Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
In the spirit of open source development, MIT invites their user community to submit homepage designs: “We’ve found that homepage designs work best as an interactive process…” Check the gallery for historical results. Love the idea. If anyone wants to send a drop-in replacement style sheet for this blog, I just might run with it.
Watched The Triplets of Belleville with Amy tonight (see trailer). Refreshing to see animation that impresses not because of technical sophistication or by breaking any particular ground, but because of pure inventiveness — even though most of the film feels like it could have been drawn in the early 60s, the animators make choices that are impossible to justify even within the film’s own universe — such as the gorgeous and eerie, Giaocametti-tall ocean liners Mrs. Souza and her dog chase across the sea in a paddle boat. Likewise, the simple plot is peppered with such bizarre scenarios — picture three musical biddies who subsist on a diet of dynamited frogs navigating a steel ship of bicycles and a projector through a vision of paris where buildings have giant wine bottles built in, and you’ll start to get a picture of the imagination factor here. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen, but not just “weird” — it’s charming and truly beautiful.
Had read months ago about Destino – the 1946 collaboration between Salvadore Dali and Walt Disney, but never imagined I’d get to see it on the big screen. But we were lucky – Destino screened just before Triplets; perfect pairing. Much of it was exactly what you would expect from these two forces — the best parts were greater than the sum.
Image above snapped with phonecam during Triplets — this is why the Rolling Stones are cracking down on cell phone use at concerts – copyright grey area is simple and instantaneous.
Odd – in one day, two examples relating to squashed speech and the RNC:
The Republican National Committee is telling television stations not to run MoveOn ads that criticize President Bush. The RNC is trying to convince network execs that the ads are illegally funded, while MoveOn says that “The federal campaign laws have permitted precisely this use of [soft] money for advertising for the past 25 years.”
Meanwhile, Britain’s top scientific adviser David King warned his government that global warming was probably a greater threat to global security than terrorism — referring to Bush’s policies on climate change. In response, Tony Blair’s private secretary warned King to “limit his contact with the media” and “to decline any interview requests from British and American newspapers and BBC Radio.”
BBC News looks at the psychology of portable music players, the significance of the aura or bubble that surrounds one the moment the music starts, and why it’s so appealing. A key point is that headphones in part allow one to regain control of the senses – the world represents a bombardment of visual and sonic messages, and by replacing the sonic shell, you in part get to choose your sensual world, rather than moving through the one the world chooses for you.
I didn’t start wearing a music player until my late 30s, and remember the experience being very different than expected at first – it wasn’t just fun to listen to music – the iPod literally changed the way I felt in the environment. It was almost too much. The experience feels much more normal to me now.
More:
Some women use earphones to deflect unwanted attention, finding it easier to avoid responding because they look already occupied. In the same way, removing earphones when talking to someone sends a strong message about how interested one is in what is being said. It pays the speaker a compliment.
In the first official instance of interplanetary graffiti, Mars rover Spirit pulled out its abrasion tools and left a little Mickey on a Martian rock.
Is it spring yet? Sure feels like it. Camelias are blooming like crazy, Amy planting up a storm, I fertilized the lawn with Scott’s Turf Builder (amazing stuff!).
For no particular reason, in the mood to celebrate with Jimmy Webb’s glorious lyrics to “MacArthur Park” (made famous by Richard Harris, Donna Summer, Frank Sinatra, take your pick). Who today writes lyrics this good?
I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing checkers by the trees
MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left a cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!
I think The Polyphonic Spree should cover MacArthur Park.
Friend from many-moons-ago Kabir Carter is helping to open Miami’s Subtropics music festival by performing a real-time moblogging project from New York.
Walking in the city (or elsewhere), sounds are heard and recorded without employing the subjective and limiting filter of conventional, transducer based sound recording technology.
So he’s describing sounds in text rather than laying them down magnetically, posting aural impressions from the field, without sound. For the opening, they set up a projector in a space in Miami and showed the posts. Sample results:
SFX #75
SFX: Folding Subway Seat RecoilingSFX #73
SFX: Over Twenty Trash Bags Buffeted by BreezeSFX #56
SFX: Sliced Potatoes Frying in Oil Filled VatSFX #40
SFX: Three Helium Filled Ballons Rubbing against Corrugated Metal Scaffolding
Having an interesting discussion with a friend about issues surrounding online privacy and corporate tracking of customers. At issue is whether some forms of customer tracking are acceptable, or none. If a company you like and have done business with in the past sends you an email, do you expect that clicking links in that email will report that you, Jane Doe, responded to an email campaign, visited the such and such pages, and bought such and such products? (Keep in mind that this is not spam, but an email newsletter you really did sign up for). If you didn’t know you were being tracked, would it bother you to find out that you were? What about non-personal, generic stats tracking, which just gathers average results to see what people do and don’t like? What if you found out that the company’s services could become much more valuable to you if they could gather personal usage data on your surfing and buying habits? How valuable is your personal privacy? For which kinds of rewards would you be willing to give it up? How clear should a company be that they’re tracking you? Is the fine print in the EULA or TOS sufficient, or should tracking notices be posted in boldface on the page where you sign up? Can privacy lost ever be regained?
To lead a fulfilling life, one needs haiku beamed to one’s cell phone daily. Birdhouse is proud to host tinywords.com, home of a mailing list that takes advantage of the limited text capabilities of cell phones’ SMS-email gateway capabilities — haiku are perfectly suited for the size constraint. Of course you don’t need an SMS phone to sign up – any email address will work.
tinywords is the brainchild of writer and Mobile PC Magazine executive editor Dylan Tweney, whose weblog is also hosted here.
Amazing results of grep searches through recently surfaced (partial) Windows source code. Of special note: References to Windows users and other MS programmers as “idiots,” open acknowledgment of lots of “ugly hacks” and “dangerous” bugs and of certain functions being “total bullsh*t.”
