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 29, 2005

Bloggable Public Space

For each of the wifi hotspots around town, especially in public places with particular cultural cache or communal access, there should be a blog that anyone can post to. The catch is that you should only be able to post to the blog while you are actually in the physical space. So, to give a Portland example, you could only post to the Pioneer Square blog while you were accessing the wifi network that covered Pioneer Square.

The technical details are a little bit over my head, but I bet someone smarter than me could set up a blogging system that would only accept posts from computers connected through the particular IP addresses on those wireless networks (or something). Each blog would then become a kind of record of the physical space. If something interesting happened there people would record it and otherwise, the blog would just become an accumulation of different people's impressions of the place. We could supplement the entries with web cams of each of the places. As more and more of the cool places around town come online the network of blogs could grow making for a kind of virtual folksonomic map of the city's culture.

Tagged: blog, public, space, wifi, communal, city, urban

Posted by Greg at 4:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 26, 2005

Google SMS Tipsheet Hack

A couple of posts ago (though more weeks than that do to my recent, and even more recently terminated, unplanned blogging vacation), I wrote about my discovery of Google SMS. I have since been using it happily and effectively to, for example, find the address of a karaoke bar while driving out of a bowling alley parking lot during someone's birthday party.

Yesterday, I found a little hack that will make Google SMS even better. First of all, it turns out that the system does more than just yellow pages-style lookup. With special commands, it does movie showtimes, weather conditions, trivia, stock quotes, etc. These commands are multiple and though intuitive, rapidly become fiendishly difficult to remember as they accumulate. Handily, Google provides a tiny little PDF crib sheet, thusly:

Now, taking a page from 43 Folders' Amazon Wishlist Hack, I immediately printed this out, cut it loose from it's sheet of paper, folded it in half, and dropped it into the accordion folder of my Moleskine so that I always have it with me. As Merlin says, "Swish."

Tagged: Google, SMS, 43folders, moleskine

Posted by Greg at 5:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 25, 2005

Making Stuff

I have a kind of obsession with being able to make stuff and with people who already can. It's not something I'm especially good at, making stuff. Now, I can write, play, and record songs. I can research and write newspaper articles. I can draw and paint pictures and take photographs. I can make websites. I can make websites that do things. I can make widgets

What I can't do is actually build anything in the three dimensional physical world. When I try to measure out and cut parts for a simple box, say, it always ends up as a non-euclidian (and therefore non-assemblable) hyper-box. I can't solder together circuits that work (mostly I make solder bridges and melted breadboards). When it comes to the kind of making that results in useable devices, gizmos, or doodads, of whatever complexity, I am pretty hopeless.

Lately, this divide between things I can and can't ma