Ping

08:01 pm - Phones

The last four phone booths in Manhattan.

07:58 pm - Phones

<a href="http://www.scoutingny.com/?p=852">The last four phone booths in Manhattan.</a>

11:47 am - Advice

From Bruce Mau:

Don’t be cool.
Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

11:15 am - Rolling up of Sleeves

At least Sarah Palin's attorney [PDF] can write a memo within the bounds of English grammar.

But "rolling up his sleeves?" When will Americans tire of this folksy bullshit?

08:39 am - Economist

Hooray! It seems that The Economist now has a Kindle edition. The Economist was the reason I bought a Kindle. Unfortunately, I didn't check that the Economist was available. I'm very happy to see this.

Subscribed!

Now I just have to switch my FT subscription over, and I'll be mostly paper-free. (I am not switching The New Yorker to Kindle; it is too much fun reading that on paper)

05:26 pm - Homer on Tom Tom

I can how have Homer Simpson giving me directions on my Tom Tom.

This is so dumb that I might do it.

11:57 am - Venn

American Apparel venn diagram.

07:44 am - Marathoners

The New York Times has such fantastic people who visualize numbers.  The latest graphic is this representation of where people drop out of the New York Marathon.   Of course, I couldn’t help think of Napoleon marching on Moscow.

07:23 pm - Squares

Now you got a crapload of squares.

02:51 pm - RIP: Jay Bennett

Musician Jay Bennett was found dead on Tuesday. He was 45.

Jay was a prodigious talent. The creative (and personal) tension between Jay and the rest of the band made Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot the masterpiece that it is.

07:48 pm - Toccata

I normally find this kind of thing annoying, but they rocked.

via vowe.net

03:16 pm - Computers

Some interesting graphs on the computer usage at the University of Virginia. Particularly the Laptop vs Desktop and MacOS vs Windows charts.

11:41 am - Win Sev

I had the time to download and install the Windows 7 RC build this week and to install it on both real hardware and in a VMWare VM (hosted on MacOS).

I must say that I'm impressed. Not because it has any compelling new features; that would, it seems, to be too much to ask. But it seems to be the first Windows release since XP SP 2 that gets out of its own way.

On my fairly beefy workstation (a recent Dell Precision with 4 gig of ram), where Linux was remarkably fast, Vista was sluggish. Vista rarely crashed, but often paused, churned on IO and couldn't seem to get the most out of network transfers. WinSev seems an entirely different beast: far faster, many operations instantaneous. Chrome on WinSev has (so far) been a pleasure, reminding me of the browser on BeOS that showed me that web sites aren't slow, hardware isn't slow, but operating systems and browsers are. Good show, indeed.

On VMware, WinSev is somewhat less impressive, not substantially faster than Vista. But this might be sue to some setup / driver issues. I didn't pay too much attention to what I was doing there.

This being said, I don't know if I'll be upgrading everything to WinSev. If I need to run it both on the Dell and VMware, do I need two licenses? Are there any "family packs" or something similar for Windows? I certainly won't pay full price to upgrade two machines, given that I use the MacOS most of the time.

11:42 am - Soth

inside the photographers_studio from andrew hetherington on Vimeo.

A somewhat-silent-movie touring through Alec Soth's studio.

In addition to being a talented photographer, Soth wrote a short-lived but fascinating blog that showed what a thoughtful, brilliant, well-read and funny person he is.

11:14 am - ISA

Insane Scrabble Ad

10:48 pm - Graf

via the rut

08:00 pm - Spies

Wow – this is fairly awful.  At least everyone looks a little dirty.

12:09 pm - Public

I like to keep up on what conservatives are thinking. There are lots of rational, thoughtful conservatives out there. And some not so much. On the Powerline blog, Scott Johnson commented on the "tea party" silliness that has come to be ridiculed as "tea bagging" in some circles.

Scott first shows his sexual naiveté by admitting that he didn't know what tea bagging was. His boring sex life aside, Scott then comes to an interesting conclusion.

The problem isn't that conservatives are, once again, fixating on something stupid while the country is facing some huge problems. Scott identifies the problem as, of course, the gays.

"There is something funny going on here, if not exactly where Cooper, Maddow and Sullivan find it. Cooper is widely reputed to be homosexual. Maddow and Sullivan are of course public homosexuals. It is funny in an ironic sort of way that these folks choose to disparage the tea party protestors from somewhere deep inside the homosexual subculture. "

Several things about his blog sadden me:

• By saying "public homosexual," Scott shows us that he thinks that sexuality is something to be hidden, something shameful.


• He seems to think that only gays would, you know, touch testicles.


• He can't see that Dick Armey's absurd tea parties aren't a serious attempt at anything and that they deserve any more than ridicule.

11:54 pm - Dream

Also, am I the last person in the world to see this? Fantastic. Made me smile.

11:49 pm - Din Din

I'm not much for restaurant reviews, but I had dinner at wd~50 tonight; extraordinary. Creative without being overly precious, relatively relaxed, and fantastic flavors. I have never said "holy shit that is good" so many times in a restaurant.

Good stuff.