Wired Minds

Paul Boutin

Rules for Renegades                                                                 

She slept with Bill Gates!  It gets one page.

Rules for Renegades is a combination memoir and business how-to by entrepreneur Christine Comaford-Lynch. It differs from the usual get-rich book because of Christine's crazy career path -- runaway teen to model to monk to Microsoft programmer to aspiring geisha to IT consultant to venture capitalist to author.

 

• Rule #1: "Everything's an illusion, so pick one that's empowering."
• Truest Biz Rule: "Learn to love networking."
• Should've made this line a rule, too: "Forgive the person who has hurt you the most."
• Christine and billg: Awwwwwwkward.

The rules may or may not stick with you, but the anecdotes will. When Microsoft announced to a roomful of consultant engineers that they were outsourcing everyone to Volt, a young Christine stood up and offered her own outsourcing service that took less of a cut from everyone's paycheck. Thirty engineers signed up. Ruh roh! She had to figure out how to set up a company, get cash in time for the next payroll cycle, and beat Microsoft's attempt to stonewall her out of business. She did, but many of Christine's so-crazy-it-just-might-work schemes go south. Cardinal rule for renegades: Keep going.

via http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/

Holly Patterson

Idea for a single girl in advertising: submit an RFP for landing a hot dude. She could clearly outline her background, dating history and, of course, her requirements. I bet some adsy press would pick it up and she'd have some juicy responses. May even work.

via http://hollypatt.blogspot.com/

Jen Eno

Opening Day at Osteria Mozza            

It's no secret that I'm a pilgrim to chef Mario Batali's mecca. But even I was surprised to be the first patron to cross Osteria Mozza's threshold on opening day.

Upon entering, the excitement and anticipation is palpable, as if everyone snapped into place moments before. All eyes are on the "walk-ins" as we approach the dazzling white marble Mozzarella bar at 5:45 pm. The dapperly appointed servers at attention, eager chefs at the bar, a smiling chef Nancy Silverton, and a flushed pony-tailed chef Mario Batali (sporting a pink shirt and orange crocs) all track our first reactions.

The space feels sophisticated and welcoming, with an expanse of silvery sage blue walls up to vast airy ceilings. Mario recalls the feeling you get in Grand Central Station, amidst all the hustle-and-bustle -- which this restaurant is sure to see -- when you look up and sense the grandiosity of the space as it absorbs the noise around you.

Immediately, we're greeted with a Mozzarella rollatini with capers, pesto, tomatoes and olives, and we celebrate our good fortune with a glass of Prosecco. The late afternoon sun ambiently enhances the crystal glasses, baroque wine decanters, gleaming silver, and clean white linens that dot the setting.

The menu offers a range of Antipasti, specialties from the Mozzarella bar, Primi, Secondi and Contorni inspired by the Bologna region in Italy. To start, we select Prosciutto di Parma and melon with extra virgin olive oil. The Antipasti is composed before our eyes. The melon is snatched from one of the many eclectic still-life-esque bowls on top of the counter. On the back counter of the mozzarella bar sits the Osteria's "prestige piece" -- a glorious fire engine red antique Berkel deli meat slicer, loaded with a gorgeous leg of prosciutto and primed for thin slicing.

The meltaway proscuitto and drippingly succulent sweet melon combination is a dream. We learn the melons were sourced on Wednesday at the Santa Monica Farmers' Market and are of the Charentais variety.

Our next two dishes are specialties from the Mozzarella bar and both champion Burrata cheese. With renowned chef Nancy Silverton in command of her celebrated station, we know we're in store for some incredible compositions.

The Burricotti, braised artichokes, pine nuts, currants and mint pesto on grilled bread is stunning in terms of its flowery presentation and multidimensional taste.

Oozing with richness, the Burrata with asparagus, hazelnuts, brown butter and guanciale on grilled bread sends waves of creamy nutty troughs and crisp salty crests.

For the Primi course, our party-of-three splits two classic pastas from Mario's arsenal: Orechiette with sausage and Swiss chard, and Agnolotti, burro e salvia. Both are sublime fresh pastas. The perfect flavor balance and texture of the Orechiette -- finished with a trail of breadcrumbs -- trips us all out to the moon and back. This may be the best rendition of this pasta we've ever tasted.

The Agnolotti defines decadence with its silken filling of chicken, pancetta, and mortadella spiked with nutmeg in a substantial saged-scented butter sauce. (Note: the pasta portions seen in our photos have been split three ways -- they are normally much larger.)

Local Santa Barbara Spot Prawns are standouts on the Secondi menu. They arrive whole in an outrageous "al diovolo" sauce that we attempt to break down, crowned with shaved scallions. Turns out it's an amazingly fresh and piquant combination of garlic, white wine, red Fresno chiles, passato di pomodoro, and basil.

After stammering over braised or grilled beef, we opt for the Grilled Beef Tagliatta, rucola and Parmigiano with aceto balsamic. Such high quality ingredients shine here, especially the incredibly tender and flavorful beef.

Dinner at the Mozzarella bar is an engaging and exciting scene. If you are enthralled by the glory of food preparation, then I highly recommend sitting here in the center of the action.

We're happy that Mario imported Babbo's signature rockin' mix for the Osteria soundtrack, with the likes of Elvis Costello, Astrid & Bebel Gilberto, REM, Coldplay, and Neil Young. The music matches the buzzy upbeat vibe.

Honestly, what more could you ask for in a Los Angeles Osteria? And by partnering with chef Nancy Silverton, team Batali and Bastianich ensure authenticity with the best of LA's local purveyors and ingredients.
PHOTOS BY BRETT CODY ROGERS

via http://epicureanquest.blogspot.com/

Lisa Schmeiser

Living dolls

One summer in middle school, I chanced upon a Reader's Digest condensed books volume that contained a treatment of Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives. All you highbrow readers may not know this, but the RD condensed-books treatment not only slices-and-dices chunks of text, it adds in art, just in case you like your chapter books with pictures.

For the Stepford Wives, someone had done a little photography and created before-and-after human-to-mannequin heads for all the women who were killed and replaced with robots. It was nicely creepy, and obviously made an impression on me, because in the past week, I've seen two real-life photography efforts that seem to mirror the desire to replace warm humanity with commoditized perfection.

The first was covered last week in Salon's chick blog with the post "Airbrushing the Baby." I swung by Pageant Photo Retouching to see exactly what all the fuss was about, and got my answer on this page. I prefer the natural look but clearly, there is a market for people who want photos of their children to resemble those ads for dolls that run in the USA Weekend supplement.

Then this morning, I was looking at Valerie Belin's untitled 2003 series, in which she photographed living models to resemble mannequins. Again -- a little frisson of unease when I checked out the pictures. I suspect that Belin's making a statement about the artificiality of "beauty" and how commoditized our definitions are, how ultimately dehumanizing.

But what ultimately strikes me about both is how very female the photo subjects in both sets of prints are. We don't see little boys being retouched to look less human; we don't see male mannequins. In the case of the latter, I would hazard a guess that it's because most people don't regard men as sales accessories to the same degree that women are. It seems that ultimately, to be female in the Western world is to learn how to deal with the fact that your natural appearance is not publicly/industrially permissible in a way that men's natural appearances are. It will be up to you to decide how to deal with that.

One summer in middle school, I chanced upon a Reader's Digest condensed books volume that contained a treatment of Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives. All you highbrow readers may not know this, but the RD condensed-books treatment not only slices-and-dices chunks of text, it adds in art, just in case you like your chapter books with pictures.

For the Stepford Wives, someone had done a little photography and created before-and-after human-to-mannequin heads for all the women who were killed and replaced with robots. It was nicely creepy, and obviously made an impression on me, because in the past week, I've seen two real-life photography efforts that seem to mirror the desire to replace warm humanity with commoditized perfection.

The first was covered last week in Salon's chick blog with the post "Airbrushing the Baby." I swung by Pageant Photo Retouching to see exactly what all the fuss was about, and got my answer on this page. I prefer the natural look but clearly, there is a market for people who want photos of their children to resemble those ads for dolls that run in the USA Weekend supplement.

Then this morning, I was looking at Valerie Belin's untitled 2003 series, in which she photographed living models to resemble mannequins. Again -- a little frisson of unease when I checked out the pictures. I suspect that Belin's making a statement about the artificiality of "beauty" and how commoditized our definitions are, how ultimately dehumanizing.

But what ultimately strikes me about both is how very female the photo subjects in both sets of prints are. We don't see little boys being retouched to look less human; we don't see male mannequins. In the case of the latter, I would hazard a guess that it's because most people don't regard men as sales accessories to the same degree that women are. It seems that ultimately, to be female in the Western world is to learn how to deal with the fact that your natural appearance is not publicly/industrially permissible in a way that men's natural appearances are. It will be up to you to decide how to deal with that.

Kristin Windbigler

Big Doin's in Blocksburg

A lot of exciting things have happened since we last chatted. Over the weekend, Frew and my new fast friend Tim drove up to attend the Fortuna Rodeo with me. Besides baking in the grandstands, we ate an inordinate amount of meat, drank beer, and bullshitted with a bunch of smelly cowboys (yay!). Tim also brought his photography equipment and snapped some great portraits of my friends and neighbors.

In other news, the concrete trucks came streaming in yesterday and dumped more than 40 yards of the stuff within the forms Brandon, Josh, and Cliff built last week. Brandon tells me they’ll start in with the hammers and nails next week. So exciting!

Nadav Savio

[#] Jared and Yue have written a nice overview of our ongoing Mobile China research for UIGarden. From their conclusion:

In contrast to the expectations of many of our technology clients, we have found in our research that youth discourse about telephones focuses much more heavily on emotions rather than technology and features. The implications for designers of mobile devices and services is to focus more on the human side of this emerging technology, new youth identities, and popular desire for entertainment, fashion and companionship.

Mike Kuniavsky

Magic and ubicomp in the Congo

Category: Social effects
Tags: magic, ubicomp, ubiquitous computing

Technorati tags: magic, ubicomp, ubiquitous computing

                                                                                   

In the latest Economist Technology Quarterly, there's a story about a SUNY researcher who is creating an RFID and metal detector system for rangers identify potential poachers walking the elephant trails in Nouabale-Ndoki National Park in the Congo. This in itself is somewhat interesting, but what's also interesting is how he's planning to deploy this technology within the local culture. As the Economist article says:

[...] Many people in Congo do believe in magic and Mr Gulick does not propose to disabuse them of the notion. Local people will receive no explanation for the rangers' new powers. That, Mr Gulick hopes, will discourage potential poachers from turning thought into deed.

I find this a little patronizing (NONE of the locals will read any news sources that will describe the system?), but it may be realistic, at least at first. Eventually, people will certainly figure it out, or they will be told, since possessors of black magic--as the rangers will likely be called after a while--rarely like to keep that label outside of fiction. They will do what they can to clarify that no, it's not that they're using dark secrets to do a better job, it's just that they have new tools. But by that point, if it happens, the value of the tools will have been established.

Andrew Anker

Did they put up an old building? I don't remember that being there before the construction began.                         

                                            

            

               

Market and 3rd

via http://aa.vox.com/

            

           

   

Jeff Burchell

And the music (writers) never stopped?

(We know you've been waiting, and we promise, sometime soon, we'll tell you dear readers about the two weeks we spent driving all over the north island (and a few days on the north end of the south island) with Jen and Jim. Days were spent sampling wine in several regions, hiking nearly 18km across volcanoes, kayaking 15+km along shorelines, floating on innertubes through caves, jumping off of waterfalls, and enjoying all the things that New Zealand has to offer outside of Auckland. Denise has been updating the photos over on flickr, so you can see some of what we did.)

But this post is about two musical resources that you probably don't already know about. 

First is an absolutely awesome station out of Spindale, NC (near Asheville -- where I spent several summers): WNCW.  They've got a great-sounding 128kb/sec stream (which is rare for a station of their size, and speaks volumes about them). I put Local Color, their local music show, on underheard.org a few months ago, but have recently been spending more and more time listening to their live stream (especially in their overnight hours) -- usually with a smile on my face. If you're looking for an alternative to KCRW, that's a little more eclectic and somewhat less urban, check them out.

Second is that I recently discovered that Bob Lefsetz is posting The Lefsetz Letter as a blog now (actually, he has been for some time, it's just that I recently rediscovered him). Bob's been a music industry insider since before I purchased my first LP (for the record: Blondie's Autoamerican -- which easily dates me as being from the Atari half of Generation X), and he's been publishing The Letter for more than 20 years. We used to get a copy of it (on paper) at KZSC, but it's been nearly 15 years since I last read Bob's writing. It's still as good as I remember it (he pulls no punches, and he stays current; check out what he has to say about DRM and why the music industry doesn't get it.) But Bob... go back to the black T-shirt or fold your collar. You're old enough to remember how stupid that looked in the 80s, and you're only embarrassing yourself by repeating that fashion tragedy.

via http://innerslacker.com/p/b

David Weir

Saturday, May 05, 2007
To Capture the Dust

The other day I found a penny. It was dated 1976. My first real job was as a writer-editor at Rolling Stone in 1975. My salary was $16,000 a year. That was more than my Dad had earned in any year of his long career. It also was more than a rookie Major League Baseball player then earned. They got about $14,000 a year at that time. Yes, times have changed. Baseball stars now make multiple millions each year, and the Boston Red Sox paid over $50 million this year simply to meet a top prospect before signing him. Then, they threw in another $50 million or so to get him on their roster. Meanwhile, the per-word rate for freelance writers has hardly budged, and still hovers around $1 or less at many outlets. Editors are somewhat better compensated, but they don't get signing bonuses, long-term contracts or the super-lucrative product endorsement deals that elevate athletes from simply rich people into the super-rich. But none of this was what went through my mind when I squinted out the number "1976" on that random penny. The most important thing about that year for me was that my first child was born on Memorial Day weekend. She was tiny, only a few ounces over five pounds, and emerged into this world as perfect as any baby I've ever seen. Nurses and other parents gathered around her incubator to admire her beauty through the window (in that era, at UCSF, they displayed the newborns side by side so that fathers and other family and friends could see what their wives, sisters, mothers, lovers, or friends had produced.)

***

Every time I find a penny I scrutinize its minting date, and start wondering what story that coin could tell, if only it had a voice. How many human hands has it touched, and how widely has it traveled? Thirty-one years is a long time in the life of a coin. So much so that, in the case of this penny, it has almost completely lost its former sense of status. Today, pennies are throwaways, literally. Most storekeepers don't bother giving you change in pennies -- they round the total up or down and discard pennies like meaningless recyclable tidbits into an ashtray or some similar vessel for customers to use at their will.

via http://hotweir.blogspot.com/

Jen Eno

Restaurant Review HAIKU
Six89
Carbondale, CO                    

           

      

haute local lamb, trout
worldly Keller-esque menu
gem outside Aspen

Six89
689 Main Street
Carbondale, CO
(970) 963-6890
Google Map

More Reviews:
Nation, Restaurant Review
Chowhound.com

via http://epicureanquest.blogspot.com/

Todd Lappin

It's an Amphicar!  It's an Amphicar! 

Special Agent Oddwick recently enjoyed an Amphicar sighting in Florida, although he didn't fully realize it at the time. Instead, he reported seeing a "boat/car thingy" and noted that he didn't believe the propellers were functional.

He was right about the boat/car thingy part, but wrong about the props They were indeed very functional. That's because Agent Oddwick had captured a rare contemporary photograph of an Amphicar in the wild.  And what's an Amphicar?  The International Amphicar Owners Club has prepared an executive summary:

The Amphicar was built in Germany from 1961 to 1968. Total production was 3,878 vehicles. The Amphicar is the only civilian amphibious passenger automobile ever to be mass produced. 3,046 Amphicars were imported into the United States between 1961 and 1967. The Amphicar is rear engined and uses a 4 cylinder British-built Triumph Herald motor producing 43hp. All Amphicars are convertibles, and the civilian models were originally offered in only 4 colors: Beach White, Regatta Red, Lagoon Blue and Fjord Green (Aqua). [...]

The Amphicar has a top speed of 7mph on water and 70mph on land. Hence, it was dubbed the "Model 770". The Amphicar is moved in the water by its twin nylon propellers. A special two-part land-and-water transmission built by Hermes (makers of the Porsche transmission) allows the wheels and propellers to be operated either independently or simultaneously. The "land transmission" is a 4-speed-plus-reverse unit similar to those found in the old Volkswagen Beetles.  The "water transmission" is a 2-speed offering unique to the Amphicar featuring single forward and reverse gears.  In the water, the front wheels act as rudders.

When new the Amphicar sold for between $2,800 and $3,300, depending on the year.

Amphicars have crossed the English Channel in 20' seas and traversed the Yukon. In Berlin, the police used a few as search and rescue vehicles. Buyers could order the vehicle with a built-in shower that ran off the bilge pump, and it seems the manufacturer also offered an amphibious camper trailer. Apparently, it's even possible to water ski behind one. Slowly.

Having an Amphicar fantasy? No need to be ashamed. We have them too.  But dreams seldom come cheap.  A fully restored Amphicar can today fetch upwards of $30,000.

   

via http://telstarlogistics.typepad.com/telstarlogistics/

Special Agent Oddwick recently enjoyed an Amphicar sighting in Florida, although he didn't fully realize it at the time. Instead, he reported seeing a "boat/car thingy" and noted that he didn't believe the propellers were functional.

He was right about the boat/car thingy part, but wrong about the props They were indeed very functional. That's because Agent Oddwick had captured a rare contemporary photograph of an Amphicar in the wild.  And what's an Amphicar?  The International Amphicar Owners Club has prepared an executive summary:

The Amphicar was built in Germany from 1961 to 1968. Total production was 3,878 vehicles. The Amphicar is the only civilian amphibious passenger automobile ever to be mass produced. 3,046 Amphicars were imported into the United States between 1961 and 1967. The Amphicar is rear engined and uses a 4 cylinder British-built Triumph Herald motor producing 43hp. All Amphicars are convertibles, and the civilian models were originally offered in only 4 colors: Beach White, Regatta Red, Lagoon Blue and Fjord Green (Aqua). [...]

The Amphicar has a top speed of 7mph on water and 70mph on land. Hence, it was dubbed the "Model 770". The Amphicar is moved in the water by its twin nylon propellers. A special two-part land-and-water transmission built by Hermes (makers of the Porsche transmission) allows the wheels and propellers to be operated either independently or simultaneously. The "land transmission" is a 4-speed-plus-reverse unit similar to those found in the old Volkswagen Beetles.  The "water transmission" is a 2-speed offering unique to the Amphicar featuring single forward and reverse gears.  In the water, the front wheels act as rudders.

When new the Amphicar sold for between $2,800 and $3,300, depending on the year.

Amphicars have crossed the English Channel in 20' seas and traversed the Yukon. In Berlin, the police used a few as search and rescue vehicles. Buyers could order the vehicle with a built-in shower that ran off the bilge pump, and it seems the manufacturer also offered an amphibious camper trailer. Apparently, it's even possible to water ski behind one. Slowly.

Having an Amphicar fantasy? No need to be ashamed. We have them too.  But dreams seldom come cheap.  A fully restored Amphicar can today fetch upwards of $30,000.

It's an Amphicar! It's an Amphicar!

Special Agent Oddwick recently enjoyed an Amphicar sighting in Florida, although he didn't fully realize it at the time. Instead, he reported seeing a "boat/car thingy" and noted that he didn't believe the propellers were functional.

He was right about the boat/car thingy part, but wrong about the props They were indeed very functional. That's because Agent Oddwick had captured a rare contemporary photograph of an Amphicar in the wild.  And what's an Amphicar?  The International Amphicar Owners Club has prepared an executive summary:

The Amphicar was built in Germany from 1961 to 1968. Total production was 3,878 vehicles. The Amphicar is the only civilian amphibious passenger automobile ever to be mass produced. 3,046 Amphicars were imported into the United States between 1961 and 1967. The Amphicar is rear engined and uses a 4 cylinder British-built Triumph Herald motor producing 43hp. All Amphicars are convertibles, and the civilian models were originally offered in only 4 colors: Beach White, Regatta Red, Lagoon Blue and Fjord Green (Aqua). [...]

The Amphicar has a top speed of 7mph on water and 70mph on land. Hence, it was dubbed the "Model 770". The Amphicar is moved in the water by its twin nylon propellers. A special two-part land-and-water transmission built by Hermes (makers of the Porsche transmission) allows the wheels and propellers to be operated either independently or simultaneously. The "land transmission" is a 4-speed-plus-reverse unit similar to those found in the old Volkswagen Beetles.  The "water transmission" is a 2-speed offering unique to the Amphicar featuring single forward and reverse gears.  In the water, the front wheels act as rudders.

When new the Amphicar sold for between $2,800 and $3,300, depending on the year.

Amphicars have crossed the English Channel in 20' seas and traversed the Yukon. In Berlin, the police used a few as search and rescue vehicles. Buyers could order the vehicle with a built-in shower that ran off the bilge pump, and it seems the manufacturer also offered an amphibious camper trailer. Apparently, it's even possible to water ski behind one. Slowly.

Having an Amphicar fantasy? No need to be ashamed. We have them too.  But dreams seldom come cheap.  A fully restored Amphicar can today fetch upwards of $30,000.

Justin Hall

Community Analysis: WoW, Xbox, 3 Rings, PMOG
Many of us have friends offline. We went to school with them, we met them through our parents, we bumped into them at the park. Lots of ways to make friends.
Transitioning those friends to "online friends" is tough - you have to find out if they have the right computer or console, then you have to get some kind of a friend code that allows you to make a connection. Email is a fairly useful lingua-franca, but I've met alarming numbers of teenagers who don't use email at all these days.
So with so many online games today, it's a miracle to find and play alongside anyone you know. This is one of the things I just hate about World of Warcraft - I would love to play. But should I play on the server with my nephews? Or on a server with game critics? Or on a server with international friends? Why do I have to choose which one to be friends with? And have separate characters to interface with each group.
Xbox Live has fabulous means of watching any kind of friend. What are they up to? Can I join them? How are they doing at their games? It's a sort of light-touch online friendship. Light co-presence.
But Xbox Live needs richer real-time grouping. I couldn't gather more than one other friend in a voice chatroom during an online game. We were split into separate teams and couldn't talk. We had to get ourselves back into groups after a match ended, if the host wanted to change the game settings. So there was a sense that we were at an online gaming party, but we had to keep leaving and re entering the party, and we could never been in the same room.
In YoHoHo Puzzle Pirates and Bang! Howdy I didn't know anyone there immediately. I made some friends in Bang! Howdy, and I could find them later. But it was generally somewhat sparsely populated-seeming. It would have been nice to see a central gathering place, where the bodies mill about in Bang! Howdy. Then again, in Puzzle Pirates, I was quickly thrown into a large area with bodies milling about and I wasn't able to make much of it. Except other people had much bigger parrots than I had, and better clothes. Something to aspire to, I guess!

via http://interactive.usc.edu/members/jhall/

Heather Havrilesky

THANK DOG YOU'RE HERE

I was just musing over the pet food recall, and I stumbled on this post from a great blog called Fagistan, about how it's fucked up to feed dogs cheap, crappy food. Mr. Fagistan says that everyone knows wheat gluten is shitty for you, so why don't people get off their fat high-fructose-corn-syrupy asses and buy their pets some decent food?

This hit close to home with me, because I just recently decided I was too broke to pay for my dogs' organic food, which after all is much healthier and more organic and special than anything I eat on a regular basis. I thought "Science Diet food is good enough for them. It has the word 'Science' in it, it has to be healthy." Plus I have to drive pretty far to get my special expensive food, and I'm extremely hassle-avoidant. So I haul home a huge bag of the Science Diet, and my dog Potus eats it for two days and then stages a protest, standing by her bowl and looking up at me, as if to say, "This food is not organic, and you're a dirty whore who makes my stomach turn even more than these foul-smelling, wretched, chemically-polluted nuggets do."

To put it in perspective, Potus eats apples but spits out salmon, tuna, salami and sliced ham and she gives me that "You're a dirty whore" look when she doesn't get her daily 3-mile walk - and honestly, I've neglected to walk her maybe once in the past month. So it's hard to take her feelings into account in these matters, unless you want to feel tortured around the clock over how miserable you're making your dog by keeping her confined to a very pleasant house and small, sunny yard, which she shares with her confidante Bean, a friend carefully selected for her from the pound by yours truly. (And yes, naturally, I do want to feel tortured around the clock over how miserable she is.)

Her pal Bean does not turn up her nose at the Science Diet. Bean eats the Science Diet with gusto, and she wags her tail and looks up at me as if to say, "Thank you for this wonderful, nutritious meal!" She also eats the salmon, tuna, salami and sliced ham that Potus spits out, and she eats anything that falls onto the floor, and anything that smells interesting or has an intriguing texture, like leaves and twigs and that sought-after delicacy, cat shit.

It's funny, though. Bean is so thankful, but I feel about her the way God must feel about truly faithful Christians: I take her gratitude for granted. What I want is for that ingrate Potus to give me a little love. So when Potus stopped eating the Science Diet, it made me nervous, and I started to look into the pet foods recalled in the pet food recall for the first time (I had assumed, of course, that my expensive organic feed wasn't included) (and it wasn't) and there's Science Diet, on the list, and there's rice gluten in it (not wheat gluten, but even so, I hate that word, gluten!). So here I am, switching over to shitty, cheaper food just as it's being recalled. I am such a fucking asshole!

No, their exact brand wasn't recalled. But you get the picture about me being an asshole. So I bought another big bag of the expensive stuff. Potus still thinks I'm a dirty whore but at least she eats her breakfast now.

Anyway, I'm reading Fagistan and laughing, in large part because the title of his post is "I Feed My Dog Nothing But Cock," but just when I'm about to write to him and tell him that he's right and I'll never feed my dog shitty food again, I discover that he links to this blog! So then I do a search on his blog and my name (we've already established that I'm an asshole, why hold back now?) and I find a post where he says he wonders if I'm losing my edge!

So what do I do in response to this notion that I'm losing my edge? I write a very long, rambling post about the funny looks my doggies give me and what they mean.

It's official: I have no edge. I might as well just give in to it. From now on, this blog is going to be written in the voice of my dog, Potus.

via http://www.rabbitblog.com/

Mike Kuniavsky

Coming Age of Magic (Etech Edition)

Category: Smart Objects
Tags: design, magic, ubicomp, ubiquitous computing, user experience

Technorati tags: design, magic, ubicomp, ubiquitous computing, user experience

                                                                                   

This morning I gave a keynote at O'Reilly's Etech. It was an elaboration on the theme of magic in the design of ubiquitous computing user experience that I've been developing for a while now.

The core of the piece were three linked arguments about emergence:

• The emergence of ubiquitous computing from market forces acting on, and in concert with, CPU prices
  
• The emergence of animist reactions to devices that have behaviors that go beyond action-reaction physics
  
• The emergence of magic as a metaphor for the design of ubicomp devices
  

I've made the presentation (710K PDF) with all of my speaking notes available.

via http://www.orangecone.com/

Thomas Claburn

New Radiation Symbol Clarifies Some Things

 

With radiating waves, a skull and crossbones and a running person, a new ionizing radiation warning symbol is being introduced to supplement the traditional international symbol for radiation, the three cornered trefoil.

The new symbol is being launched today by the IAEA and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) to help reduce needless deaths and serious injuries from accidental exposure to large radioactive sources. It will serve as a supplementary warning to the trefoil, which has no intuitive meaning and little recognition beyond those educated in its significance.

Link

This is bound to diminish the market for polonium snacks.

via http://www.lot49.com/

Paul Boutin

Re-Wired                                                                 

I've taken a full-time position as managing editor for Wired's blogs. That means not much writing for now. I have a couple of pieces in the pipeline for Slate and Valleywag. I'll probably do a few car articles and some book reviews elsewhere when I need to unwind. But mostly I'm up to my eyeballs in behind-the-scenes work for the fifty or so bloggers who write for Wired. Drop me a line if you've got any ideas for the site.

Since you asked...

The screenshot above was one of the design team's mockups for the website's new look. It follows a redesign of the magazine that went into effect with the February issue. Most obvious change: The new logo, shown below. The paper stock is improved, too, and the magazine has been re-proportioned a bit taller and narrower to be the same dimensions as publisher Condé Nast's other magazines. The website is likewise being remodeled over the next few weeks.

Wired is currently one of Condé Nast's fastest-growing titles. My job is to help the website's bloggers maximize their own readerships.

via http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/

             

Will Kreth's HotWired page

http://www.kreth.com/adhom/hotwiredthing.htm

Will's page is sadly lacking many pics, but there is one good one of the office and a flyer, both cool.