this is sippey.com

“Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant.”

Ah, the genmon Twitter stream. Worth every iota of attention, esp. when it produces gems like this: “Oh, gtd is finite state machines. What other computing paradigms can become life org methodologies”.

All the great stuff is always in the comments (umm, irony? –ed.), as evidenced by this one from Hudsong on the Gizmodo post which embedded the iPhone update video featuring our favorite guy in the black shirt.

I think that guy is a robot.

I’m sure you’ve read this already, but Joel Spolksy’s piece explaining the Excel bug is worth linking to just to accrete an infintessimal amount of incremental PageRank to joelonsoftware.com.

Q: Shouldn’t they be testing for these kinds of things?

A: I’ll bet that most of the numeric testing done on the Excel team is done automatically with VBA code. Cells containing this value display as 100,000, but from VBA, they’re going to look like 65,535 (since the number would be passed into the Basic runtime in binary, before the display formatting.) I’m sure there’s plenty of code to test display formatting, but with a bug like this that only happens on 12 out of 18446744073709551616 possible floating point binary numbers, it’s unlikely that any set of black-box tests would cover this case.

And if you make it all the way through to the end, his parting shot is good for the laugh, but perhaps a bit over the top.

The current #1 track on Amazon’s music store is 1234 from Feist. You probably know this as the soundtrack to the new iPod nano ad.

I’m spending the week in Tokyo (hosted by the charming and brilliant team at Six Apart Japan), and will have an opportunity to visit Kiddy Land this afternoon. Really looking forward to it. “KIDDY LAND helps keep your mind, body and soul youthful, now & forever.”

There’s no way Major League Baseball could say anything else but this about Vote 756. This from Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey:

“This ball wouldn’t be coming to Cooperstown if Marc hadn’t bought it from the fan who caught it and then let the fans have their say,” Petroskey told The Associated Press. “We’re delighted to have the ball. It’s a historic piece of baseball history.”

Kevin Kelly on sell-side advertising. Worth quoting at length and reading in full.

The simple idea is that you can craft a publication, or a reading/viewing experience, primarily by choosing and sequencing ads. Selecting the right cool ads – not merely cool content – is the attraction. Not just tiny adsense text ad boxes, but full page ads, or even commercials inside widgets. When I was part of the team making Wired magazine a decade ago, half the battle at launch was landing the right cool ads. We had to convince the advertisers to join (and pay) us. But what if we could just choose the cool ads we wanted, without having to ask permission? What if we could simply harvest the the best ads (measured by any metric we choose) and were paid for the ones we ran according to the traffic we brought to them?

Chuck Close in a New York Magazine interview: “I don’t work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work.” (Via Mike.)

NBC’s Jeff Gaspin on how shows that fans download from their new online service will self-destruct:

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

David Recordon, who’s back (in force) at Six Apart blogs about one of the things we’re contributing to at Six Apart: opening the social graph. It’s long but worth the read (and the time for the screencasts); David does a great job of putting all of the work that’s happening around the web on OpenID, hCard, XFN and FOAF into a user-centered context. The goal is making it easy to discover and connect with people across networks. “An open social graph is just as important as an open identity.”

News to me, but Radiohead’s catalog isn’t available on iTunes. Instead, they’re on ateaseweb.com, with full albums available in DRM free 320kbs MP3s. The statement from EMI is interesting: “iTunes insists that all its albums are sold unbundled, but 7digital doesn’t. Radiohead prefer to have their albums sold complete. The artist has a choice, and if they feel strongly then we respect that.” (Via TRIN.)

Dear Lazyweb. Please produce a detailed comparison (with screenshots, please!) of Mint and Wesabe. It’s about time I channel my (former) inner-Quicken-user to the web, and I don’t have the time / patience to try both of them. (Well, actually, I did have time to attempt Mint yesterday afternoon, but their Yodlee connector must have been overwhelmed with new users because connections to my external accounts timed out and they told me to try again later.)

(See also: Fred Wilson on Who Owns Your Financial Data.)

It’s not in heavy rotation yet, but the few times I’ve cued it up recently I’ve really enjoyed Because of the Times from Kings of Leon. The seven minute opener “Knocked Up” is worth the price of admission on its own.

For the record, recent things that won’t dislodge from the top of the stack: Marc Andreessen on the three kinds of platforms (and, relatedly, some of the new stuff announced by Salesforce today); Cringely on the Goog’s plan for world domination; Matt Webb’s experience stack; and Kottke’s note on impressionism v. realism in blogging.

It made me smile to launch the new presentation builder at Google Docs and see the all-too-familiar instruction Click to add title.

The Emmy’s were a complete disaster. Sure, the Sopranos won the big one, but the wrong James picked up best actor, and Sally Field? Are you serious? Good for 30 Rock (“dozens and dozens of viewers” was a nice touch) and for Stewart and Colbert having Carrell accept the award he didn’t win. Basically, +1 to Tim Goodman’s liveblogging commentary which we were reading in kind of this weird asynchronous way while we skimmed the awards on Tivo.

But. But but but. The award to current.tv was the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in a while. Twitter is extremely useful for bookmarking moments (and look, now that moment has a permanent URL), and last night was a perfectly bookmarkable moment:

Guy from NBC’s heroes on a mac talking to myspace tom presenting an Emmy to al gore. Dissertation fodder.

At some point in time somewhere some doctoral candidate in media studies will dissect all of the multilayered richness of those 30-40 seconds of video. My head is still spinning.

Jen Bekman has launched 20x200. Jen is one of the web’s original pioneers; she and I did a stint together as community managers of Netscape.com in like 1997. Since then she’s escaped the ‘net and built a wonderful art business in New York. It’s great to see her combine two of her (many) passions – art and the web – into this new venture.

We introduce two new pieces a week: one photo and one work on paper. Each image is available in three sizes. The smallest size is reprinted in the largest batch – an edition of 200 – and sold at the lowest price – $20. Hence the name 20x200. (200x20 just didn’t sound as good.)

Jen has a great eye, and the work that’s already up is fantastic. If you’ve never bought art before, maybe this is the way for you to get into collecting.

Via (the consistently great) Very Short List comes this brilliant ad for Cadbury Dairy Milk. Wait for the payoff; it’s worth it.

Had a long conversation yesterday with someone about what happens to media when the only thing that’s different between delivery devices is the size of the screen (small, medium, large), and the continuing power of story telling and narrative. You know, the normal “over coffee” bla bla for the pattern recognition generation.

But it reminded me that I needed to mark in the permanent record how much I’m enjoying FX’s Damages. It’s a great mix of over the top acting, a completely unbelievable story, delicious art direction and a fragmented narrative that is working forwards and backwards through the story at the same time. Every week I have to watch to find out what happened and what happens next. [1]

Plus, Ted Danson is brilliant. Who knew?

[1] I wonder if Tivo is collecting / sellling aggregate viewership data on not only what gets recorded and what gets watched, but how it gets watched. I can imagine a television engagement metric that measures the mean time between when a program is recorded and when it gets watched. Meaning even with the benefit of time shifting, the sooner someone sits down to make their way through a particular show, the more engaged they are.

Kevin Fanning chronicles the battle of Lyric and Grace. Worth quoting at length, if only to convince you to click through, dammit.

As the girls grappled high above the mean streets of New York, the bloodthirsty crowd gathered online, each side supporting their champion by decrying the other side as being retarded, the comments written all in caps. The event was sponsored by Google and TechCrunch, although no one was entirely sure how that’d happened. Amidst the flurry of impassioned commenting and trolling, there were murmurs here and there, vague details about similar situations from the recent past. Some said that the two boys whose births had been the first ones announced on Flickr and del.icio.us had died in a car crash in San Francisco, in a game of Chicken gone horribly wrong. Someone remembered the story of a girl who had committed suicide recently; hers had been the first birth announced on MySpace, but no one had ever noticed. And wasn’t the Pownce kid in juvie?

Every once in a while (you know, like every third day) I come across a post that makes me insanely jealous in the “GodDAMNIT I wish I had written that” kind of way. Here’s the latest: Fake Steve on IBM and Facebook:

They are going to assign fourteen thousand IBM programmers and a hundred thousand IBM business partners to the task of creating applications for Facebook, with a commitment to spend one billion dollars over the next two years on Facebook-related business ventures. First up: a version of Lotus Notes that runs on Facebook. Also, IBM Global Services has created a Facebook consulting practice to help big companies develop strategies for moving onto Facebook, teaching them how to use Facebook to gain competitive advantage over the other companies that IBM is also assisting with Facebook-related engagements.

I’m sure you’ve read the whole thing already, because it was posted yesterday and it’s already today and thus by definition this is yesterday’s news and I know, it’s time to move on already. But seriously, I’m up to my eyeballs in green-colored jealousy.

6Aer Kevin Goess writes a brilliant post summing up how the San Francisco Department of Parks and Recreation is killing a twenty year tradition of volleyball in Ferry Park. (Never heard of Ferry Park? It’s near the Ferry Building.) “Why should you care? Why should anyone who doesn’t like to play volleyball care? Because having a stable, dependable presence in a neighborhood that is otherwise deserted after 6:00pm is a Good Thing.”

Two potential options for iPhone “early adopter refund” logistics:

1. Require users to present their original purchase receipt for their iPhone (along with the phone itself) at the Apple Store by a certain date. Check receipt for validity, check iPhone serial number for valid date range, check the customer’s photo identification. Have them fill out a form, and only after validating the purchase and collecting appropriate personal identification, present the user an Apple Store gift card for $100.

2. On iPhone sync, during a scheduled update, recognize that the device was activated before the price drop, or through the serial number that it was purchased before the price drop. Connect the phone to the user’s iTunes store / Apple ID email address. Offer the customer $100 (or potentially even more, $110?) in iTunes store credits on the spot, or an emailed coupon with a custom code and potentially a custom generated bar code that can be printed and brought to the store.

Option 1 has the potential to maximize breakage. Option 2 has the potential to minimize breakage and provide more immediate data to Apple on redemption patterns. If they do something like option 2, in something approaching “real time” (like they pull that off in the next week or two), you have to wonder if the price drop and resulting letter from Steve was planned well in advance…

What, no games announced today for the jesus phone? Cue the outrage and indignation, please.

The SF Chron’s Kenneth Baker had a front page piece this weekend about the issues at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco @ the DeYoung. I found the tone of the piece to be a bit odd – it’s clear that Baker doesn’t like what’s happening out in the park, but laid most of the criticism at the feet of unnamed “local artists, art dealers, collectors and other frequent museumgoers.”

The one thing that I found refreshing, though, is the criticism of the building. Most people you talk to love it. It’s bright and shiny (figuratively, not literally) and has brought people back into Golden Gate Park. I think the building’s great for parties (esp weddings!), but find the experience of actually looking at art in the building to be lackluster. Here’s the relevant graf:

The installation of artworks at the de Young consistently gives the impression of overcrowding. Promises to donors to keep certain works perennially on view explains this to some extent. But Cornell pinpointed the ultimate problem: For all the size and sheen of Herzog and de Meuron’s immense new building, “I think to say that the museum doesn’t have the space it needs is a fair criticism.”

If you want to follow all the fun about FAMSF, check out Modern Art Notes. Tyler Green’s gonna have a field day as this unravels…

Kottke (and Buzzfeed! and the New York Times!) on virtual book tours, which would have been the more appropriate option for the guy hawking his September 11 historical fiction / conspiracy theory tome at McCarran Interational Airport in Las Vegas last week. He was walking up to people and handing out these glossy bookmarks that must have cost him a buck a pop, the poor guy.

Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche will be performing with Kronos Quartet as part of the SF Jazz festival in October. They’ll be premiering a new piece by Kotche, “Anomaly.” Looking forward to that. As Anil says, drummers always love the drummers.