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July 31, 2005

Humbled.

Another unexpected result: the most requested item on this site used to be the infamous "Why do you hate America so much?" post. For awhile it was the number one result on Google for the phrase. I closed comments on it a long time ago, and now it's currently #5.

Checking my logs this morning, I discovered that the most popular item on this site is now this picture of a man in a panda suit, which as of this morning accounted for 65.39% of my traffic. I better not quit my day job.

In second? The archive page on which the picture of a man in a panda suit appears.

And third, after robots.txt? The thumbnail of the image of a man in a panda suit.

Two things:

  1. There are a lot of panda fans out there.
  2. Sigh.

Posted by John at 9:55 AM |

Reason to believe.

Scripting News: 7/31/2005:


I thought about it a bit and said, that I don't think that would help very much, what would really make a difference would be to send me there, to take pictures, to view their world through my lens, and then report that back through my blog. That would help foster understanding, that would be a link that meant something. Pointing to a woman because she's a woman isn't a solution to a problem anyone really has. However creating understanding seems to be the solution to everything.


This, in a nutshell, is why we so need more events like Blogher.

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Posted by John at 9:29 AM |

July 30, 2005

Wickit good, in a cabinet or from a bubbler.

Much of what forms, shall we say, my attitude, stems from my upbringing in Providence, RI, a place where the political corruption is so deeply entrenched that it engenders a near-fatal level of cynicism in any thinking person who grows up there. Imagine my great delight to find quahog.org, a truly encyclopedic site of all things Vo Dislun. I knew it was the real deal when I ran across this:

No school Fosta-Glosta
A catchphrase (much like "Whatchootalkin'boutWillis?"), uttered by much-beloved media personality Salty Brine during winter snow-day reports. Foster and Glocester are two abutting communities in the northwest of the state that are completely snowbound during months containing an "r." Salty always lumped the two together when making no-school announcements; most Rhode Islanders believe there's a town out there called Fosta-Glosta.

Salty's been gone from the radio for a few years now, but the phrase refuses to die. A sure way to find out if someone is lying about having spent time in the state (as though one would), is to challenge him with the phrase "No school..." A real Rhode Islander knows the rest.

Posted by John at 12:23 PM |

Swordfish.

James Robertson: Being on, 24x7:

It's all very confusing to those of us who don't have access to the beta.

Which gets to a basic problem in the always on world that we have now - limited access betas are mostly pointless now. Why? Well, look at this whole dust up. Someone complained about toolbars disappearing. Afraid of the Kryptonite effect, Scoble raced out with a bunch of posts (and, according to the Register, a few emails). In the meantime, most of us don't have access to the product in question. To us, this looks like a bewildering array of charges, counter-charges, and explanations. Heck, The Register accuses Scoble of dishonesty.

There are a few possible fixes here, I think. One is, don't do limited access betas at all. If you intend to make a beta publicly available, then make it widely available. Otherwise, you'll get what you see here - lots of commentary being slung over the heads of the unwashed masses.


I don't get limited betas. Maybe it's the insidious influence of the business side, but I find it hard to reconcile increasingly shrill cries for "transparency" with the double super secret nda mentality so rampant in the industry. Tech loves elitism - invite-only conferences, coy references to insider access, closed betas. Said betas ALWAYS make it out into the wild anyway; I'd be surprised if you can't already get the IE 7 beta on the file-sharing networks. It's pretty much proven that such cloak-and-dagger bullshit is at best annoying and worst ineffectual.


So why does the disconnect continue? My educated guess would be the relationship (read "collusion") between the tech industry and its customers, typically corporate IT departments. Tech really has a 2-level customer base: IT and the "unwashed masses." The unwashed get pretty much no insider access whatsoever. IT does; it's pretty much ALL inside baseball. Blogging, especially the Scoble-type "I'm not an amateur pundit, but I simulate one on-line" variety, gives it the veneer of being out in some undefined "open," even though I can't really tell you why right now. What's strange is that many of these "conversations" could be conducted via email; quite often there's little or no benefit to the people not directly involved. But if you did it over "private" channels you couldn't refer to yourself as a "revolutionary." A corporate revolutionary. Jesus. That's right up there with "military intelligence."


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Posted by John at 8:34 AM |

"Get off the road, you fucking asshole."

Fat Cyclist: An Open Letter to the Passenger in the Green SUV Who Screamed as He Went By Yesterday:

The originality of your sense of humor. I haven't conducted a survey or anything, but I'm pretty sure you are the absolute first person to ever scream at a cyclist from a moving car. And I'm sure other cyclists will verify that they, like I, have never:
* Had a car swerve at them as a joke
* Had a car honk at them as a joke
* Had someone throw a beer bottle at/in front of them as a joke.
What is the deal with motorists? Throwing things at people on bikes? Sideswiping them? It's nuts, plain nuts.

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Posted by John at 7:58 AM |

July 29, 2005

Truer words.

via cleverchimp, this amazingly prophetic and accurate statement:

Every man on horseback is an arrogant man, however gentle he may be on foot. The man in the automobile is one thousand times as dangerous. I tell you, it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind if the driving of automobiles becomes common. It will breed violence on a scale never seen before. It will mark the end of the family as we know it, the three or four generations living happily in one home. It will destroy the sense of neighborhood and the true sense of Nation. It will create giantized cankers of cities, false opulence of suburbs, ruinized countryside, and unhealthy conglomerations of specialized farming and manufacturing. It will make every man a tyrant. —R.A. Lafferty, late 1800s
Can you say "road rage?"

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Posted by John at 4:26 PM |

July 27, 2005

Into my cruelty-free belly!

what the hell _does_ a vegan eat anyway?

A simple vegan blog about what I eat everyday. This blog came together because once people know I'm a vegan, the first question I get asked is...What The Hell Does A Vegan Eat Anyway?

Pretty great looking food. I was annoyed that all the links go to vegan porn at flickr. I was hoping that they'd be to, oh, recipes.

Posted by John at 5:41 PM | | Comments (3)

Try new cheeze vegans.

VeganFreaks: Anyone Got a Job for Us?

(In a marginally related note, just the other day, a student told me "I don't eat vegans." And I said "Neither do I, not unless they ask me to." He looked at me, puzzled, as he explained that he thought "vegans" was a brand of food. Seriously.)

The double entendre is nice.

Posted by John at 5:38 PM |

blogher.

Due to lack of funds and time, I am not able to attend blogher. I really don't do conferences at all, for various reasons. This is one, though, that looks like it could be a refreshing antidote to the posturing and elitism (or do I mean "un-elitism") of most of them. If you're in the area, go. I hope it goes well, folks - I wish I could be there. Maybe next year. I miss yet another opportunity to complain about the lack of free airport wifi. Damn.

Posted by John at 2:32 PM | | Comments (2)

July 26, 2005

Crumbled.

I'm not yet sure that this isn't some sort of snark, but Kottke appears to have fallen for one of the hoariest urban legends.

A woman who was charged $250 for a cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus gets her revenge by emailing the recipe to everyone she knows

Update: Yeah, it's just the same old smug middlebrow SCAL bullshit.

Updater: Confirmed.

[1] "Something" being the gigantic amount of email I received yesterday after posting this link. For a good 2 hours or so, an email arrived every two minutes telling me that the cookie thing was a hoax. It was kind of incredible, by far the most feedback I've gotten in several months. Boy, you folks don't think much of me, do you? ;)

Actually, no, we don't.

Posted by John at 2:09 PM | | Comments (1)

July 22, 2005

What *don't* we eat? Oh, right, meat.

What do vegetarians eat? What do vegans eat? See our answers.
Probably one of the most annoying questions a vegetarian or vegan gets is, "So what do you eat?", often followed by, "Don't you get tired of eating nothing but salad?" I usually answer that one with, "Yes, and it's so terrible I cry myself to sleep every night."
Really great page, not only as a handy pointer for the omnis but also as a source of ideas.

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Posted by John at 1:44 PM |

July 14, 2005

A link is not a vote.

Wired News: Technorati: A New Public Utility

Someone has to cut through all the contemporaneous smog, however, and that would be Technorati, which includes information about every poster in each search result. That way you can gauge bloggers' "net attention" -- calculated by the number of people who link to them -- so you can locate the most authoritative views.

There's the fallacy right there.

Popularity != authority.

It's the Googlewhore syndrome all over again. As long as this deeply flawed quantitative metric is in place, the unscrupulous will game the system.

Posted by John at 3:39 PM |

July 8, 2005

"Drawing Mind."

Everyday Matters: July 2005 Archives

Drawing is about reaching for pure being. Not making pretty pictures to put in frames and on websites. The world doesn't need more pictures. It needs peace and connection. It needs people who can accept reality and don't feel compelled to control their environments. If you can look at a boot, at a rotting apple, at car's worn tire, at an old man's foot, and see it for what it is, without value or judgement, can see the beauty and particularity of the thing, you will find peace. You will avoid being covetous. You will be happy with what you have. You will accept others more readily, will see the sunshine on a cloudy day. Life is a wonderful business, though fools blow up London tube stations and sell each other crap and waste time with gossip about movie stars. If you can draw, you will always have a place to go that is beautiful and honest and true. As you sit in an airport you will find pleasure in the folds of a crumpled lunch bag. As you bide your time in a doctor's waiting room, you will find peace in the arrangement of the shadows on the wall. Even without putting ink on paper, you will be able to slip in to Drawing Mind.

I usually have little tolerance for Talking About Drawing (or its broader cousin Talking About Creativity.) I really enjoy reading Danny Gregory, though, and he's inspired me to start drawing again, something I had previously loved but had not done in a looooong time. I mostly draw comic-type stuff. The name of this blog, for example, comes from a character my son and I draw sometimes.

Posted by John at 5:06 PM | | Comments (1)

"Contains active cultures."

New Harvest - Advancing Meat Substitutes

What is cultured meat? Cultured meat is meat produced in vitro, in a cell culture, rather than from an animal. The production of cultured meat begins by taking a number of cells from a farm animal and proliferating them in a nutrient-rich medium. Cells are capable of multiplying so many times in culture that, in theory, a single cell could be used to produce enough meat to feed the global population for a year. After the cells are multiplied, they are attached to a sponge-like "scaffold" and soaked with nutrients. They may also be mechanically stretched to increase their size and protein content. The resulting cells can then be harvested, seasoned, cooked, and consumed as a boneless, processed meat, such as sausage, hamburger, or chicken nuggets.

Nowhere in this FAQ do they address the question of whether "cultured" meat is any better for you healthwise than the standard slaughtered kind. I find this whole idea deeply creepy, and I wandered round this site for awhile, wondering if this was just a well-done (snark) hoax. It appears to be legit. Something about this is just wrong, plain wrong.

Posted by John at 4:16 PM |

July 7, 2005

"keep your eye on the ball."

First Draft by Tim Porter: London Bombings: The Unread Newspaper

Three newspapers lie unopened and unread on my kitchen table.

The fact that I subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle tells you much about the trust I place in newspapers as an institution. The fact that I didn't give them more than a fleeting glance this morning speaks just as strongly to their uselessness on a day of major news.

Well, this post was the proverbial last straw.

A great tragedy occurred today. There is a mounting toll of casualties in London. By most accounts it is the worst attack on London in three decades. The top of a bus was ripped off like it was a tin can.

This is not the time for more blogger self-congratulation.

Especially when so far, the one stupid blurry phonecam shot being linked around appears to be the sum fucking total of your "reporting." The already much vaunted flickr pool seems to mainly consist, ironically enough, of people taking pictures of televisions tuned to news channels. And we get the inimitable "Doc" Searls. His main take on the tragedy: how it's affecting Technorati's most popular searches.

Shame on you, you fucking self-involved assholes.

I found this sort of bragging disgusting during 9/11. When I finally got home from one of the most terrifying days of my life, I found the usual asshats talking about how much better they were than "moribund media." Perhaps you could "report" on what's actually happening rather than the cynical exploitation of this tragedy as yet another opportunity for another round of back-patting blog triumphalism.

And from a New Yorker to London: our hearts are with you.

Posted by John at 2:21 PM | | Comments (2)