Category: long story short
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Richard Fleming's Walking to Guantanamo: A closely observed true thing
Walking to Guantanamoby Richard FlemingCommons (Oct 1, 2008) I loved this book from start to finish. Fleming is a charming and self-deprecating travel companion: the best kind. His pictorial eye strives to transmit clear, unfiltered images and as his readers we make up our own minds about the pros of cons of hitchhiking across Cuba.…
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This is what a dislocated pinkie looks like
The doctor I saw on Wednesday gave me this printout “as a souvenir.” Note the badly strained wrist (seen only as a large bulge, since only soft tissue, no bone, was damaged).
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I fought the bus and the bus won
This past week, driving to work on 580 east my car “became involved in an accident” with a bus or large van (it happened very quickly and I left the scene in an ambulance, so I’m not positive of all the details). Our first step was to inform the attorneys for personal injury cases in…
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New iPhone stencils for prototypers
Interaction designer and prototyper Chris Stone recently volunteered to adapt the iPhone stencils in our OmniGraffle based stencil kit in the Yahoo! Design Pattern Library and optimize them for use in Adobe InDesign. Chris “created a customizable, vector-based iPhone stencil library for InDesign.” To make it he worked from the PDF version of the stencil…
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Map sketches from over the Pacific
(san francisco peninsula) (new york harbor) (san francisco bay) (western north america) (bering straits)
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Down in the Blue Mountains
teeny falls Originally uploaded by true dirt Briggs took some wonderful pictures in Oz. This one’s from the rainy day we climbed down the ravines in the Blue Mountains.
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The new phone book is (almost) here!
The writing is over (for this edition), the book has “shipped to the printer,” and the cover mechanical (shown above, in its technicolor glory) is in the can. My tech writing career is now complete: an animal book with O’Reilly!
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Open source unbooks and a pattern language for groups
Two hot bookmarks today, each of which probably warrants a full blog post: Book’em, Github | Linux Magazine tech authors posting source code and sometimes entire books on GitHub Pattern Language of Group Process A pattern language for group dynamics whose goals include (1) To support Purpose-driven design. Form should follow function, (2) To deepen…
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Comparing hosting options
There is a very real prospect that the sweet sweet deal the Mediajunkie publishing empire has had these many years with Tiedrich and associates may need to replaces by something inevitably not half so sweet. What this means is that I may need to find a new host for my multiple and various web experiments.…
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What was the Watergate scandal?
Another in my new series of longwinded Aardvark answers made public, in this case answering a question about U.S. history from a 19 year-old in New York State: “What was the watergate scandal?” Here’s my answer. (How’d I do?*): Watergate is the name of a famous hotel in Washington, D.C. where a lot of political…
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Why is Dante's poem called the Divine "Comedy"?
I got this question from Aardvark and gave a speculative answer i’m not sure, but it may go back to the greek definitions of comedy and tragedy, which are different from ours today. for the greeks, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending and a tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending.…
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Playing around with Utterz
Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument: Mobile post sent by xian using Utterz. Replies. mp3
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Testing Anil Dash's text-embed idea
Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside…