January 2012
2 posts
1 tag
Why, Publishers, Why?
I am trying so hard to like ebooks, really I am. The Kindle is the first e-reader that makes any sense to me at all as something to actually read for long periods on, and it achieves one of its design goals in that it disappears and you stop noticing the device.
Except when the text is mangled by the conversion process.
Two examples from today.
the last three chapters or so of Martin...
1 tag
December 2011
5 posts
Important sights in Prague
Wenceslas Square
Plinth of the Stalin Statue. That is, everything on the flat space and more you can’t see used to be hundreds of tons of stone statue of Stalin; it was finished shortly after his death and was difficult to remove when the winds changed under Khruschev. Ultimately they had to use dynamite. In Letna Park, where the demonstrations which brought down the regime happened.
...
Velvet Revolution
When I was in Prague in 2005 I went for a walk, following the route of the protesters who were ambushed by the police on November 17th, 1989.
The protest started out as a legal assembly in honor of a Czech student who died during the German occupation in World War II, at the Visegrad cemetery just outside of town. This is the cemetery where Czech heroes like Smetana are buried. The group decided...
bluessongoftheday:
Blue Christmas
- Porky Pig
...
2 tags
Don't Be A Free User (Pinboard Blog) →
Hey Tumblr! Let me pay you. Otherwise I’m just waiting for the day when your VC’s insist you do advertising, which will not fill me with joy. I don’t want to be a product here, and I’ll never buy enough custom themes to make up for the subscription I’d be happy to sign up for.
minimalmac:
What if a little site you love doesn’t have a business model? Yell at the...
U.N. Says Death Toll In Syria Has Surpassed 4,000... →
In related Syrian news, the BBC reports that two major opposition groups have decided to join forces. The Syrian National Council, the main opposition group and the Free Syrian Army (FSA), made up of Syrian army defectors, said the FSA would cut down on its attacks on government forces and use force only to protect civilians.
That’s an important move, says the BBC, because it could stop...
November 2011
8 posts
OCD Saturday
I am presently engaged in doing battle with iTunes to clean up my classical music collection, slowly re-ripping from CDs to get all my bitrates at the same decent level. I continue to be impressed by the insanity of the Gracenote data for most classical music. Certainly pop music works better and has a larger market, but iTunes has not gotten better with classical stuff over time. Presumably...
Armed Groups Are on Rise in Syria, as Are Civil... →
I believe I have touched on this before, but…how many months of a government and its people killing each other before it’s OK to call it a civil war? If you’re talking about defections from the army, there are at least two armed groups. I think it qualifies.
Boston Globe Online
My relationship with the Boston Globe’s new site has come to an end. It is a product I wanted to like. Here are some reasons I didn’t:
In hindsight the signs were there during the trial, when I needed to sign up for an account to see the free material. Why require registration for something you’re giving away? In any event, I tried it on day 1, set up the account, and promptly...
College Sports Done Right
I spent some time last night watching women’s college soccer: UC San Diego vs. UC Santa Clara. The field was a wreck because it’s also used for football. The stands were not especially full.
It was awesome. Both teams are going to end up in the post-season tournament, so even though San Diego won easily everybody was playing well. The folks who came to watch were enthusiastic. The...
Libraries, Articles, and User Experience
If you know a librarian, you know someone who’s had this conversation:
Patron: Do you have access to the New York Times website?
Librarian: Not the website, but we do have access to it through several of our subscription databases. Here, you can use this one to do a search….
Patron: (puzzled look)
The puzzled look is the right response, because it’s very strange to insist...
October 2011
4 posts
Enthusiasms: Pack my box with five dozen liquor... →
dailymeh:
I was disappointed to see that Google’s web fonts directory has done away with the quick brown fox… as the default example sentence. Instead, we get “Grumpy wizards make toxic brew for the evil Queen and Jack,” which somehow doesn’t measure up to the elegance of the fox. On the other hand,…
The Book Bench: Is Self-Knowledge Overrated? : The... →
Review of Thinking Fast and Slow, in which the fallibility of human wisdom is made clear.
“Knowing thyself is not enough. Not even close.”
via Daring Fireball
Enthusiasms: The View from Godless Liberal... →
This poses the intriguing hypothesis that what’s thinkable politically is different by culture, and that socialism is in the eye of the beholder.
dailymeh:
The thinkable is a very narrow band in the spectrum of politics. Revolutions invert the thinkable, or at least shove it far into the land of the previously infrared or ultraviolet, if you follow my metaphor here. Within each little...
September 2011
5 posts
1 tag
Facebook wants your past, present, and future on... →
Facebook’s plans, announced today at F8, make me slightly ill. It’s not really that I mind advertising, but I do increasingly mind sites which don’t even pretend they’re about anything other than selling every scrap of personal information they can get to whoever will pay.
Wait, wait. I don’t know how Tumblr plans to monetize. Crap.
“Usability is the bones of the product, not the skin”
– from a post Bijan wrote about Sonos. (via dpstyles)
LA Times on Republican Debate →
“He was pushed on his views on climate change. (That resulted in one of the evening’s pure head-scratching moments when Perry appeared to compare his skepticism about global warming to Galileo’s views on heliocentrism.)”
“All in all, Perry committed no gaffes and did little to harm his position in the still unfolding race.”
On what planet can you say the first thing in...
2 tags
US Open
Watching Dolgopolov v. Djokovic at the US Open. Djokovic seems to be continuing his aristeia, which is sorta delightful, because he was an also-ran for a bunch of years behind Federer and Nadal, and he’s now playing like he means it.
The sky darkens, and rain approaches, the leading edges of, I believe, Lee. Will cool things off nicely. Although I’m not ready for fall semester, I am...
2 tags
Gladiators
I like watching pro football, but I’ve never been able to figure out why college football never did much for me. Just figured it out.
Watching LSU-Oregon on ESPN and a first-year running back fumbled on a play from scrimmage and then the kick return after the resulting touchdown. After the first fumble one of the announcers said, essentially, “that’s what you get for giving a...
August 2011
11 posts
1 tag
American McCarver: Tennis anyone? →
Good tennis coverage is rare as hen’s teeth. Any coverage. Though it continues to charm me that Al Jazeera includes tennis and cricket in their hourly sports reporting. This is a compilation by The Byliner via American McCarver.
americanmccarver:
Hey Dodgers fan*— maybe it’s time to turn to tennis? Here’s some verbiage to get you in the mood for the US Open. Following on yesterday’s...
You Look Nice Today: East Arcadia State: 2009... →
I shall cheerfully reblog this every year the increasingly incomprehensible and insufferable Beloit Mindset report crosses my path.
At the dawn of each academic year, East Arcadia State University prepares our instructors and staff by curating some facts and observations about the generational differences that are peculiar to our incoming freshman class. By understanding how the world looks to...
3 tags
"Plastics" revisited
My previous post on canceling my Netflix disk shipments has collided with the reality of the oddness of my tastes. I have suddenly decided I want to watch gorgeous black and white noir, and the Netflix streaming catalog is not really up to it—though I did do a nice impromptu John Huston marathon last weekend. However, I work for a library at a university with a film program, so my office is...
2 tags
The misery of the protracted presidential campaign... →
Glenn Greenwald on why every election is the worst ever. This is extremely sensible and honest about how distorting and pointless presidential campaigns are in terms of governing the country.
No one can say anything sensible for the next year and a half. And the two candidates will end up being very similar in all kinds of ways, and different in largely manufactured ones.
Is The Web The Ultimate Serendipity Machine? →
I’m a librarian, so Aleks Krotoski’s question yesterday rings a bell for me. Libraries are about arranging things physically to facilitate serendipity. There are some advantages to that, like putting everything by and about William Shakespeare in the same place so you can (barely, in a small library) see all of it at once and browse through it quickly. But there are disadvantages, like...
2 tags
A wild assortment
MPOW is getting ready to replace the carpet in the office I share with two dozen people, so we’re all temporarily packing up our desks. Some of my colleagues have twenty years’ worth of paper records (we’re a library, so for some it’s journal literature and for others it’s order forms and vendor records), but I’ve kept my cubicle fairly minimal because I find...
“And both of these setups would come with a couch, a Lady-Grey-with-milk...”
– Cheryl Klein
3 tags
Sometimes, There's A Man →
I commend to you track three, Go Through Hell, of this rock opera about a podcast host, commissioned by an email marketing vendor, and performed by Merlin Mann, my favorite geek. I just put it up on Facebook to the uncomprehending stares of my non-geeky friends and relations. Track three is the one with the combined literary-Rush reference.
The layers of geekery here are palpable.
July 2011
8 posts
Politician's syllogism →
Oh, this explains much.
bestofwikipedia:
The politician’s syllogism, also known as the politician’s logic or the politician’s fallacy, is a logical fallacy of the form:
We must do something
This is something
Therefore, we must do this.
(via @werttrew)
3 tags
"Plastics"
This morning I dropped off a Netflix DVD in the mailbox on the way to work. I’ve done this a thousand times, but this time was probably the last. I signed up for the streaming-only plan based on my careful analysis of exactly how many physical DVDs I’ve watched in the last year. So, depending on how you’re scoring I’m saving either $2 or $7 by switching away from physical...
Netflix changes (note lack of outrage)
I think I may be the only geek who’s not righteously angry at Netflix right now, but I think any of the new plans are a pretty good deal. My actual DVD watching has apparently been pretty low the last couple of years, so moving to streaming only is probably the right move for me. Netflix continues to be the only pay-TV service I am happy to pay for, because it’s still exactly what I...
WatchThis is a most cheerful and excellent cover. They’re right—it’s a TMBG song.
laughingsquid:
They Might Be Giants Covering Tubthumping by Chumbawamba
June 2011
2 posts
venomous porridge: A Pivotal Moment in the Film... →
Thank you, sir, for pointing out that there must be some trauma at the root of this.
dwineman:
PROFESSOR: Less. J.J.: Like that? PROFESSOR: No, less than that. J.J. (making an adjustment): How about now? PROFESSOR: Less still. J.J.: Gosh. Okay, how’s that? PROFESSOR: Even less. You’ll be amazed how much less you can get away with. J.J.: But it’ll ruin the shot! PROFESSOR: Nah. Have some...
What's a civil war?
I’m not sure what Reuters thinks a civil war is.
Yesterday, President Saleh of Yemen was wounded in an attack on his compound by people trying to get him to leave the country. Here’s the quote that got me started on this:
“Any departure by Saleh could make it extremely difficult to him to return to Yemen where he is fighting a four-month uprising against his rule that has...
May 2011
3 posts
Believeland →
These are my people.
April 2011
2 posts
1 tag
Saturday morning
My Acer netbook is slowly downloading Natty Narwhal. I’m typing this on my Macbook Pro. My iPhone is elsewhere, minding its own business. And I have my Kindle open to the Economist’s World This Week column, which I just Facebooked the best quote ever from:
“A young man and his fiance were expected to get married in central London on April 29th. Millions of Britons took...
