One of my favorite authors, Malcolm Gladwell, has begun posting on a blog of his very own. Like the Steves at Freakonomics, he’s smartly using it as a platform to expound upon and correct elements of his writing in books and in the New Yorker.
Looking at the comments, I noticed a rather effusive comment from Dave Sifry, founder of popular blog-search site Technorati, proving that even heroes have heroes.
>> Tivo has aggregated some interesting data of their viewers television recording habits. The TV list is as might be expected, but the directors list is surprisingly sophisticated, trending towards foreign (Kurosawa, Almodovar) and classic (Billy Wilder, Frank Capra) in addition to the usual suspects (Spielberg, Scorsese).
Something horrifying just occurred to me. Is there anyone out there who still doesn’t have a Gmail account? Would you like one? I’ve been using it for maybe a year now and it’s quite possibly even better than sliced bread. Inexplicably the sign up is still by invitation only, but say the word and it shall be yours. I’ve got 99 some odd invitations to give out. Email me
SXSW, the premier music showcase in the country is coming to Austin March 13-19. The website just released the annual bittorrent of the mp3 set of all participating showcase artists. That’s 2.4 glorious gigabytes of musical joyness!
Don’t know what to do with it? Bittorrent is a P2P distributed filesharing application. Grab a copy of utorrent, my personal favorite. Download the .torrent file from the SXSW website then open it in your bittorrent client to start downloading the mp3s. Also, these files are all perfectly legal to share; they’re released by the bands through SXSW to promote their set. It’s a great way to discover a boatload of new artists.
I bought a crappy USB wireless adapter made by this rebate vampire at MicroCenter. Gigafast was offering a $25 rebate, obviously necessary to get anyone to buy the aforementioned crappy $35 USB wireless adapter since no one in their right mind would pay $35 for it, but $10, hmmm….. I do need one for my extra desktop…. so the cycle of rationalization began.
Had I known I would never receive my $25, had I known that Gigafast gets an F Rating from the Better Business Bureau, I likely would have spent a little extra on a quality component from a reputable manufacturer. However, I didn’t know these things at the time of my purchase. Gigafast, I believe, knows exactly what percentage of rebates it will honor. (Ed Foster claims the return rate for one rebate house was less than 30 percent.) This is a classic information inequality resulting in (1) a deadweight loss to society inflicted by this rebate regime in terms of wasted postage and administrative costs for all parties and (2) loss due to the opportunity costs of buying something for a certain (so we think) price, when, had we known the true price, we would have bought something else. This is a market inefficiency, and there are few things that I hate more than market inefficiencies.
Long story short, I e-mailed MicroCenter and relayed my complaint. They were very responsive and a manager offered to apply the amount of the rebate towards another purchase. Great customer service. I’ll shop there again. From Gigafast I heard nothing but a loud clanging silence.
great question. we’ll put it in the hopper. thanks for writing, sjd
It occurred to me that ‘the hopper’ could be a circular filing cabinet reserved for the rather obvious ideas contributed by intellectual pygmies like myself, but I prefer to think they’re debating the finer points of my suggestion right now at this very instant.
Am I right in thinking it’s been 2 or 3 years since Microsoft released a new version of the Internet Explorer browser? In the meantime, I’ve become a hardcore Mozilla Firefox user. Except for some websites that run incompatible plug-ins built for IE, it’s just a vastly superior browsing experience. Multiple tabs, RSS feeds, pop-up blocking, a constant flow of new add-ons that vastly improve your productivity, and a slew of uber-geek toys that I won’t go into.
IE7 looks to be an admirable effort to pick up lost ground, adding all of the things that made Mozilla better and up the ante with features like phishing filter, page zooming, thumbnail view of open pages, convert to PDF. In short, nothing that would inspire me to replace Mozilla. On the other hand, the offerings for IE add-ons, channeled through the Windows Marketplace, are pathetic compared to what’s available for Mozilla, perhaps the best indication fo the difference between supporting and ignoring open-source developers.
All in all, not too much to get excited about here. If you already use Mozilla, just keep on trucking. If you use IE6, the world will seem new and different and sparkley the moment you install it. Welcome to the rest of your life. Do wait until a nice stable release comes out though.
He’s also apparently a veteran Contra player. If you have no idea what the joke is here, congratulations, you’re not half the dork I am. Move along. Nothing more to see here.
I just put up a Google Map mash-up of all the places I like to go in Houston. I’m calling it Luke’s List. I’ve been wanting to play with the Google Map API for a while and could never find the time. Then I came across Mapbuilder.net and had the map up and working within about 15 minutes. Brilliant! (guinness commercial)
I’ve just got a couple of things up there now, but check it out and let me know what you think. I’m planning on adding separate maps for the Best of Houston’s restaurants, watering holes, places to play tennis, and live music venues. Am I missing anything?
In The Wisdom of Crowds, Surowiecki argues that the aggregate of decisions of crowds of individuals acting autonomously (think voting, stock markets, odds-making in gambling, etc) are often dramatically better than the opinion of experts in that particular field. The rest of the book explores why and under what conditions this is the case, and how we might use the wisdom of crowds to make better decisions in a variety of arenas and circumstances.
I finally took the plunge with Skype to see what this braver newer world of VOIP is really like. VOIP is Voice Over Internet Protocol, aka Internet Telelphony, aka using the internet to talk on the phone. This momentus event was occasioned by the discovery that my laptop had a built-in microphone and I didn’t need the ridiculous wrap-around headphone-mic I got for the purpose but can’t bring myself to use. Skype-to-Skype calls are free but since you can’t expect much of an installed base, I was more excited about SkypeOut which allows me to call any landline or cellphone and SkypeIn which gives me a real telephone number and voicemail. It’s a central Texas number which I’ve promptly forgotten, but I’ll post it when I get the activation notice. More reviews to come….
Jessie’s been a busy little blogger in Budapest, oh so close to a working phone line, and only 4 months of trying. Welcome to Eastern Europe I suppose. She appears to be whiling away the hours at drink with the Irish, not quite a recipe for sobriety, now is it. Still chunking the deuce though, that’s the fighting spirit!
I thought everybody kind of knew this already, but the best way to buy books is now officially used and online. Apparently the statistics are starting to reveal the extent of the evolution of book-buying as the NY Times notes in a recent article:
In barely a decade, online booksellers have grown to account for two-thirds of the market for general-interest used books, a trend that calls into question the future of brick-and-mortar stores devoted to used books, according to a study financed by the publishing industry and released yesterday.
The authors’ and publishers’ guilds have been throwing a fit about this trend, directing a special petulance toward Amazon.com for the devious act of allowing its users to purchase new and used books on the same page. Since I believe supply is supply and demand is demand, I find it fairly ludicrous to get upset about something like this. Perhaps the publishing industry should follow the lead of their MPAA brethren and join them in developing technology to thwart and alienate their customers, perhaps some form of IED that explodes the book if read more than once or a biometric security mechanism that allows only the retina of the authorized owner of the book to see the words on the page.
All in all, there are some very good economic reasons for the dodo-ization of the neighborhood used-book store. Most center around market efficiencies - vastly larger inventories online, greater incentives for bookowners to sell when they connect directly to buyers and cut out the middleman, lower search costs for buyers, shorter time for books to make it onto the secondary market - and all point to the used book store going the way of the travel agent.
So where to buy? The best of the best, in MHO - Amazon.com, click the ‘used and new link’ below the ‘Add to Shopping Cart’ button to see used book prices and descriptions, and the ‘Sell Yours Here’ button if you have one you’d like to get money in exchange for, also Alibris.com if you’re like me, have a wee bit of a book fetish and it matters if the books you buy are quarto, cloth-bound, with that cottony feel to the paper (pre-1940’s).
In this month’s Popular Science, Steve Casimiro wrestles with the implications of widespread photoshoppery on our culture. Fakes abound. I’ve been known to swap a head or two in my day. I would estimate that roughly 50% of Americans know it’s possible, 20% know how they’re around and can recognize an obvious fake, and 1-2% can pull one off themselves and spot the sneaky ones. My ‘Fishing with George’ shot, took about 20 minutes. It’s crude but you get the point. (View the source images here, here and here.) As the original image (also altered) demonstrates, it’s a powerful vehicle for Swiftian satire, whether we propose eating Irish babies, wish to imply guilt by association, or imagine the future. The article reviews some technologies designed to spot frauds, but all the solutions mentioned require some sort of tagging of the original image or high resolutions, neither of which is likely in cases in which controversy arises. All in all, no convincing solutions, raising the specter of some day watching courts refuse to allow digital photographs as evidence for fear of not being able to identify modifications.
I was innocently browsing Coolhomepages.com looking for things to steal, um inspiration, when whoa, wait a minute, I know that girl. Every once in a great while an Emerson alum actually does something with themselves. What a great site. When your site gets props right next to Radiohead’s, you done good.
I’m back in Houston; back at work. Since I’m in a reflective, work-avoiding mood, here’s a list of 10 things it would have been nice to have this past week.
A power inverter to plug in my laptop from the cigarette lighter of the car. They run about $30. There is no reason on God’s green earth I didn’t have one. I’m ordering one right now.
GPS receiver for maps, directions, distance, etc. Luckily Kris had one of these. We got a couple of good back-road routes out of this one, plus I’m always getting lost in general.
A way of knowing the average speed and/or travel time between any two points on texas highways. There was a local info number, but something like the signs on Houston’s freeways for rush hour would have been helpful. Hopefully some über-geek at TxDot will whip up a Google Map API for this one.
Cruise control that would keep me inching forward but would also stop the car automatically to keep from running into the guy in front of me.
A way of going to the bathroom in mixed company without getting out of the car. OK, so I don’t think this will ever be invented, but it would have been damn useful.
even moderately healthy food at any gas station
A Treo cellphone to use as a modem for my laptop and get online from anywhere. Oh wait I’ve got one of those, sure wish I had figured out how to use it as a modem before this all went down.
Tivo for the radio. Wait, what did they just say? The road’s washed out where? Don’t take which highway? Every radio needs a rewind button.
Call forwarding for my cellphone. This would be useful for life in general. If I’m at home, send my calls to my home phone, out of town, send it to my hotel. You get the idea. I realize Cingular has their Fast Forward services, but it seems like this kind of thing should be universal like voice mail.
Speaking of which, how about a transcription service for that voicemail to send them to me as text-messages. This is also something that would be useful for life in general, but especially so when the networks are under a lot of strain.
None of this is going to happen on account of this measly little blog post, unless of course any of you reading this happen to be inventors, in which case you can make out a check for the royalties semi-annually if you please. On the upside my mom figured out text-messaging on her cellphone. I’m tempted to call this an evolutionary event on level with dinosaurs growing feathers, but I’m pretty sure my aunt Sylvia just showed her how.
The more things seem to change, the more we realize that’s the way they’ve always been…
Exhibit A:
From 43 Folders: “Ye Olde Hipster.” The pages of Jefferson’s notebook are made of ivory (sorry elephant-lovers), which could be written on in pencil and erased after he transferred his ideas to more permanent residences.
P.S. Anyone who thought PDA meant “public display of affection” needs to go directly back to junior high, do not collect $200, do not pass go.
Houston traffic being what it is, I spend a lot of time trapped in the car. This is all the more intensely annoying since I used to be able to read the entire Times or Journal or 30 to 40 pages of book on each leg of my commute in Boston. Enough is enough. Time to reclaim the time lost to traffic tyranny.
Then oddly enough, I realized, I don’t really need Audible, even though that’s what got me started. I don’t really need a huge collection of audio books and I’d like to be able to loan what I listen to to my friends if I wanted to. Amazon sells new and used audiobooks on CD, why not “rent” an audiobook by buying it and then selling it to someone else when I’m done? I can’t do anything but listen to the mp3 file from Audible, but I can do whatever I want with my well-packaged CD - give it to a friend, resell it, whatever. Moreover, the I can copy CDs to my computer and onto my ipod, generally in more user-friendly format since it’s divided into chapters on the CD and comes in one hulking file from Audible. Audible executives take note. There are chinks in your business plan.
Got some ghettofabulous news in ye ole inbox today. Woolley Andrew says…
O.W.W.W
The Organization of World wide web
Barnby Worldwide Business Information
9 Leapal Road, Guildford, Surrey, GU1 4JX
Dear Sir/Madam,
We the Organization of World wide web is happy to inform you that you
have luckily log in to the one million timer count. This is to mark the
years of internet existence on earth and to inform you that you have
been selected for a cash prize of
£1,000,000.00 (one Million,Great British Pounds)
This is in line with the first ten lucky winners and the Big cash prize
of ten million Great British Pounds goes to the overall winner picked
from the first ten luck winners.
The selection process was carried out from all web site in the world
through one million timer count computerized email selection system
random selection from a database of over 10 000 000 000 email addresses
drawn from all the continents of the world. This is the first of its
kind since the years of internet existence on earth
Prize collection:For the processing of your prize you are to contact
The D.C.V.D for the winning Prize using the contact as stated below
I’m not sure how I ‘luckily log in to the one million timer count’ but I can only figure I’m just a heva lucky guy. I’m waiting on pins and needles for my one Million Great British Pounds.
Finally a video service to do what Flickr did for photos. Upload a video to share and send me a nice bandwidth-friendly link. Stop filling up my e-mail inbox. You people know who you are. Here are some favorites:
Jennifer Granick is the Executive Director of the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) at Stanford, and is by all appearances a crack IP lawyer and a prolific blogger. She doesn’t appear to sleep as far as I can tell, or apparently has cloned herself, or maybe she’s a GTD samurai? Greplaw has a great interview and profile.
She’s recently posted a fascinating four-part series on Mike Lynn, her latest client, who created an uproar and got himself sued for revealing that it was possible to remotely execute code on Cisco routers. Since Cisco routers are ubiquitous, sky-is-falling types are postulating the entire internet could grind to a halt if details on creating an exploit fell into the wrong hands. Cisco has been aware of the issue, but has kept it under tight wraps, raising the interesting chicken-egg sequencing dilemma of whether it’s better to publicize the vulnerability (thus alerting potential hackers) or keep it secret (whereas your customers can’t patch what they don’t know is vulnerable). Well worth the read…
I feel like the last one on the bandwagon, but in case there is still anyone out there who hasn’t heard of Getting Things Done (GTD to the cognoscenti) I can’t recommend it highly enough. I was a little skeptical when my coach first recommended it, but now I’m a convert and I feel like sharing. GTD is a personal productivity methodology pioneered by author David Allen but recently it’s started to take on a life of its own. The best overview I’ve found is from 43 folders which does a great job of laying out the basic principles.
Here’s how I would sum it up: At any given moment your brain is juggling all of your tasks, responsibilities, wishes and dreams, recycling reminders through your conscious mind in order to keep from forgetting, interrupting your thoughts at times when you can’t do anything about it. As a result, your mind is constantly distracted by these reminders, thwarting your attempts to concentrate, to get organized and to plan your day with any semblance of sanity. Allen contends that the way to quiet these reminders and free your mind for productive, creative work is to quickly tag and organize these to-dos into actionable tasks and file them in a system your mind will trust to remind you at the appropriate time. Once your mind is satisfied that the task won’t be forgotten, it quits trying to remind you and allows you to focus on the task at hand.
That’s the premise, there are lots of ways to implement such a system. The 43 Folders site takes it’s name from the number of folders (12 months, 31 days) used to build a physical “tickler” file to remind yourself of tasks at the appropriate time. For those of you who shudder at the thought of using a technique so barbaric and undigital, I’ve just downloaded a trial of a Outlook Plug-in. Whichever way you cut it, it’s a great way to start thinking about and improving your productivity.
Hal Varian of the NY Times has written an excellent analysis on the effect of Amazon’s used-book sales on the general market for books.
While Amazon is best known for selling new products, an estimated 23 percent of its sales are from used goods, many of them secondhand books. Used bookstores have been around for centuries, but the Internet has allowed such markets to become larger and more efficient. And that has upset a number of publishers and authors.
The publishers and authors may be unduly upset, he points out, due to the countervailing effects of the used-book market
When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there’s another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later.
Applying the authors’ estimate of the displaced sales effect to Amazon’s sales, it appears that only about 16 percent of the used book sales directly cannibalized new book sales, suggesting that Amazon’s used-book market added $63.2 million to its profits.
Apparently not everyonoe shares my enthusiasm about this article, judging by the dazed look I got from the co-worker I just accosted outside the bathroom. That may suggest either high boredom-elasticity among heterogeneous consumers of the article or a poor choice of venue.
Incidentally, the Times article links to an SSRN paper with empirical research. My spidey-sense is telling me that there’s been a bit of an about-face on the part of editors who some months ago would never allow an article to link to another source on a 3rd party’s website. Tech rags such as Wired have done that for a while, but it seems the Grey Lady has finally (and only recently) started wising up to the tao of the internet.
Oh and since we’re talking about books and this is a helluva long post any way, why not read my lonely little essay Hot Wet Book Love. I promise I’ll get around to writing another <fingerscrossed>one any day now</fingerscrossed>…
The NY Times reports on recent advances in isotope hydrology that will allow scientists and government agencies to track the path of water and develop localized plans for sustainable development and conservation of water resources.
After more than 25 years of cooperative work, the agency has gathered so much information that it is now fashioning a detailed portrait of the planet’s water resources that could help prevent future crises and reduce regional friction that may erupt in water wars. “We’re talking about food security, sustainable development,” Dr. Aggarwal said. “If it’s based on unsustainable water resources, you jeopardize everything.”
So it seemed like a good idea. I’m getting kind of hooked on Sudoku, a Japanese logic game that British newspapers picked up and turned into a bit of a craze on that side of the pond. I
don’t get much of a chance to sit down with pencil and paper and work on one, so I went looking for a version for my Treo and lo and behold, soduku on the go, loaded it onto my phone and now I can’t stop playing that freaking game.
onsider the potential ramifications of Sudoku my personal productivity. I console myself with the tenuous belief that while playing I vaguely look like I’m giving my calendar an awful lot of thought. Care to join me in spending an obscene amount of time we could be using for productive, money-making activities instead playing a silly, infuriating game with a bunch of numbers?
Haven’t tried it yet? There’s a bunch of stuff out on the web to help you get started on this wonderful time-obliterating activity. Websudoku has puzzles you can solve online. Here’s a cool Sudoku primer (pdf) I just turned up. Other than that the Sudoku Wikipedia entry has all you could hope for to start you down the road to addiction.
I am no longer last to be picked for kickball. The powers that be have seen fit to finally approve an upgrade to Photoshop CS2 (still working on the rest of the creative suite). So far the most stunning improvement (and I haven’t heard anyone mention it) is the expanded dual-screen functionality. Previously only one screen was really operational at any given time, though you could keep toolbars and the like on the other screen, freeing up some space. Now you can use all the real estate on both screens. Wicked.
Google Ig launched earlier today - puts my Gmail, Weather, Slashdot, NY Times, BBC News and Directions all in one place.
It’s amazing how little Google actually has to do anymore to come up with something really cool… guess this is a bit of the long tail everyone’s always talking about.
for my new copy of Photoshop CS2 to get here. As usual, I had to finagle the upgrade. For some reason Management takes the cynical view of upgrades, assuming that the new features are tricks to get weak minded people to buy something they don’t really need. Too used to dealing with Microsoft, I guess. Ironically, I finagled it as part of the $1500 Adobe Video Collection Professional. Whew, sure glad we saved that 150 bucks for the upgrade. So that also means I now have a bunch of meta-cool goodies like Premier, Aftereffects, Audition & Encore but that’s a separate happy dance.
As usual, the hoi palloi are myopically obsessed with Photoshop’s ability to mess with reality, but for those of us whose work generally takes place outside the intelligence or conspiracy theory communities, this is a minor amusement for after hours.
So what has me salivating? The easy batch processing built into Bridge for one. This is perfect for those perfectiony jobs like contrast tweaks where you don’t want to mess with a batch. Along a similar vein but even more useful is the multiple layer control. I’ve long dreamt of the ability to perform the same task on a bunch of different layers all at the same time. As usual there are a bunch of really neat features that I’ll probably never have a valid use for, but are nice to have nonetheless - vanishing point and image warp. I’m going to have to wait and see what this SmartObject thing is all about - sounds pretty amazing, but I want to see it in action.
My reaction to this was a little bit like finding out your two best friends are engaged to be married. It’s really great and you’re really happy for them, but you’re also a little freaked out about what this will mean for your relationship with each of them individually.
I’m a bit scandalized by the idiocy of some of the reporters covering the story though. Terrance Nielan is a might bit clueless about what these companies’ products actually do. He describes Adobe as a “document-design software company” which is a bit like describing GE as a lightbulb manufacturer. Photoshop gets a mention near the end. He then refers to Macromedia’s products as “the Dreamweaver and Flash web-design software used mainly in digital video production.” Since when is web-design software mainly used in digital video production? Dammit Terrance!
Yeah, I know, for all my pretensions to geekiness I just didn’t see that much point in text messaging. 99% of the time, I’d just rather call someone and talk to them. Google SMS just changed all that. Text the number “46645″ and add a query such as “pizza” or “John Doe” and some parameters such as a zip code “77043″, hit send and wait a few seconds. Google texts you back with the results - name, address, phone number, distance, &tc.
So back when Google purchased Keyhole, it was assumed that this would eventually happen, but who could have guessed how cool it would really be? To try it, type in an address at Google Maps and when the map comes up, click the “Satelite” link at the far right. I g-mapped all the places I’ve ever lived.
The colors are kind of fascinating. I could have guessed that Maine would be green, since it’s 98% undeveloped forest land, but I had forgotten what a concrete jungle Boston was. It would be nice if the there were a time sequence to the satelite imaging that would let you select from a range of available photographs, see the progress of development. It would be nice to see Maine in the fall, for instance.
Every now and then some industrious soul comes out with something so ingenious, so beautiful and simple that I seethe with self-righteous that I did not somehow think of it first. Such is the Annotated New York Times, which rather artfully marries the blogosphere to the grey lady of dinosaur blogs. Let the lawyers commence!
Here are some favorites:
(GTD to the cognoscenti) I can’t recommend it highly enough. I was a little skeptical when my coach first recommended it, but now I’m a convert and I feel like sharing. GTD is a personal productivity methodology pioneered by author David Allen but recently it’s started to take on a life of its own. The best overview I’ve found is from 
