Year: 2007

  • The twelve-month review

    Levi Asher tagged me with a meme, according to which I am to list the first sentence of the first post of each month for the past year. I’m game: * January: “The talented Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger” (Local blogging gets a site) * February: “Grab your preferred username at Useless Account before someone…

  • Sitting next to my father

    It could be a very curious experience sitting next to my father watching a bad movie. He thoroughly enjoyed anticipating the next line of a predictable dialog. This involved more than just getting the words right. There was also the timing. It had to be quick, and had to hit on the half-beat in the…

  • Calendar made of people

    The big version of the human calendar is amazing! The portable version is kind of cool too. From Craig Griffen, who also brought you the human clock.

  • I am not Spock

    I trust these people but why lodge that information with Spock.com?

  • Sort of about Chanukah and Christmas

    Got this in the email today: The lasting achievement of the Maccabees was not that they won a war but that they rekindled the light of hope in Jewish hearts and saved the faith of monotheism from defeat. – Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, 1997 [Background: Chanukah celebrates the victory in the…

  • Community site responds to homicide epidemic in Oakland

    I just heard today about Not Just A Number, a community journalism project coproduced by the Oakland Tribune and InsideBayArea.com. It endeavors to tell the real human stories of Oakland homicide victims, rather than letting them become merely statistics. The site speaks for itself, and I feel like I might be cheapening it by talking…

  • Voice over iPod?

    Remember when I said that an iPod touch with wifi and Skype (or similar) would obviate the need for an iPhone? Well, according to the unofficial Apple weblog, that day may be closer than ever: > [iPod] touch hacker eok has ported Samuel’s SvSIP to the iPod. SvSIP uses the SIP protocol to connect to…

  • Funundrum

    Nobody knows what the Sun really looks like. –DKo

  • Nevelson revisited

    After I posted about that Louise Nevelson exhibit at the de Young museum and seeing the model for the sculpture near my parents’ apartment at 92nd and Park Ave in New York, my sister scanned and emailed me a photo of the four of us siblings posing in front of the sculpture, circa 1974. (The…

  • As promised, my pattern library talk

    As the third curator of Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library I often receive a lot of thanks and praise from website designers and developers for the way we at Yahoo! have offered this resource to the world. I usually try to explain that much of the goodness happened before I came on board and that I…

  • Finding my bliss

    A week or so ago I posted a semi-whimsical question on Facebook: > Has anybody seen my bliss? I was following it but I think I fell too far behind. (Hat tip to Joseph Campbell, pictured here, who seems to have coined the phrase “follow your bliss.”) My friend Aldon Hynes wrote an interesting post,…

  • A message to you, Rudy

    Since Rudy Giuliani is running for president of 9/11, WFMU is running a remix contest encouraging people to put together tracks using his incessant invocation of that day (when his command center proved to be so ill-placed): > Here’s over two minutes of wall to wall September Eleventh’s, courtesy of America’s mayor. Your mission: turn…

  • Philosophical Courage

    I’ve been getting an Aristotle Quote of the Day on my (Google) home page. Today it was, “Character is habitual action.” And–totally apart from the content–I am thinking, “What guts! To say something so flat out straightforward, so intellectually committed as those four words.” And there is nothing obviously true about these words. Where are…

  • Discovering Louise Nevelson

    So yesterday B and I went into SF in the afternoon to visit our friends D and P and get some cultcha. We went to the deYoung museum in Golden Gate Park and took in the Louise Nevelson exhibit. For some reason I did not know who Nevelson was. I read her bio on the…

  • Things to done

    Saturday * Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market at Splash Pad park * Work out with B at the gym * Drop off shirts at the cleaner * Start laundry * Make pizza and salad * Fix problem with misdirected payments to writer client * See Michael Clayton * Have a…

  • My slides from Unbroken Chain

    Here are my slides from our panel at UMass (called “They Made a Fine Connection”): | View | Upload your own Without my comments, the slides are kind of telegraphic. If I get a sound recording of our panel, I’d link them together into a slidecast. I’ll also put my thoughts down about the symposium…

  • The limits of multitasking

    I was running a search on a labeled group of messages (from a mailing list) in my mailbox, looking for just the unread ones, but I was also doing something else at the same time (actually two or three other things, drinking coffee, firing up a YouTube video, looking for a file on my desktop)…

  • Unescaped entities on the loose

    So, I’m back from the Dead Symposium at UMass (I’ll post my slides soon), and Thanksgiving has come and gone, and I’m at the office now wrestling with my new MacBook Pro, trying to get everything possible onto it from my old G4 without breaking any of the new stuff. I think I’m almost there…

  • Drop by Drop

    “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.” –Aeschylus I wish to Hell I didn’t know what he was talking about. But I do. We all do. Or if you don’t know yet,…

  • For public consumption

    A few people have asked me about when they might be able to see the recording of my brown bag on the Yahoo Pattern Library and so I wanted to post a little update. This got delayed because of a cold that laid me up for all of last week, but I’ve just completed a…

  • Slow blogging ahead, or behind?

    Yeah, what she said: FringeHog: In Praise of Slow Blogging. Or is it a he? There’s no byline and several authors for the site. Whatever. Also, should I get an OLPC (one laptop per child) XO laptop in the buy one / donate one program? They look like they might be a great conference tool.…