sippey.com

links for 2007-11-30

• I, Cringely -- When Networks Collide
  "What I believe is troubling the relationship between AT&T and Apple is the upcoming auction for 700-MHz wireless spectrum and AT&T's discovery that -- as I have predicted for weeks -- Apple will be joining Google in bidding."
  (tags: apple google mobile iphone)

miami!

The Times Travel section covers Art Basel Miami Beach and the satellite fairs that will invade Miami next week. There's so much going on that the director of Art Miami advises visitors to "make a spreadsheet and write in what shows they want to see and hours and locations in order to plot their course." If you're not familiar with the spectacle that's Miami Basel, it's not your typical open studio weekend. For proof, check out the list of event sponsors. (Think NetJets, Cartier & UBS.)

If you're one of the lucky tens of thousands who'll be there, make sure to visit the Aqua Wynwood satellite fair and stop by Traywick Contemporary. Lots of great work's been packed up and shipped for your visual pleasure; tell the wonderful gallerist I sent you.

links for 2007-11-29

• Snooth: personalized wine recommendations
  I've been drinking more wine lately (no comments from the peanut galley, please) and have been looking for something like this. Gonna give it a shot. If you're on it, I'm "Sippey."
  (tags: wine reviews recommendations)
• 101 Simple Meals Ready in 10 Minutes or Less
  These are all supposed to be summer recipes, but still such a great reference. The loser in me wants these on his iPhone for quick cooking reference goodness.
  (tags: food cooking recipes)
• Brian Oberkirch on the social graph, hacking Beacon, etc.
  "People are creative about remaking things for momentary comfort. What they lack in power to restructure a system, they make up for in improvisation. That is to say: cultural hacks are natural and expected."
  (tags: facebook social software)
• The Fakebook Generation (NYTimes editorial from October)
  "We even make a joke out of how we know one another — claiming to have met in 'Intro to Super Mario Re-enactments,' which I seriously doubt is a real course at Wesleyan, or to have lived together in a 'spay and neuter clinic' instead of the dorm."
  (tags: facebook identity social software nytimes)
• Chris Sacca's 'What is left?': The difference a year can make
  Notes on the mobile work going on inside Google, and the impact of the Verizon announcement.
  (tags: google mobile verizon)
• Adventures in $40 eyeglasses
  Matt Haughey writes an incredibly useful post; especially if you need new glasses like I do.
  (tags: health eyes vision howto)
• The iPhone and the Kindle
  Long and thoughtful review / discussion on the Kindle.
  (tags: kindle amazon iphone review)

so long, series 1

  Purple tivo 
  Originally uploaded by mathowie

Our beloved Tivo Series 1 kicked the bucket this week, dying a wheezing, whining, hard-drive clicking death after more than seven years of reliable service.*

Normally I'm not the type to mourn the passing of a device -- after all, how many have I willingly tossed recycled in the same period?  But there's something to be said for that simple, well-designed box that changed the way we watch television.  It paused while we went for popcorn, treated us to the entire back catalog of Sports Night, reliably delivered hundreds if not thousands of hours of season passes week after week, and kept us sane and entertained during countless 3am feedings.

Rest in peace, old friend. The house may be quieter without the constant whine of your tired, old, underpowered and undersized hard drive, but trust us -- we'll miss you.

* Don't panic, though, we have a Series 2 in the living room; the Series 1 was the luxurious second Tivo that lately was responsible for recording endless episodes of Arthur and Mickey's Clubhouse. Sorry, kids.

links for 2007-11-28

• WWLD? No. 3: Organizing your environment
  I really miss Leslie Harpold. Lance is doing an incredible job with this series at 43 folders, and each new entry in the series makes my eyes burn a bit. I wish he could keep this going forever.
  (tags: leslieharpold lancearthur)
• Tyler Green on Richard Misrach's series 'On the Beach'
  Misrach kept three small prints of World Trade Center jumpers on his studio wall for the four years he worked on On the Beach. "On one level or another," he says, "they inspired the whole project."
  (tags: art richardmisrach tylergreen photography 911)
• The history of Comic Sans
  Blame Bob.
  (tags: fonts design)

an excuse to get to new york

Martin Puryear
Originally uploaded by Anile P

As if I needed another excuse for a trip to New York, there's the Puryear exhibition at MoMA.  Tyler Green's been doing a series of posts at Modern Art Notes putting Puryear in perspective; today's post is about the  connection between Puryear's sculpture and minimalist painting. I'm an unabashed fan of minimalism (surprise!) and loved this sentence in Green's post:  "Of course to this day Puryear's sculptures are reductive, almost tidy in their banishment of anything even potentially, remotely extraneous."

it's january 2009 that matters, after all

Slate's Mickey Kaus on the cop out of covering candidate "electability."

"Who's electable" is a Neutral Story Line--it seemingly doesn't require reporters and publications to take stands or sides. You can write dozens of "Is Hillary Electable?" stories without letting on what you think about, say, government-guaranteed health care. It's harder to write "Will Hillary be a Good President?" without doing that.

first world problem

From Katherine Boehret's review of the Wildpad:

The pad, from WildCharge Inc. in Scottsdale, Ariz. (www.wildcharge.com), eliminates the messy tangle of wires that many people struggle with each time they want to charge their portable devices. But more to the point, it turns charging a gadget into something that happens in the background rather than an active task. And it spares you from that nagging question: Did I remember to plug my phone or iPod or BlackBerry in before going to sleep?

Thank GOD charging my phone is now something that happens in the background. I can't tell you how much mental energy I've wasted over the years on that incredibly active task.

kindle motivations

So while the tech types commence with the time honored tradition of eating of their young, a couple of notes on why I want a Kindle.  Maybe not this Kindle, but a Kindle.

• My house has too much crap in it. Six years ago or so I ripped my whole CD collection, and on the rare occurrence when I actually buy a CD now, it gets ripped and then stored.  We used to have furniture dedicated to storing CDs -- no more.
• The books I keep on the shelf I keep for a reason.  I love books. Addicted to them, almost. About a year ago I went through a massive purge of the collection I'd been hoarding since the mid-80s and kept maybe 20% of them, tops.  I kept the favorites, the ones that changed how I see the world, and the great editions. These fill the shelves at home; the rest of them found new homes.
• Most of the books I'm reading now don't actually deserve to a permanent home on the shelves. This is sad, but true. I'm still reading great books, but after going through the experience of selling / donating the vast majority of my collection I'm much pickier about what ends up in our home permanently. And there are still too many for the shelves we have.
• All the other media I consume is getting lighter. You can make all the value judgments around this that you want, but the experience of buying and consuming all nine of Beethoven's symphonies is exactly the same as buying and consuming the latest Britney single or the latest espisode of Weeds: click, download, play. I'm spoiled by that experience and I want the same with books.

So those are all the rational reasons.  The slightly less rational reason is that a Kindle will let me hide my habits.  Kindle will let me buy and read books without having to worry about where they're gonna get shelved after the fact...or how they'll be perceived while I'm reading them.  Just imagine -- I could finally indulge my long-standing curiosity about romance novels and devour 10 or 12 of them in a row without having a single one show up in my bookshelf or in my bookbag. On the outside, it looks like I'm catching up on the latest in linguistic pshychology, while on the inside I'm enjoying the latest bodice-ripper from J.R. Ward. And no one but me -- and Amazon, and all of the trusted third parties my purchase history is shared with -- has to know.

links for 2007-11-27

• The Kick Is Up and It’s ... A Career Killer
  (tags: via:kottke sports football kickers psychology)
• Screenshots And Details On Upcoming MySpace “News Feeds”
  "The process distills down to a requiring a double positive - you must agree to share with specific friends, and they must agree to subscribe. Without both sides agreeing, the information doesn’t appear."
  (tags: myspace facebook social software activitystream)

short attention span theater

Note to self:  you have a very short attention span, as measured in the meantime between overhauls of your blog's look and feel.  Short story:  I fell in love with one of the new themes that Walt had put together for TypePad, and just had to apply it here.  Oh, and I'm sure there will be all sorts of Google weirdness with the flipping back and forth with the content on /unfiltered and now here back on /filtered, but we'll suffer through. I know everyone liked the new look (so did I!) but there's something comfortable and familiar about two-column right.

Anyway, we're back here for now.

black friday reading material

I'm sure you'll all be safely ensconsed at home this Friday, protesting the materialist, commercialized nature of the holidays, self-righteously snickering at all the fools who woke up at the crack of dawn to drive their gas-guzzling SUVs to the local big box retailer to take advantage of a measly 10% discount on the brightly colored made-with-petroleum painted-with-lead crap made by slave labor in China.

But if around noontime you get tired of re-reading your well-thumbed copies of Tom Frank or Lizabeth Cohen or Kalle Lasn, you may want to pick up the copy of the Restoration Hardware gift catalog that most likely landed in your mailbox this week. It's the best catalog of the year (it's obviously less expensive than what Neiman's pitching, and it's less pretentious then the one from Design Within Reach), and it's chock full of great toys, games and stocking stuffers like a wooden box Clue, or a Jokes on You Prank Kit or a pair of Marshmallow Roasters. (And even though this is all online, the paper catalog (relax, you can recycle it!) is worth getting your hands on. It's really a thing of beauty.)

Don't worry -- after you drool over the nice Scrabble set and possibly order a few prank kits for your nieces or nephews, you can pick up your Frank or Cohen or Lasn again and step back into your usual Black Friday spirit before your friends come over for a few games of Guitar Hero or Wii Tennis.  No one will have to know.

dashing kindle

Anil writes the blog post I wanted to write[1] about Kindle.[2]

[1] But didn't get to it today; how the hell did he?
[2] NB: this post is filed under "Books" and not "Business" or "Software."

no country for charlie rose

From this weekend's "Adventures with Tivo," Charlie Rose had Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin and the Coen brothers on to discuss No Country for Old Men. Worth the time, even though it's, you know, Charlie Rose.

futurefeedforward

Holy cow, futurefeedforward lives! My inbox told me that "Socal Skyfires Torch Subprime Skytellites."

The airborne fires, some of which have burned for more than nine days, are fueled by thermobaric clouds of atomized landfill and other condensing nano-particulates disbursed into the upper atmosphere by disposal units commonly used in the county's tethered, low-earth-orbit neighborhoods. The roiling clouds of burning waste-vapor have been described by local witnesses as both "apocalyptic" and "breathtaking." "I mean, I've seen the entire rainbow in those fires," notes William Lennox, 43, a Plato Verde dentist and father of two. "The heat is incredible, and the smell, but the colors are really what gets you. The sky is literally burning, but the colors are just amazing."

They're also working on a novel.

redacted as tour of modern media environment

A.O. Scott on Brian DePalma's new movie, "Redacted."

An unrivaled master of showy cinematic technique, he has made a film whose governing conceit is that it is not a film at all but rather a palimpsest of found video culled from consumer-grade camcorders, surveillance cameras, cellphones and Web sites. (There are also snippets from a French documentary, a mischievous parody complete with portentous music and solemn narration.) “Redacted” takes us on a tour not only of the battlefield, but also of the modern media environment, where no moment goes unrecorded and where everyone is, at least potentially, a filmmaker.

I'm not planning on seeing "Redacted" in the theater for a variety of reasons ("I don't get out much and I'd rather spend babysitter money on 'No Country for Old Men'" being the leading contender), but I wish there were  way to experience this tour of "the modern media environment" in that actual environment.

knapp on bonds

Chronicle sports columnist Gwen Knapp on the Bonds indictment:

If Bonds is guilty, the best outcome would be a plea agreement, requiring him to say aloud what really happened. The BALCO prosecution started with the mission of cleaning up sports, and a long jail term can't match the effect of a confession from a superstar.

the note could not be saved

Small Macintosh OS X Leopard hint, first in a series of one, because I usually don't do this kind of thing. If you have a local mail folder named "notes" you need to rename it before Mail will let you save a new note you create.  Otherwise you will get an error message that reads "The note could not be saved." May legions of Leopard users find this blog post through the wonders of Google and save themselves just a little bit of time.

eod is back

If I had a dollar for every time I've said this over the past dozen odd years I'd have enough to money buy a sandwich, a bag of chips and maybe a chocolate chip cookie, but hooray! An Entirely Other Day is back.

jennifer love hewitt and cory doctorow

You know it will be a good day when The Cold Inclusive posts more in the ongoing adventures of Jennifer Love Hewitt.  Today our protagonist is being interviewed alongside Cory Doctorow:

CD: I guess it depends on the kind of profit and how they’re profiting by it. I don’t get upset if a carpenter sells a bookcase to someone and makes money because that person needs somewhere to put my book. Even though that carpenter is benefiting from my labor.

JLH: You did not just say that. Cory honey, if you want to change people’s mind about something, you have to use examples from this planet to illustrate your point.