Modus Operandi

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was closed so that 6000 people could...

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:42:56 -0400

The Sydney Harbour Bridge was closed so that 6000 people could have a picnic. Beautiful!

"I, for one, would like to see a chart of something juxtaposed with everything else. I think then..."

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:45:00 -0400

“I, for one, would like to see a chart of something juxtaposed with everything else. I think then we’d get a clear picture of what-the-fuck is going on here.”

- Hired Goons on charts and newspaper circulation

Nice. Great change-up with the usual baby portrait scenery!...

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:43:00 -0400

Nice.

Great change-up with the usual baby portrait scenery! Also, apparently his middle name is Danger.

Nice. Predates and looks like a nice companion to the stunning...

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:22:05 -0400

Nice. Predates and looks like a nice companion to the stunning That’s It, That’s All. I found this via a link from titlecase of some beautiful time-lapse photography by the same filmaker, Brad Kremer.

Private vCard

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:30:00 -0400

It’s very cool being able to easily email your contact details from the iPhone. But I have some private email addresses for posting to various services (like tumblr) that I don’t want to share. This occurred to me immediately after I emailed that vCard to a new acquaintance. Oops.

Today I discovered that there is actually an option to pick and choose which details are sent in the vCard.

Set up this way, when you edit your card you will see a column of checkboxes that will let you exclude (uncheck) certain details from being shared. Neat! I wish I’d known about that sooner.

Oh. My… I have a bit of a bag problem.

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:55:49 -0400

Oh. My…

I have a bit of a bag problem.

Uh Huh

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 20:15:00 -0400

So, the birthers are expecting us to believe that Obama’s mother knew back in 1961 that her black son, born of an interracial marriage, was going to be president someday.

link

via lickystickypickyme Now that is bad-ass.Picture: AP

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:28:54 -0400

via lickystickypickyme

Now that is bad-ass.
Picture: AP

Just what kind of “meeting” are you proposing?

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:38:17 -0400

Just what kind of “meeting” are you proposing?

image via itsnotascheme Whenever I see one of these...

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:51:00 -0400

image via itsnotascheme

Whenever I see one of these renderings with huuuuuge hovering things I think it would be cool to do a companion image showing their effects. The relevant technology is usually described as some sort of repulser. Something is pushing down to counteract gravity’s effect. Which in turn means exerting a force at least equal to its weight, down. So I imagine that they’re like enormous steamrollers crushing everything they pass over.

In this case Paris.

The MacBook Pro line in actual pixels. The 17 sounds really...

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 21:17:00 -0400

The MacBook Pro line in actual pixels. The 17 sounds really tempting until I remember the physical dimensions those pixels are packed into.

I’m really on the fence about between the 13 and 15 though. On the one hand, the 15 can run Pro Apple Apps I seldom use, on the other I’ve really gotten used to the 13 inch form factor. And $400 buys a lot of RAM.

Mike’s son at a family bonfire. That’s a...

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:45:00 -0400

Mike’s son at a family bonfire. That’s a pretty-close-to-perfect circle.

Sadly this is not my photo, it looked like a blast from half the world away.

From The Big Picture today about sulphur miners in Indonesia....

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:42:50 -0400

From The Big Picture today about sulphur miners in Indonesia. These guys carry from 45 to 90kg (~100–200 lbs.) of sulfur several kilometers to a weigh-station several times a day. They are breathing sulfuric acid fumes while at the mining site.

That is stupefyingly hard work.

Love that she letterpressed a sign for a yard sale! Yes...

Wed, 27 May 2009 16:10:00 -0400

Love that she letterpressed a sign for a yard sale! Yes it’s overkill, but so delicious.

Dovetails nicely with this collection of guerilla flier redesigns (via glass)

Preferred Wireless Networks

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:20:00 -0400

I’ve been having trouble with my home wireless network. The AirPort (EXTREME!!!) Base Station periodically refuses to connect me to the internet. I get full bars but no web. I factory reset my Base Station and renamed the network in the process. This seems to have ironed out the original problem, but it created a new one. Whenever I woke my MacBook from sleep it would take ~30 seconds to acquire the network. Argh.

The solution turned out to be pretty simple. The new network name got tacked onto the end of my Preferred Networks list in the Network>AirPort Preference Pane (the Advanced… button in the lower right as of 10.5.6). Moving it to the top immediately eliminated the delay in connecting for me. Yay!

I couldn’t figure out why this worked until I took another look at the list. It was seeded with a few named “default,” “linksys,” and “belkin54g.” I imagine that the MacBook was recognizing identically named networks and spending time trying to negotiate a connection with them.

It’s pretty simple, but maybe this will help someone else who is as frustrated as I was.

Also, name your wireless networks!

Missing The Mark

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 08:33:34 -0400

Dowd Interviewed Twitter Founders Biz and Ev.

This is another of those instances where a journalist’s lack of a basic understanding of the subject matter is obvious to those familiar with it. When this happens every time you read about something you actually know about, you start to wonder whether you should bother reading anything else they write. What are the odds that they are only blowing the things that you know about?

Whoa. From the 2009 Australasian CrossFit Games Qualifier.

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:31:00 -0400

Whoa.

From the 2009 Australasian CrossFit Games Qualifier.

Debugging our moral code. (TED Talk)

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 13:54:00 -0400

Debugging our moral code. (TED Talk)

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:05:37 -0400

Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.:

Clay Shirky writing about the need to focus on the problem of informing and empowering citizens not trying to preserve a specific institution that is organized around solving a logistical problem that no longer exists.

It’s the little things

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:46:16 -0500

I know that I shouldn’t be too starry-eyed about the new Administration. Government has an enormous amount of inertia. It’s hard to make big (positive) changes and harder to do it quickly but I just can’t help but be encouraged by the little things that they are doing. Small bites that can make a meal of large problems.

For example the Stimulus package requires that government agencies report how they spend the money in an Atom/RSS feed. By itself this is not a big deal, what percentage of the population knows what RSS is or could do anything with the data that comes out of it. What excites me about this is that by making data available to organizations that can do something with it the Administration is taking its job and its citizens seriously.