Entries for February 2004
Today was the first real spring-like day in New York this year, so Meg and I celebrated by exploring the High Line. I took some photos (click on the photo below for more):
The High Line is an elevated railway that has fallen into disuse and disrepair, currently running from 33rd Street to the Meatpacking District on the west side of Manhattan. Before setting off, we checked on the Web for directions on how to get up there and found that some friends of ours, Jason, Alison, and Jake, had documented their High Line excursions, complete with directions. If you’re interested in trying it yourself sometime, I would note that the south entrance/exit to the High Line appears to be closed (new fence, locks, barbed wire), so prepare for a round trip back up to 33rd Street.
God has been on my mind of late as I’m 1/3 of the way through God, A Biography, which has been excellent thus far. And so I was quite interested in checking out The Passion of the Christ to see if Gibson had come up with any new perspectives on the death of Jesus or even if it was an entertaining (in the broadest sense of the word) portrayal of the event. Sad to say, he has not. All the violence, which wasn’t really that bad (certainly not the most violent movie ever), numbed me to the emotion of the whole thing - much like Tarantino’s movies do for others — leaving me only the movie itself to consider. And the movie was just ok, certainly nothing special.
A note on the crowd at the film, which was, due to the nature of the film, more interesting than what was happening on the screen. Two men of the cloth sat in front of me (affiliation unclear); they whispered to each other for much of the film, discussing what they saw.
Before the movie started, the woman of the couple beside me said to her husband, “you know, I’m going to have to see this again. My mother and my sister want to see it.” He asked her, “are you going to buy the DVD too?” “Yeah,” she said. After a short silence, her husband says, “honey, you know this is just a movie, right? It’s not church.”
Many people cried during the whipping and cruxifiction scenes…and there was a baby that cried periodically throughout the film. No children in the audience as far I could tell. At the end, lots of clapping…the audience clearly enjoyed the movie.
Track a stolen laptop with a customized default browser home page. One could even set up a service that would do the same for anyone who wanted to do something like this.
I went and checked out the NYC photoblogger event at the Apple Store in Soho last night. A huge crowd assembled to watch presentations by seven NYC photobloggers. Among the highlights:
- Khoi’s presentation of Infrangible. A man after my own heart, he still hand-codes his site for each entry, nesting tables within tables and thumbing his nose at structured data. Databases are for suckers! He also does not resize large photos (like this one) to fit on the screen all at once, the idea being that the photo won’t have the same impact at 400x600 that it does at 740 x 1113.
- Mike’s photos of abandoned subway stations. I loved hearing Mike’s story: he’s got a cheapo camera and is a self-professed bad photographer, but he loves to shoot, is striving to improve, and, judging from the audience’s delighted reaction to some of his photos, his approach to photography is definitely interesting.
- The topic of retouching photos in Photoshop came up several times. Most of the presenters adjust their photos in Photoshop for brightness, contrast, color correction, etc. Purists would argue that this is cheating. I liken the Photoshop retouching stage of the digital photography process to the darkroom stage in analog photography. Ansel Adams performed extensive manipulations of his photographs in the darkroom and few consider Adams a cheater. Khoi had an interesting comment along those lines, saying that the photo out of the camera has to have “it” regardless of any correction done after the fact in Photoshop. In my experience, good photos can be made great in Photoshop, but no amount of manipulation can turn a poor photo into a good one.
- Adam and Scott’s description of the simplicity of fotolog.net. You upload photos, your friends upload photos, and the interface allows you to quickly jump from the photos of one friend to the next, keeping up with their visual lives. No need to call it social software or justify how useful the social network is. fotolog.net is elegant in its simplicity and it works. End of story.
- A tantalizingly short look at Eliot’s photo management system.
- And across it all, the *barest* of impressions that photologging is an art form unto itself, that it’s not just photography + blogging. I’m not sure yet what makes it a unique thing, but the combination of the relative inexpensiveness of producing digital images in mass quantities (with a digital camera, it costs as much to take and store 1000 photos as it does to take 1 photo) and cheap, easy methods of publishing them to the Web has a lot to do with it.
Most of the crowd stayed the whole two hours…which is amazing. After it was over, some of us moved along to a nearby bar to socialize which, according to Jake’s introduction to the event, was the real reason for the whole thing in the first place. I only stayed for a bit before hunger and tiredness got the best of me, but it was nice to briefly meet and chat with some of the presenters before racing off to dinner.
Paul Ford on the word “consumers”:
The word “consumers” makes me sad for this world. Whenever someone tries to convince you of advertising’s nobility, remember that word — the industry looks at you and sees not a human, but a gobbling creature with money to spend.
I can’t recall where I heard this, but my favorite definition of a consumer is “a wallet with a mouth”.
The Passion of the Christ opens today, rating of 50 on Metacritic. Ebert loved it, gave it 4 stars, but called it the most violent movie he’d ever seen.
kottke.org is grey today because I believe that musical sampling without prior consent of the copyright holder should be legally allowed because it does our society more good than harm.
Late last year, a DJ named Danger Mouse took The Black Album by Jay-Z, mixed it with samples taken from the Beatles’ White Album, and produced The Grey Album. He sent the album to a few folks and now — blame the Internet — everyone has a copy.
EMI, one of the big five record companies, parent of Capitol Records, and owner/controller of the Beatles musical catalog, sent Danger Mouse a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that he had infringed on their copyright of the Beatles tunes in question. (Jay-Z, on the other hand, released an a capella version of The Black Album so that precisely this type of sampling/remixing would occur.) Andy Baio and several other people posted MP3 copies of The Grey Album on their Web sites and were also sent letters by representatives of EMI ordering them to remove the songs from their sites.
Believing that “the record industry has become a huge drag on creativity”, music activist group Downhill Battle organized Grey Tuesday (Feb 24) and urged Web sites to turn grey and/or host MP3 versions of The Grey Album. I’m not hosting any of the MP3 files (you can find the files on these sites), but I have turned the site grey for the day to show my support for more permissive copyright laws. Instead of locking creativity up, I say set it free and see what happens.
Meg and I have been enjoying a small wedge of Cahill’s Irish Cheddar for the past week. It looks a little strange and is made with Guinness Stout, but it’s actually quite darn tasty (and fun to look at after the initial what the…?). We first tasted it at Meg’s parents’ place last year and were happy to run across it at Gourmet Garage in the Village. I’m not sure where else it is available in NYC (or in other places), but if you’re a fan of the salted, pressed milk curd (and who’s not?), you might want to give your favorite cheese shop a jingle and enquire after their supply of Cahill’s Irish Cheddar.
Amazon wishlists now sortable by wish priority. Priorities range from “must have” to “don’t buy this for me”.
On heavy rotation on the iPod and iTunes lately have been Talkie Walkie by Air, Permission to Land by The Darkness, and Belleville Rendez-Vous from the Triplets of Belleville soundtrack. Nothing in common there except for the listener. (Oh, and The Grey Album by Danger Mouse.)
Nice fluffy article in the NY Times about the design process that led to the TiVo remote control, complete with a thumbs-up (bing!) from usability quote-whore Jakob Nielsen. I like TiVo and all, but why does tech journalism have to be so soft all the time?
The TiVo remote has a really huge, much-discussed design flaw, namely that you cannot tell which end to point at the TV unless you look at the remote or take a few seconds to feel for the buttons in your hand (if the room is dark). I’ve been using TiVo for almost 4 years now and while I’ve learned to look at the remote before I pick it up, the symmetry problem still gets me more than it should.
Here’s another pitch that the Times let sail by in the article: “TiVo holds four design patents on the remote’s basic shape and key layout.” Say what? Trademark maybe, but how do you patent the shape of a remote control? By now, this question has a fairly pat and dissatisfying answer (“well, the busted and overworked patent system let us so we did”), but I’m tired of seeing patents like this given credibility by being mentioned in big newspapers.
Update: Neil sent me a link to the USPTO’s guidelines for granting design patents. Here’s their definition of design:
A design consists of the visual ornamental characteristics embodied in, or applied to, an article of manufacture.
If businesses buying design don’t have any idea what design is, I guess you can’t expect the US gov’t to have any better understanding.
New movie reviews from Ebert and Roeper. “Our thumbs are higher than I was that day!”
Reader Jason (no relation) just alerted me to CSFB removing the Thought Leader Forum piece by Paul DePodesta which influenced my recent post about innovation. It seems that DePodesta’s recent hiring as the GM for the Dodgers prompted the move, perhaps because they don’t want Paul giving away too many trade secrets. (What’s next? A Moneyball recall?) The version in Google’s cache has been updated already and I can’t find the article on the Wayback Machine…does anyone have a copy from their browser cache that they can email to me? The filename is “depodesta_sidecolumn.shtml” from the “csfb.com” domain. Thanks.
Update: A copy of DePodesta’s Thought Leader Forum article is available here. A similar article, mentioned in the ESPN piece above, is available here. Thanks to Jason and Richard for the links.
Further update: Paul emailed me and asked me to remove the articles from my site, which I have done (I’m leaving the links to the offsite versions). Nothing to do with the Dodgers…he personally wants to keep a lower profile these days.
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