this is sippey.com

how you like me now

Watching The Heavy's much-linked performance on Letterman, all I could think of was Robert Smigel's version of Lorne Michaels screaming "Noooooo!!! This needs to be on myyyy shooooooooooooooowwwwww!!!!"

entitled to care, starring jason schwartzman

But, then we also find ourselves having to beg them to face the non-negotiable reality of a scary, complicated, and hard-to-monetize new environment where nobody cares how attached you are to your spreadsheet. Bravely vowing to continue pretending it’s 1972 is a terrific treatment for a film, but it’s a crap way to run your growing business.

via www.kungfugrippe.com

Merlin's piece about entitlements and business model dirt naps is worth reading in full.

But the little bit excerpted makes me think that this would make a terrific film. Directed by Wes Anderson, Jason Schwartzman stars as a young, inherited-wealth magazine publisher who bravely vows to continue to pretend it's 1972, while all around him people in distressed jeans, sneakers and ironic t-shirts whiz past with their iPads and their Foursquare checkins.

OK, now that I think about it...maybe not.

the multi-layered ipad

Up until now, we’ve done most of our reading using a single layer of data. This works well when you have abundant space, but breaks down when you try to work on a smaller device. As we pack more and more data into smaller spaces, we need to consider how this data is presented. The answer that provides the best compromise of accessibility and usability is to layer our data using modal dialogs. And now, a story.

via www.capndesign.com

Matt Jacobs publishes his notes on talk he gave about "The Tablet" and multi-layered computing. Well worth the read, or if you want the short-hand version you can page through his slides.

pluto is no longer a planet

via tiffchow.typepad.com

Tiff blogs about how kids get pissed off when they learn that Pluto isn't a planet. BUT! Check out the dateline on that letter -- November 6, 2006. Kids that have been learning about planets since Pluto's been declassified have a completely different take...

Case in point: took the kids to the Chabot Space and Science Center this past weekend, and watched a great film with them about the solar system. My when the kids in the movie flying their animated cardboard rocket finally made it to Pluto my nine year old turned to me with this shocked look on her face and whispered "But Dad! Pluto's not a planet!"

i am also a huge fan of soulver

DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD.

via www.marco.org

I no longer click the fake clear button to clear the display on my one-line, non-editable fake LCD. I am a convert to Soulver (desktop and iPhone) and it really is a thing of beauty.

thanks, dave!

The news that Issue #60 ("Append file support") in the Quick Search Box for the Mac bug tracker has been marked as "fixed" by Dave MacLachlan will make a vanishingly small number of people exceedingly happy.

And since the other 99.99% of you have no idea what I'm talking about you can move right along. There's nothing to see here.

now that's a party

I loved this little bit from The March 1 New Yorker profile of Paul Krugman: "Once, he and [his wife] Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics -- two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed up as a column."

That's right: two Asian tigers. Imagine the awkwardness. 

does the model have her shoes on the table?

There's a lot to love in this 3 minute, 20 second slow motion, captioned rendition of Sunday night's iPad ad, but more than anything else, I love the sound effects.

nightmares in neon

The phrases bloom in my mind, filled with monstrous possibilities. As you read, the voice in your head becomes by turns lover, mother, creep, sadist, rapist, murderer. Snag on a particular phrase and, as you watch it slide away, you'll miss what's coming up behind. Occasionally, the words blink on and off, or stall and reverse. It is hard to keep up, even though they glide by at a walking pace, silently.

via www.guardian.co.uk

The Guardian's Adrian Searle on Jenny Holzer's exhibition "For Chicago."

world class, a.k.a. international hullaballoo

I know world class is  just a phrase, but it’s one that sets my teeth on edge. ... Language is enriched when it incorporates slang, neologisms, immigrant inventions and street talk that say things that were never needed to be said before, or that we were never willing or able to say to each other. Language is corrupted when it is made bland, vague, superficial, flabby or meaningless. World class is a term that I believe leaked over from the sports world. In ranking how fast the fastest sprinters can cover 100 meters, it has objectivity and meaning. Slopped over to a realm such as the arts, it only pretends to some kind of verifiable truth. So while it feigns being about the best of the best, it really means, “talked about and caught up in the international hullaballoo that we all hear so much media talk about,” with a dash of “appreciated by we who are at top of the heap.”

via blog.sfmoma.org

SFMOMA's Renny Pritikin pens a word class blog post on museum building booms and digresses on the use of the phrase "world class."

the flickr commons

If you haven't, go check out the Flickr Commons. "The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden treasures in the world's public photography archives, and secondly to show how your input and knowledge can help make these collections even richer." And if you're not the tagging or commenting type, browsing works, too because every once in a while you come across gems like this one from the collection of the State Library of New South Wales. (Baldessari, anyone?)

Peggy Bacon in mid-air backflip, Bondi Beach, Sydney, 6/2/1937 / by Ted Hood posted by State Library of New South Wales collection at Flickr

the canon blaster

I'd like a Chrome extension that redirects every article similar to the above to Armond White's Transporter 3, which is the last word on the topic as far as I am concerned.

via hello.typepad.com

David is on to something with this idea for a browser extension. "Oh! You think that article is interesting? Well you should check out the one that really matters. You'll thank us later." Or instead of a browser extension imagine a campus-wide proxy server that detects and automatically redirects based on student browsing activity. (Included free with your tuition!) We'll call that act of redirecting GETTING BLASTED BY THE CANON.

the DFW archive

You probably read it there, since I'm sure the set of kottke.org readers fully encompasses the set of sippey.com readers, but Jason points out the news that the University of Texas has acquired the archive of David Foster Wallace.

UT's press release about the acquisition is essentially a microsite of material from the collection, including scanned images from the inside of some of the books Wallace owned. Here's the one for DeLillo's Ratner's Star:

That image makes my heart beat faster. Here's an excerpt of a blog post from Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's literary agent, about the collection...

What scholars and readers will find fascinating I think is that as messy as David was with how he kept his work, the actual writing is painstakingly careful. For each draft of a story or essay there are levels of edits marked in different colored ink, repeated word changes until he found the perfect word for each sentence, and notes to himself about how to sharpen a phrase until it met his exacting eye. Having represented David from the beginning of his writing career, I know there were people who felt David was too much of a “look ma no hands” kind of writer, fast and clever and undisciplined. Yet anyone reading through his notes to himself will see how scrupulous they are.

The inclusion of the words "and readers" gives me hope that some of the pieces in the archive find their way into books, on to the web, etc....and not just sifted through the inscrutable filter of academia. (And since everything comes back to this lately: I wonder what the market opportunity is for an iPad version of Infinite Jest annotated and overlaid with notes / revisions / edits from DFW?)

paul ford will be at sxsw

I will not be in Austin this year, though the inimitable Paul Ford will be. You should find him and say hello.

I've never been to SxSW before. It surprises some people when I tell them that. It also surprises people when I cry or vomit, or get into bed with them well after all the other guests have gone home. But I've never had a job where they want to spend money to send me places to learn things. I think that's a very NYC thing; ideas and talent are supposed to come to us, preferably kneeling and begging, not the other way around. This approach is why the finance and publishing industries are enjoying such great years.

via www.ftrain.com

quite a lot!

Anyway: Dave Eggers! I am writing to compare him to Wyndham Lewis, because while there is definitely something to not like about him, there is a lot to praise. Quite a lot! There is great worth in Dave Eggers.

via www.theawl.com

Maria Bustillos tries really (really!) hard to say good things about Dave Eggers, and compares him to Wyndham Lewis. Which I guess is a good thing?

Me? I've never met Dave Eggers. But I like some of his books! And The Believer sure is neat. And I was surprised at how much I liked Where the Wild Things Are because I don't think it was really that "twee" and was actually quite a sophisticated story... But what do I know. I don't write for The Awl, and I don't know enough about Wyndham Lewis to know whether or not Ms. Bustillos is being ironical.

home is where i want to be

As an iPhone user, Jason Snell's writeup of what he's learned from using a Nexus One is enlightening. ("If the iPhone didn’t exist, I would have the Nexus One in my pocket right now—but then again, if the iPhone didn’t exist, the Nexus One wouldn’t either.")

I keep hearing fundamental things about the Nexus One that turn me off, like, for example, the fact that the on-screen keyboard can't keep up with any reasonable pace of typing. I do a lot of writing (email, notes, twitter, etc.) on my phone, and if the Nexus One's typing experience is a step backwards from the iPhone, then it's a deal breaker.

The part of Snell's piece that I found the most interesting, though, is the discussion about the home screen and notifications. It's the one place where the Android platform is seeing a lot of developer experimentation and innovation, from the user customization tools that are built into the Android OS, to fully baked and branded experiences like MOTOBLUR, or independently developed applications like SlideScreen (pictured here).

Assume for a minute that Apple does want to evolve the home screen / notification experience in the next rev of the iPhone OS. Here are three things they could do (they aren't mutually exclusive) to drive that evolution:

1. A better Apple-provided out-of-the-box solution for notifications and glanceable home screen summaries of messages, events, social network notifications, etc. Likelihood: high.

2. A framework for third party applications to provide "out of sandbox" information snippets and notifications (beyond cloud-delivered push notifications) that will appear in the notification stream or on the user's homescreen. Likelihood: maybe.

3. The ability for third-party developers to ship applications designed to be installed and run as "home screen apps," and essentially take over the role of notification delivery vehicle and application launcher. These home-screen apps would presumably have access to snippets and notifications delivered by other apps. Likelihood: no way.

I can see (1) happening - they really do have to at least fix the notification problem, and they have to do something with the UI to catch up to (or leapfrog?) all the innovation that's happening in the Android space. And I'd love to see (2), where notifications are delivered from the cloud, and the "badge count" metaphor is expanded to include headlines or snippets of information. (Don't just show me I have 12 things due today in Things, show me the headlines of the first few and then let me tap into launch the app and view them all.)

But I just don't see (3) happening. No way, no how. Especially in the context of the current patent suits -- there's no chance in hell they'd risk sending the market the message of "you know that core iPhone experience that we're suing you over? Well, now any application developer can override it."

I seriously hope they're doing something to improve the notification / home screen experience. Because in the meantime I'm looking at all the activity in Android land and it makes me jealous. Not that any one of them has completely nailed it (though I think SlideScreen is very nice), it's that there's action happening there: designers in market evolving design approaches to the opportunity of an always-on, always-connected 3.5" glass screen in your pocket.

smart marketing from @jenbee

The tradeshows of the art world, art fairs can leave even the most avid art enthusiast feeling deflated by day's end. To help keep everyone in high spirits during the NYC art marathon that started yesterday, Jen Bekman and the team behind her online art initiative 20x200 will be handing out survival kits packed with a Daily Candy city guide, artist Jason Polan's clever hand-drawn map, a "Visual Palate Cleansing System" for the visually overstimulated and much more.

via www.coolhunting.com

Having done more than a couple fairs in my lifetime, I can absolutely testify to the "deflated" feeling. Kudos to Jen Bekman for her smart kit for surviving this week's New York fairs.

david byrne's dream

I know, however, that this is no ordinary gift — I announce that this is an “Art Trap” and that we should be very, very careful. Somehow I know that if one gets too involved with this thing, with its seductive lights and displays, one would magically find oneself in one of the holes, squeezed and stuck tight. The temptation to fiddle with it up close is great, as the thing is truly a bizarre wonder. We get close to it, examine it, and when the dream ends I’m not captured — though that could still happen easily, in the blink of an eye.

via journal.davidbyrne.com

Holy shit.

formless and definite content

Craig Mod has a great post up about Books in the age of the iPad, where he makes a critical distinction between Formless Content (content without well-defined form, obviously) and Definite Content (content with well-defined form). Think "most prose," which would flow just as well between two covers as it would through a Kindle or an Instapaper app v. "designed content" which doesn't pour into any particular vessel.

I loved this example:

You can sure as hell bet that author Mark Z. Danielewski is well aware of the final form of his next novel. His content is so Definite it's actually impossible to digitize and retain all of the original meaning. Only Revolutions, a book loathed by many, forces readers to flip between the stories of two characters. The start of each printed at opposite ends of the book.

Emphasis mine. (NB: if you're a "book person" and you haven't read Only Revolutions, I highly recommend it. It's obviously not available for the Kindle.) Mod's point is that the iPad creates opportunities for not only delivering digitized Formless content (like the Kindle, iPhone and other content consumption devices already do), but creating new ways of telling stories through Definite Content.

I have to take exception, though, with this bit in his post. It might feel like I'm nitpicking, but it's important:

The metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone. I suspect it will feel even more so on the iPad.

Ah. It only feels "boring and forced" if you're forced to page through boring content. I've essentially moved 90% of my long-form reading to my iPhone, and when you're engrossed in great prose (aka "Formless Content") the act of paging feels natural and expected. In fact, the new pagination feature in Instapaper 2.2 makes the app disappear, since you're not worried about where your thumb is, and maintaining a decent scroll position, or finding the line after you've scrolled, or even holding your iPhone in just the right position in order to have the tilt-scroll work correctly.

This is important because it points to a desire to force new modes of interaction just because we have a new form. Sure, it's a screen, and it's scrollable, and I can pinch and tap and zoom and scroll and shake...but sometimes just paging (and paging, and paging) is the best solution.

now i want a sous-vide cooker

It's simple enough that it can be accomplished with about 5 minutes of active work, and under an hour from start to finish. Why would anyone want to cook a steak sous-vide, you might ask? The short answer is flawless execution.

via www.seriouseats.com

Serious Eats does a fantastic writeup about cooking steak sous-vide -- with detailed instructions, photos, the results of controlled experiments, and even a chart or two. Having overcooked more than a steak or three in my short cooking career, sous-vide results are awfully tempting...