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The trailer included on the DVD looks strikingly contemporary (pounding music, hundreds of cuts, very MTV) and must have been every bit as jarring** as the film to watch in a 1970s movie house.
** So jarring was the film to British audiences that after a short release, Kubrick withdrew the film from the theatres and it wasn’t seen again in the UK until after his death.
Paul McFedries’ excellent Word Spy site has spawned a book.
The Fabric of the Cosmos is a new book by Brian Greene, author of the Elegant Universe.
This Safari caching bug still hasn’t been fixed. It bit me yesterday and I almost lost an entry.
Bad editing, weak musical score, mediocre acting from good actors, no sense of humor, obvious plot “twists”…everything about this movie was phoned in. City by the Sea is a good example of bad Hollywood filmmaking.
Stunning photo of Chicago from Lake Michigan. Take a look at the rest of the 2004 World Press Photo Contest winners while you’re there.
Design Observer is looking for examples of the periodic table for an upcoming book.
People have been asking (not really), so I thought I’d let you know that MetaFilter, Megnut, and A Whole Lotta Nothing are down because of a bad computer fan. No ETA as of yet on when the box will be back up. Matt Haughey was unavailable for comment due to laziness on my part, but if he were available, he’d probably say something like, “you tell those ungrateful bastards that I’ll order that new fan when I’m damn good and ready.”
Update: Matt clues us in about the recent outage at status.metafilter.com.
The second season of Six Feet Under on DVD June 8. Woo!
Kelly Heaton’s Live Pelt. A woman’s coat made from 64 Tickle Me Elmos “trapped” on eBay.
The San Francisco St. Valentine’s Day Massacre of Love. Photos of same-sex couples getting married in SF.
When’s the last time you used an imagemap?. Just wondering if there’s any reason to still use them.
On the packing of M&Ms into a space. I spent a couple of years in college studying the packing fractions of atoms in glass.
A list of restaurants in NYC that are BYOB-friendly.
Paul DePodesta is the assistant GM for the Oakland A’s, a team whose winning ways have been documented in Michael Lewis’s excellent Moneyball (my review). DePodesta took part in CSFB’s 2003 Thought Leader Forum, presenting his ideas on The Genesis, Implementation, and Management of New Systems. He starts off talking about the situation in Cleveland, where he worked before going to the A’s:
Despite this situation, I was grappling with a significant issue: the Indians were very successful at this time. We kept winning the division year after year, selling out every game in our stadium and the owner took the team public at one point and was making more money than any other owner. Thomas Kuhn wrote in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “As in manufacture so in science-retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it.” There was no crisis in Cleveland, at least not on the surface.
Success breeds complacency and isn’t conducive to creating an atmosphere of critical analysis or innovation. Peter Merholz riffs about this in the context of user experience on the Web:
One of the most annoying realities of a user experience professional’s life is eBay, because it seems to flout everything we stand for. The Web’s most popular ‘pure play’ sports a remarkably unwieldy and unattractive design. eBay is wary of changing it because, hey, we’re making money, right? Yet I wonder about the untold billions more eBay could reap if it tightened up its experience. Yes, initially there would be a lot of grousing, and probably loss of revenue, as people adjusted to the status quo. But overtime, the site’s ability for higher productivity on the part of its users would lead to greater activity, and more sales.
As to why established systems (like eBay’s Web site) have problems making large-scale changes, DePodesta quotes Thomas Kuhn as saying:
The emergence of new theories is generally preceded by a period of pronounced professional insecurity.
No one at eBay wants to lose their job. This applies not only to corporations, but also to other systems. Paul Hammond recalls a recent conversation with Matt Webb about Web design patterns, particularly as it relates to weblogs:
[Matt] argues that we’ve reached the point where website design is just iterating on the same handful of design patterns, and the gains made with each iteration are slowly lessening. If we were to start somewhere else, even if that something was rubbish, there is the potential for subsequent iterations to be significantly better.
The only problem with this idea is that the sites will suffer in the meantime. But even this isn’t an issue on a personal site…
You’re certainly not going to fire yourself if your personal site underperforms because you’re trying something innovative, but there are other barriers. For many, innovation isn’t a priority; people just want to write or share their photos. Or they don’t want to lose their audience (if that’s a priority) or have their friends get confused. And innovation is hard…the tendancy to follow others or to observe best practices is strong. But it would be fun to see if the introduction of some different web design patterns can do for the Web (or even just eBay) what Beane and DePodesta did for the Oakland A’s.
More than four years ago, I ordered a CD from buy.com. The album was a new release and widely available everywhere, but it took them two months to process and ship the order…and then it never actually showed up. I haven’t shopped there since.
This morning I got an email from buy.com announcing their “NEW Cellular Store”, one of many I’ve gotten from them since that initial shopping experience despite never opting in to any of their mailing lists. Every time I get one of these emails, I think of my bad buy.com shopping experience, reinforcing my low opinion of them and my decision not to patronize them in the future, not to mention eventually prompting me to tell thousands of people about it here. Perhaps not the result they were after with their email marketing.
This is my yearly “Simpsons movie coming soon” post.
Matt Webb’s Etech presentation on Glancing. I’m OK, you’re OK.
Help the NYC DOT by reporting potholes that need fixing using this handy web form.
Announcing the MTV plugin for Movable Type, inserts picture of Carson Daly into your blog.
Rosecrans illustrates the importance of location for some NYC dwellers (you know who you are) by the number of steps he has to take to reach various destinations, entertainments, services, and delectables from his desk:
Kitchen: 6
Toilet: 11
Bar: 61
Niman Ranch cheeseburger: 110
Coffee shop: 141
Cheese shop: 153
Nearest subway platform: 305
Manhattan (Union Square): 433
Gym: 561
Drycleaner (good): 961
For some New Yorkers, many of the things on his list are even closer than that: 8 steps to the phone and 9 to the door after the delivery guy rings the buzzer. With cabs and Towncars, both the well-heeled and those not so fond of hoofing it are able to reach any destination in the five boroughs and beyond in less than 100 steps. In these cases, it’s not so much about steps as dollars.
As I walked past Bryant Park yesterday at lunch, I wondered how Anna Wintour, editor in chief of Vogue, gets from her office in 4 Times Square to Bryant Park for the Fashion Week festivities. It’s only a block, less than a 2 minute walk, but she also has the option of taking one of the sleek black cars parked at the rear of the building on 43rd Street. Factoring in the stop lights, one-way streets, and Midtown traffic, the drive must take 5-10 minutes. My best guess is that Anna is not a steps kinda gal and opts for the Towncar.
I know you’re all on the edge of your chairs waiting for word about my 52 magazines in 52 weeks effort, and I shall not disappoint you on this fine, sunny day in NYC. So far, I have read copies of Wired, Print (2 issues), Prospect (a UK monthly), nest, Vogue (blech), and Juxtapoz (tied with Vogue for least appealing magazine so far). And I’ve just started Herbivore, a magazine of vegetarian culture. I suspect that reading it will make me think of SF, but not in the most pleasant way.
Original Star Wars trilogy finally coming out on DVD in September.
Daniel Okrent, ombudsman for the NY Times, has started a weblog of sorts.
Some NYC photobloggers are showing at Jen Bekman Gallery, opening tonight.
Polymath. A person of great or varied learning; one acquainted with various subjects of study.
The browser formerly known as Firebird gets an update and a new name: Firefox. Which is also a fighter pilot movie with Clint Eastwood.
My craigslist post looking for a personal social network coordinator made best of craigslist.
Microsoft FrontPage ad touting clean code contains HTML error.
Web developer tools menu for Mozilla and Firebird.
Reading this Salon article on sports video games brought back a ton of memories from college. I never got into Madden properly, but I played a ton of Tecmo Bowl, Tecmo Super Bowl, and NHL ‘94, the latter of which is, in my estimation, the best sports video game of all time (with which Stewart would agree, I’m sure). A quote from the article:
[Bo] Jackson isn’t the only athlete to have achieved fame for his video game likeness. Then-Chicago Blackhawks forward Jeremy Roenick’s ability to fill the net and make Wayne Gretzky’s head bleed in the “NHLPA ‘93” game was immortalized in the 1996 cult film “Swingers.”
Roenick was good in ‘93, but with the much-improved gameplay in NHL ‘94, he was a monster. He was blazingly fast, had a quick stick, could stop on a dime, had the hardest shot in the game, and was easily capable of racking up 15-20 goals in three 5-minute periods. But he also had an unfair advantage over other players in the league because the Blackhawks were such a great team. Players like Steve Yzerman, Pavel Bure, Teemu Selanne, and Alexander Mogilny matched up well with Roenick skill-wise, but their teams just weren’t as dominant overall. Not to mention that you couldn’t taunt your opponents with new Roenick-related lyrics to Pearl Jam’s Jeremy (GarageBand karaoke version coming soon) as easily while piloting Bure or Selanne through the heart of their defense for a completely demoralizing goal. Oh, the sting of being taunted with ad-libbed Pearl Jam.
The article also links to an article by Bill Simmons for ESPN Magazine about video game football. Near the bottom of the piece, there’s a list of the top video game football players of all time, on which is Randall Cunningham at #3:
The best video game QB of all-time. You could roll him out to either side, scramble for first downs, throw 70 yards with him, avoid sacks…and he never self-destructed like he did in real life. Regardless of how his NFL career turned out, he’ll always have his video game career to fall back on.
Based upon my experience with Cunningham in Tecmo Super Bowl, I’d put him at #1. The Eagles, who were not a great team in the game, were unstoppable with a properly coached Cunningham at the helm, mainly because he was a double threat at all times. He had the arm of Dan Marino and the wheels of Bo Jackson. If all the receivers were covered, you could just take off running and get a first down every time.
My sophomore year in college, a group of friends and I played an entire Tecmo season and I luckily drew the Eagles out of the hat during the team selection process. With a near-guaranteed first down (or touchdown) every time I had the ball, I rampaged through the regular season with a perfect record and a ridiculous quarterback rating only to buckle under the pressure in the playoffs. In the next season we started (but never finished), the Eagles were not included in the hat. Go, Randall!
Stephen Wolfram is offering A New Kind of Science for free online.
Dooce and DJ Blurb welcome their daughter Leta into the world.
Finalists in the David Foster Wallace parody contest.
Story in Time magazine about Thomas Keller’s move to NYC. Call me naive, but shouldn’t there be a big disclaimer that his restaurant is opening in the Time Warner building?
The first bit of this NY Times article, Yours Not So Truly, J. Goodspam:
Purposes L. Xylophonist sounds like my kind of man. Unique. Creative. Focused, with a hint of formality.
There is no way to be certain that Mr. Xylophonist is, in fact, a mister. Actually, it is a pretty safe bet he is not a person at all. The fact that his name appeared in the return line of a piece of unsolicited e-mail almost assures that he is not.
Mr. Xylophonist wrote trying to sell some pamphlet about maximizing profits on eBay. Or maybe that was what Beiderbecke P. Sawhorse was pitching. It was definitely not the one from Marylou Bowling; she wrote to tell about “Government Free Cash Grant Programs.” Then again, that might have been from Elfrieda Billman. As for Usefully T. Medicaids and Boggs Darrin, they both wrote about cheap drug sales, no prescription needed. (Of course.)
Alongside those missives from friends and that drudgery from the office is a cast of e-mail characters with fantastic names promising all manner of stuff for sale. Frequently the promises are bogus; virtually all of the names are, too.
Sounds a lot like a half-written post[1] I was crafting for kottke.org, something along the lines of how spam had made email fun again, with emails from such flamboyant characters as Bloomfield O. Schoolboy, Conquest M. Accompaniments, Paperboys J. Mercantile, and (just this morning) Poop J. Guadalcanal[2] and subject lines so interesting (amicable calliope, opacity applause circumcircle, exultant rodgers impromptu boot, chivalrous patent respiration gutenberg insure)[3] that it set me imagining how fascinating those emails could have been had they matched their subjects.
But that was before MyDoom hit and shat all over my inbox with 800 messages a day that haven’t been getting filtered by SpamAssassin. Spam is back on the naughty side of the my naughty/nice list.[4] Radioisotopes J. Borgia can go to hell, and I don’t care if he does want to chat about “benedictine racetrack degas grapevine”.
[1] I’m contemplating changing the name of this site to “Half-written post” because, man, I have a whole bunch of them.
[2] Here’s the full list of names I was keeping:
Apologist P. Fulfillment
Credibility C. Bolero
Anastasia M. Mayo
Bloomfield O. Schoolboy
Radioisotopes J. Borgia
Leadership C. Reformulates
Haddock B. Genially
Noose V. Acclimation
Paperboys J. Mercantile
Conquest M. Accompaniments
Eurodollar H. Bawls
Internal Q. Tridents
More good names here and here.
[3] And a list of some of the interesting subject lines I noticed:
occipital hell kiss cowl fussy
affinity imperate certiorari etiquette
handline fall cacao inflame
opacity applause circumcircle
benedictine racetrack degas grapevine
logarithmic gong roster complementary
hood sinai drosophila piquant cereal
asteria haddock
arteriole condone hannibal gluing
debauchery disney goose
chivalrous patent respiration gutenberg insure
millard demurred hornet
amicable calliope
femur laudanum
buzzard condiment
figaro cobweb carcinogenic pellagra
nuance hunch
bullhead geyser chart
commission metzler heel
exultant rodgers impromptu boot
flat tire ferronatrite euphorbium enwood crottle
[4] Although I have to say that a recent favorite spam subject line is “are you satisfied with the smallness of your love muscle?” which seems to be the spam equivalent of “when did you stop beating your wife?”
Basecamp is a new web-based project management tool by 37signals.
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