Antiweb Feeds

Antiweb Feedbag

Latest posts from: CraqueCast, Extra! Extra!, AlienFlower Blog, Life Less Literary, scot hacker's foobar blog, Literary Kicks, dkeith.net, Mediajunkie, xian's running monolog, Yes Justice Yes Peace!, Zeigen

Recently Posted…

"This AirPort Express is already set up and is not reporting any problems."…
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 27 Jan 2012 | 4:08pm GMT

"This AirPort Express is already set up and is not reporting any problems." Oh yeah? Then why can't iTunes connect to it anymore?
Google+: View post on Google+
Because he's Sheldon.
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 27 Jan 2012 | 8:53am GMT

Reshared post from +Mara Mascaro

Because he's Sheldon.

Google+: View post on Google+
Translating Market Research to UX Research
→ Extra! Extra! | 25 Jan 2012 | 10:03pm GMT
Market research is helpful to User Experience Design by extracting behavior-centric information to inform the online strategy. The role of the User Experience Designer is to get to know not only who the customers are on the web, but also what they do, and how they do it. Those insights can begin to shape from the [...]
Campanille
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 25 Jan 2012 | 8:39pm GMT

After ten years working on campus, finally took out time to go to the top of the Campanile, and to see the bells of the Carillon. Why did I wait? What a stunning view, not just of campus but of Berkeley. And the bells are incredible up close. The Carillon is played live, by a real person (not a computer) – next time will arrive before noon to catch “the concert.”

Google+: View post on Google+
Why is it taking so long for Vimeo to add captioning for the hearing impaired?
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 25 Jan 2012 | 6:03pm GMT

Why is it taking so long for Vimeo to add captioning for the hearing impaired?

Embedded Link

Dear Vimeo, Patience Isn't An Option | Inside Higher Ed
Consider this post to be the last time I write about Vimeo. What's Vimeo? It's a site that is similar to YouTube. Users upload videos for all to see. However, the option to hear a video isn&#3…

Google+: View post on Google+
http://grist.org/list/mcdonalds-discovers-social-media-can-backfire-when-people-…
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 25 Jan 2012 | 4:27pm GMT

http://grist.org/list/mcdonalds-discovers-social-media-can-backfire-when-people-hate-you/

Embedded Link

McDonald’s discovers social media can backfire when people hate you
When McDonald's tried to launch the #McDStories Twitter campaign, they clearly envisioned a bunch of fond memories from Big Mac lovers, interspersed with behind-the-scenes glimpses into the McDonal……

Google+: View post on Google+
Tech Lives: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
→ Literary Kicks | 24 Jan 2012 | 2:42am GMT

I waited a couple of months before letting myself open up Walter Isaacson's acclaimed new biography, Steve Jobs. Given Isaacson's known gift for storytelling and my own penchant for computer-age pop culture history, I knew I'd be in for an obsessive reading experience once I cracked it open. This is a book I needed to clear away some uninterrupted time for.

The most enjoyable part of Steve Jobs is the first section, in which two delightful Silicon Valley counterculture tech nerds named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak grow up and invent the world-changing Apple II, the first commercially viable personal computer, in 1977. Here, the book offers the familiar satisfying thrill we look for in the early pages of every celebrity biography: those achingly pregnant moments in which the players stand at the precipice of greatness ... and then finally step over.

The dawn of the computer age is always a compelling subject, because we can all relate in some way to the feeling of surprise, personal growth and liberation that has accompanied this rapid pace of technological change (this is a dawn, after all, that we are still somewhere in the middle of). Isaacson's Steve Jobs is a classic computer-age tale of transformation and wonder -- from the quaint beauty of the first Macintosh (a wonderful little machine, so efficient that its entire operating system fit along with several applications and free user space on a single one-megabyte diskette) to the wide smiles generated by the Toy Story movie franchise (this is what Jobs worked on in the 1990s, between the Mac and the iPhone), to the invention of the dynamic iPad device, his last offering to the world before his early death.

read more
Oi!
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 23 Jan 2012 | 9:09pm GMT

Oi!

Reshared post from +Laughing Squid

Daredevil Rides a Dirt Bike on Top of a Snowy Colorado Mountain RIdge
http://laughingsquid.com/daredevil-rides-a-dirt-bike-on-top-of-a-snowy-colorado-mountain-ridge/

Google+: View post on Google+
Former teammate +Len De Groot took a photo of his own bed head every day in 2011…
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 23 Jan 2012 | 9:04pm GMT

Former teammate +Len De Groot took a photo of his own bed head every day in 2011 – now consolidated into a single awesome video:

Embedded Link

A Year of Bed Head (2011) | Compulsive Data
My bed head has been a daily source of amusement for my wife since we've been together. So last year I took a picture of myself as soon as I woke every morning and put it together in the video abo…

Google+: View post on Google+
Years
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 23 Jan 2012 | 4:05pm GMT

Lovely – “Years” is a modified turntable that “plays” the rings of a tree trunk, rather than dragging a needle through vinyl.

Embedded Link

Years | Stuck Between Stations

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music. It is mapped to a scale which is aga…

Google+: View post on Google+
13-year-old encounters an LP for the first time.
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 23 Jan 2012 | 6:13am GMT

13-year-old encounters an LP for the first time.

Google+: View post on Google+
Philosophy Weekend: What is Wealth, and Why Shouldn't We Talk About It?
→ Literary Kicks | 22 Jan 2012 | 12:41am GMT

A surprising moment of revelation has taken place within this year's bizarre Republican presidential primary contest. It began after journalists investigated candidate Mitt Romney's claim that he created over a hundred thousand jobs as chief of Bain Capital, a very successful private equity firm. They discovered instead that during Romney's tenure at Bain Capital the firm was just as likely to profit by investing in struggling companies and stripping them for parts, allowing the businesses to die and selling off their assets (all the while charging the companies high management fees), as it was to profit by enabling jobs.

Rick Perry (of all people) made a strong point when he called Bain's practices "vulture capitalism", and it was brave of Perry, an otherwise plodding pro-business Reaganite, to make this statement. Newt Gingrich cleverly baited Romney for a full week with questions about Bain and about his own finances, forcing Romney to reveal that as a venture capital investor he has continued to have a luxurious income every year, but has been paying only 15% in taxes, less than half what a typical American pays. The outrage over this has allowed Gingrich to vault himself over Romney in South Carolina's primary this weekend, a stunning upset victory.

It's gratifying to hear conservatives finally join liberals in criticizing the predatory and hyperactive forms of "extreme capitalism" that Bain represents, which are rooted in the same syndrome of reckless misuse of honest finance that caused the crash of 2007/2008. It has been a conservative basic principle to avoid any criticism of free market capitalism, to blame the crash instead on home ownership initiatives, and to characterize even the slightest critique of economic inequity in the USA as "class warfare". The accusation that critics of Wall Street or tax breaks for the wealthy engage in "class warfare" is intoned repeatedly these days by conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. This tends to be a real conversation-killer, since the term carries such ominous historic undertones. It reminds us of the guillotine, the gulag, Mao's terrible starvation farms.

read more
Murmuration
→ scot hacker's foobar blog | 21 Jan 2012 | 10:02pm GMT

Just watch, and wonder at the magnificence of nature.
Francois Robert
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 21 Jan 2012 | 6:28am GMT
Not Dark Yet
→ Literary Kicks | 18 Jan 2012 | 1:14am GMT

I considered going dark today to protest the Stop Online Piracy Act (along with Boing Boing, Reddit and Wikipedia), but I decided not to for two reasons. First, I don't think little sites like Litkicks will make much impact at all by going dark. You've got to be pretty huge to pull something like this off effectively. Second, my favorite President has already signaled that he will veto the bad bill, so I'll save my protest for the next good cause. And here are some literary links, many of which seem to revolve around the classics:

1. We were with her a quarter of an hour before Eliz. & Louisa, hot from Mrs Baskerville's Shop, walked in; -- they were soon followed by the Carriage, & another five minutes brought Mr Moore himself, just returned from his morn'g ride. Well! -- & what do I think of Mr Moore? -- I will not pretend in one meeting to dislike him, whatever Mary may say; but I can honestly assure her that I saw nothing in him to admire. -- His manners, as you have always said, are gentlemanlike -- but by no means winning. Most of the letters in the new collection by the genius of Steventon, England, Jane Austen, are not this juicy, but the mundanity of the writer's daily routine is also valuable to read about, and the sickness-to-death letters towards the end are quietly, tragically moving. Jane Austen's Letters, the Fourth Edition, edited by Deirdre Le Faye.

2. James Franco, who was pretty good as Allen Ginsberg in Howl, has made another film based on the life of a 20th Century poet: The Broken Tower, about Hart Crane. Slate isn't impressed, but I'll give it a chance.

3. Ezra Pound's daughter Mary De Rachewitz is trying to make sense of her father's fascist past while protesting an Italian neo-fascist party that has attempted to adopt his name.

read more
How to Avoid Pitfalls in Usability Testing
→ Extra! Extra! | 16 Jan 2012 | 7:13pm GMT
Designing and moderating usability tests requires the specialized skills of understanding how people’s brains work. Even more so, interpreting the results from usability testing requires the specialized skill of switching between meticulous details of interaction and broad strokes of experiences across participants. Here are 5 tips to avoiding pitfalls when interpreting usability test sessions: Suspend [...]
cccchhhanges....
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 15 Jan 2012 | 9:26pm GMT
jk_fabiani est mort & became yes_justice

long story, say what.
Philosophy Weekend: What Is Empathy?
→ Literary Kicks | 14 Jan 2012 | 1:06am GMT

Since our weekend debates about ethics often revolve around the word "empathy", it occurred to me that we should find out exactly what the word means. Let's hit up Wikipedia and see what we find:

Empathy is the capacity to recognize and, to some extent, share feelings (such as sadness or happiness) that are being experienced by another sapient or semi-sapient being. Someone may need to have a certain amount of empathy before they are able to feel compassion. The English word was coined in 1909 by E.B. Titchener as an attempt to translate the German word "Einfuhlungsvermogen", a new phenomenon explored at the end of 19th century mainly by Theodor Lipps

I'd like to hunt down these etymological hints for a future article, but first I want to examine the meaning of the word. Does "empathy" indicate a person's rational awareness of another person's feelings, or rather does it indicate an emotional concern with another person's feelings? The word is often popularly used in the latter sense: if I am empathetic with you, I care about your well-being. But the Wikipedia definition draws a prominent distinction between "empathy" (the intellectual awareness of another person's feelings) and "compassion" (a concern for another person). "Empathy", then, seems to have no necessary moral substance. It's possible to feel empathy with someone while also wishing them harm. Empathy is only the antenna, the awareness, the sense.

This distinction may be too finely drawn for some people's tastes, as it disagrees with the popular use of the term. But the distinction between awareness (empathy) and concern (compassion) does seem useful, and I am willing to go along with this strict definition of the term from now on, and differentiate between "compassion" and "empathy" as needed in future discussions.

But an even tougher controversy involving the meaning of "empathy" becomes apparent in the next section of the Wikipedia page, titled "Theorists and definition". This controversy appears to be so active that Wikipedia throws up its hands and offers a list of possible definitions from various theorists, presenting a fascinating dichotomy between two popular meanings of the word. Here's the section in full:

read more
Kerouac Goes To Cannes, and Other Beat News
→ Literary Kicks | 11 Jan 2012 | 1:35am GMT

1. After (seriously) 17 years of development, the major new Hollywood Walter Salles/Francis Ford Coppola film of On The Road is going to premiere on May 23, four months and twelve days from now, at the Cannes Film Festival in the French Riviera. I can't believe the day is actually going to come.

I'm not sure what to expect from this film, but there's no doubt that Jack Kerouac, a Breton Francophile, would have been pleased about a prestigious Cannes festival premiere. Very little is currently known about the film of On The Road, and only a single still image has been seen: the photo above, showing Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund as Marylou and Dean Moriarty apparently in one of the movie's big dance numbers. The image may give some idea of the director's photographic style (muted colors, naturalistic setting, not bad so far), but there's no word yet on what the entire film is like. I'm looking forward to seeing a preview trailer soon. Thanks to the Beat Museum in San Francisco (always the first place to check for news about this film) for the scoop about the opening at Cannes. (For the record, the news is still unconfirmed, but it's true.)

2. The two main characters in On The Road are Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, but since Kristen Stewart is the biggest star in the film, the character of Marylou will probably receive special emphasis. Marylou was based on Neal Cassady's real-life wife Luanne Henderson, and those interested in learning more about this little-known figure from Beat Generation history will enjoy One and Only: The Untold Story of On the Road, a new book by Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos that tells the story of On The Road (and all that followed) from a new point of view. As the youngest and least commanding member of the real-life Kerouac/Cassady traveling entourage fictionalized in On The Road, Luanne has often been imagined or depicted by literary biographers as a hapless unfortunate, caught in the Beat Generation whirlwind and then left behind after they became famous. One and Only presents Luanne as more knowing and more in control of her situation than Kerouac's novel depicts, and also shows her to be a remarkable, intuitive, sensitive and courageous woman.

read more
12 Web Analytics Trends in 2012
→ Extra! Extra! | 9 Jan 2012 | 11:22pm GMT
I’m enthusiastic. I’m optimistic. I’m really looking forward to see what 2012 will do for the web analytics industry. Here are some predictions for web analytics trends in the year ahead. IBM and Adobe will succeed where many have failed: Acquisitions are tough in the web analytics space. The space innovates quickly and has re-invented [...]
Philosophy Weekend: Does Ultimate Evil Exist?
→ Literary Kicks | 8 Jan 2012 | 12:17am GMT

I've noticed something strange when talking to friends and relatives and neighbors about politics, or about the future of the world. Many people seem to believe that ultimate evil is a real and powerful force in our lives today. They believe that this evil threatens our families, our society and our nation, and they see it as our responsibility to prepare to fight this evil to the death.

Evil, according to this notion, is an eternal force, absolute and self-sufficient. It is beyond reason or negotiation; it can only be defeated for a generation, after which it will rise again, ready for another battle. We train ourselves for this recurring combat by consuming pop-culture representations of the enemy we must eventually fight: Darth Vader, Voldemort, the White Witch. These mythical creatures are widely understood to have direct correspondents in international history and politics: imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Red China, Soviet Russia, Al Qaeda, Iraq, Iran.

I have never believed in the existence of ultimate evil, and I suppose this helps explain why I disagree so often with people I talk to about current politics. I was recently struck by the coincidence of two people I was talking with in two separate conversations -- both of them progressive liberals, smart and well-informed -- pointedly declaring to me that they are not pacifists. This is apparently a badge of honor for both of them, or perhaps it's more precisely an insignia of their membership in the army of good vs. evil. When the dark lord shows his face, I will be ready to fight. An awareness of quasi-mythical evil in the dark corners of the world also seems, unfortunately, to be present in nearly every American politician's foreign policy platform.

It must be the philosopher's job today to examine this kind of groupthink critically, and to help us reach a level of understanding that is less childish, less destructive, less obviously cartoonish. This is more vital than ever today, since modern weaponry has made the stakes for war and peace so high, and since cross-cultural paranoia appears to be currently at a hysterical peak.

read more
Peace Eye! Fug! A Long Talk With Ed Sanders
→ Literary Kicks | 4 Jan 2012 | 12:33am GMT

(Last year's big counterculture memoir was "Just Kids" by Patti Smith, and 2012's might turn out to be "Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side" by Ed Sanders, an American writer, musician, happener and activist I've long admired. I'm proud to present this new interview with Ed Sanders by Beat scholar and librarian Alan Bisbort, and I'm looking forward to reading this memoir myself. -- Levi)

Ed Sanders has been a cultural force in America for the past half century. Arguably best known for his satirical 1960s rock band The Fugs and his perennially wide-selling 1971 book The Family: The Story of Charles Manson's Dune Buggy Attack Battalion, Sanders's appeal to readers is also grounded in his deep Beat Generation roots. As a high school senior in Missouri, he read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and then, after a failed attempt at a college education in Columbia, Missouri, hitchhiked east to see what all the Beat commotion was about.

Sanders was founder of a legendary literary “scrounge lounge”, the Peace Eye Bookstore, remembered as a Greenwich Village version of San Francisco's City Lights Books during the hippie era; editor of the seminal Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts; publisher of works by Charles Olson and Ezra Pound; underground filmmaker (Amphetamine Head); prose author (Tales of Beatnik Glory); poet (America: A History in Verse); antiwar and anti-nuclear activist; he also seems to have known anyone and everyone affiliated with the American underground.

In his new book, Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side, Sanders ties all of his earliest threads—up to 1970—together in the most engagingly idiosyncratic memoir of the new year. Helpfully subtitled “An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture on the Lower East Side,” Fug You comes at you from all sides of this complex, rugged individual who appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1967, emerging from splatters of Pollock-like paint as “a leader of the Other Culture.”

Still placing his shoulder to the cultural wheel, Sanders, 72, is today the strongest living link between the Beat Generation, the hippies and all other underground currents that have trickled along the countercultural pipeline since then. Sadly, his partner in Fug crimes, the irreplaceable Tuli Kupferberg, died in 2010 after 86 years of stirring up trouble and mirth.

On November 17, 2011 I spoke with Sanders by phone at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., where he lives with Miriam Sanders, his wife of more than 50 years.

Alan: The events you describe in the new memoir are so rich in detail that many of the chapters and sometimes even individual paragraphs would be worthy of entire books. Did it seem this complex at the time or is this true only in retrospect? In other words, did you just get up every morning and do all these things on instinct and now look back and you can’t believe all the ties to all the things and people?

Ed: I was very young, had a lot of energy, didn’t need to sleep a lot. Plus, I really believed that I was helping to make fundamental changes in the ways the economy works, in spiritual and personal freedom. Even though there were all those deaths and assassinations, the countercultural activities fueled the idea that there was a lot of hope throughout these years up to the early 1970s, which is where I stopped the book.

read more
Philosophy Weekend: What Does Ron Paul Represent?
→ Literary Kicks | 2 Jan 2012 | 2:16am GMT

I disagree with ultra-conservative presidential candidate Ron Paul on most issues, and I can not imagine myself ever voting for him (I'm a lock for Obama in 2012 anyway). Still, I recently found myself vigorously defending this controversial Texas politician to my journalist and fellow liberal friend Tom Watson. Tom has been a severe and constant critic of Ron Paul, and has called him the worst of the Republican presidential candidates.

I know that Paul has many flaws, but I think he's clearly the best of the Republican presidential candidates, because he's the only one who does not advocate a ridiculous "get tough" policy on Iran. This "get tough on Iran" idea is rooted in the same guerrophilia and bigotry as George W. Bush's previous "get tough on Saddam Hussein" idea, and I really can't understand how Ron Paul can be the only Republican candidate to understand the similarity. He is also the only Republican candidate willing to propose strong cuts in military spending and military activities around the world. The Republican candidates for 2012 are a raggedy bunch, but Ron Paul seems at least to be more clued-in than the others on military and foreign policy.

After reading a steady stream of anti-Ron Paul tweets by Tom Watson, I asked Tom why he puts so much effort into criticizing the one Republican candidate who has an antiwar platform, and who stands very little chance of getting elected, when other Republicans who have stated an inclination to invade Iran if they get elected are actually considered serious contenders. I also asked Tom why he doesn't feel any optimism about the fact that Ron Paul is introducing an antiwar message to many conservative voters who have long ago shut their ears to antiwar messages from liberals or from the mass media.

read more
Action Poetry 2011
→ Literary Kicks | 25 Dec 2011 | 3:29pm GMT
Action Poetry is where LitKicks has been inviting poets and wannabe poets -- that is, everyone -- to share short verses in public for review and response for the past ten years.

It's an unpretentious and friendly poetry board, but remarkable poems do show up here often. Every December between Christmas and New Years, we put up a randomized display of many of the favorite poems from the past year. Here, for your clicking pleasure, is Action Poetry 2011.

read more
Happy Holidays from Sammy and Sophie and the gingerbread pod people
→ Zeigen | 23 Dec 2011 | 6:18pm GMT

We celebrate the holidays by making people and then eating them. It’s a form of tram substantiation, I suppose.
Beats In Time, Evolved
→ Literary Kicks | 22 Dec 2011 | 3:43am GMT

Half a year ago I began assembling Beats In Time: a Literary Generation's Legacy, an anthology of the best articles about the Beat Generation from the Literary Kicks archives. Many of these articles dated back to this website's first five years, 1994 to 1999, when Litkicks called itself the Beat Generation website.

I've expanded the site's focus since then (and vastly expanded my scope as a reader too), which is probably why I now look back at some of these early Litkicks articles with wistful dismay, even though I treasure them. I am no longer the same innocent person who wrote or published these enthusiastic pieces about Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady and Gary Snyder, and I suppose a big part of my subconscious impulse in assembling Beats In Time was to gather all these articles together so that I could say farewell to them, and send them on their way.

In retrospect, this is not a good reason to publish an anthology, and fortunately my readers let me know this nearly the minute the book hit the Kindle store. The initial feedback I got was spookily perceptive; everybody seemed to notice that I had done a rush job on the editing, that I hadn't pored through every individual piece for necessary tweaks and fixes, that I hadn't even thought about the ways the book's implicit themes -- ecology, religion, digital communication, violence, love, the writing process, the mercurial process of literary criticism -- could be highlighted as relevant to today. One person, a book marketing professional who'd been following my ambivalent and semi-agonized blog posts about my editorial process, was particularly helpful and perceptive, and volunteered to work with me on a complete edit of the entire text, followed by the publication of a new, better edition of the book.

read more
5 Ways to Ensure Personas will Build Consensus
→ Extra! Extra! | 14 Dec 2011 | 7:29pm GMT
One of the primary motivations for creating personas is building consensus internally within the design and product teams about customer goals and motivations. So why do personas go wrong so often? Why do people not use the personas that you labored to create from your research? Here are 5 tips to ensure the personas you [...]
Happy Xmas from Japan!
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 10 Dec 2011 | 10:01pm GMT
Integrating Social Analytics with Google Analytics
→ Extra! Extra! | 8 Dec 2011 | 6:12pm GMT
It is essential for companies to start viewing their customer’s behavior from a holistic point of view – integrating data from both online and offline channels. However, many companies lack even a complete picture of what their customers are doing online. Companies need a way to measure how customers are engaging with social media and [...]
King Crimson - A Scarcity Of Miracles
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 8 Dec 2011 | 4:56pm GMT
Designing the Design Process: Part 2 of 3
→ Extra! Extra! | 30 Nov 2011 | 5:48pm GMT
Before Thanksgiving, I wrote about finding meaning in projects as the first in this three part series to work out a better strategy around the design process (you can check it out here). The second part around this as I observed from attending “Design meets Business,” A lecture by design leaders at Nokia is editing. Strategic [...]
A Few Common Hurdles In Implementing Analytics Dashboards
→ Extra! Extra! | 28 Nov 2011 | 5:47am GMT
If the web analyst is an author, the dashboard is his/her novel. It tells a story, with critical points in the story up to the interpretation of the readers. And for the best analysts, each reader has seen the story through different perspectives. Dashboards offer analysts a highly sophisticated tool set for telling a story which infers [...]
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 20 Nov 2011 | 5:51pm GMT
UC Davis: "Shame on you! Shame on you!"
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 19 Nov 2011 | 8:55am GMT
Designing the Design Process: Part 1 of 3
→ Extra! Extra! | 17 Nov 2011 | 10:40pm GMT
If Challenges around digital design are often solved through design, How important is the design process? According to the discussion I attended last weekend at Wharton University’s satellite campus, The shape and workings of the design studio itself is becoming a critical factor in determining the outcome for consumers, businesses and designers alike. Two lovely [...]
"Guns will not solve our crisis"
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 17 Nov 2011 | 7:02pm GMT
84-Year-Old Dorli Rainey, Pepper-Sprayed at Occupy Seattle, Denounces "Worsening" Police Crackdowns
Hold the line.
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 16 Nov 2011 | 10:57pm GMT

http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Elderly-woman-hit-by-spray-at-protest-I-m-tough-2272455.php?tsp=1
Hold The Line, Berkeley! "Stop beating students!"
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 10 Nov 2011 | 8:36pm GMT
The local media seems to have ignored this last night:
Dedicated to Oakland's blackbloc provocateurs.
→ Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 3 Nov 2011 | 11:54pm GMT
Think Why to Get the Click
→ Extra! Extra! | 2 Nov 2011 | 6:38pm GMT
No one wakes up in the morning and says, “Today I’m going to navigate a website and click a button.” People have more important things to do in their lives, like helping their kids, or going on a hot date, or impressing their boss. Sometimes in the pursuit of real world goals, people need to [...]
7 Tips On Making Data Actionable
→ Extra! Extra! | 17 Oct 2011 | 12:36pm GMT
How do you make your reporting actionable? We ponder this question often. Good paid search firms have strong processes for reporting and acting on data. For example, they routinely look at phrases that have poor conversion rates and either alter the advertising message or eliminate the phrase. But in web site optimization and web site [...]
Buon Giorno!
→ dkeith.net | 12 Oct 2011 | 3:35pm GMT

One day at a time, folks.
Four
→ Zeigen | 24 Sep 2011 | 12:39am GMT

My daughter,

You turn four today. What a wonderful presence you bring to the world! I love your joy, your good nature, your sense of humor, your boundless energy, how uniquely you see the world, and how much you’ve created your own persona. You can be stubborn about the small things (like what to wear in the morning), but you’re so easy-going and resilient about the big things.

As I told your brother, we have rough waters ahead, and I know how deeply you’re already feeling the changes that are happening. But you’ve already proven yourself to be so good at adapting to the complex world around you. Look at how easily you’ve adjusted to your new room at school, and how you jump right in to tell your friends what to do. With your family’s help, you will thrive and grow, endlessly.

I love you, Sophie. I’m proud to be your father.

(click to enlarge)
Six
→ Zeigen | 16 Sep 2011 | 8:17pm GMT

My son,

You turn six today. How we’ve both grown over that time. I love seeing how fully you experience the world: An ice cream cone on a hot day or a fascinating creature at the aquarium can captivate you and fill you with joy. A 3am itch attack or finding a dead snail can overwhelm you. You are so interested in everything around you, so creative with stories and turns of phrase, and I admire how drawn you are to the sciences — geologist, paleontologist, biologist, and museum owner are all things you’ve said you want to be when you grow up.

We have rough waters ahead, but you say you’re ready to captain them, and I believe you. You make friends easily, you learned to read and write well ahead of your peers, you’re curious and adaptable. You’re well equipped to continue to explore and develop.

I love you, Sammy. I’m proud to be your father.
Bearing light
→ Zeigen | 7 Sep 2011 | 7:54pm GMT

The Lamplighters, illuminating the 9 o’clock avenue on Thursday evening before the burn.
No Riot Here
→ Life Less Literary | 10 Aug 2011 | 1:23pm GMT

Last night, I went for a cycle ride around the inner suburbs of Sheffield. On the way, I started tweeting about the everyday scenes I was seeing, and the fact that there were no riots, using the #noRiotsHere hashtag (I plucked the hashtag out of thin air: it turns out one of two people had used it earlier in the day, although not in Sheffield). You can see a collection of my evening’s cycling/noRiotHere tweets on Storify. Soon, other people started joining in, and by the time I got home #noRiotHere was trending in Sheffield.

A few people accused me of “trolling for riots” – most did it humorously, one or two seemed genuinely confused about what I was doing. So I’ll try to account for myself here…

First and foremost, I was going for a bike ride. It’s something I’ve done a lot recently (especially since getting my new bike), generally heading West from our house into the Peak District, the hills and moors around Strines and Bradfield. I’d already been considering taking a more urban ride, exploring some of the parts of Sheffield I hardly know, and I was running out of country lanes within easy cycling distance.

But I think what really galvanised me was the steady stream of rumours I’d been reading about incipient riots in Sheffield. As I follow a lot of people on Twitter and Facebook, and a majority of them are in Sheffield, I’d seen endless rumour and counter-rumour – in particular about civil disorder starting up on London Road. The excellent South Yorkshire Police twitter feed had been quashing these rumours all day, but I felt that some people would feel more reassured if they heard that someone they know had been there and reported back that all was peaceful.

And so I set off in the direction of London Road. My initial plan had just been to go there, check out the area, and then return home, but as I got closer my head started whirling with memories of other “riot-prone” areas people had been tweeting earlier, and as I felt like I could handle a much longer cycle ride, I decided to roam further afield. The idea for “#noRiotHere” literally came to me as I was cycling along (as is true of so many good ideas). I didn’t just want to give people the bare fact of “no riot here”, I wanted to emphasise the fact that normal things were going on, that people could and ought to make an evening of it, walk in the evening sunshine, go to the pub, treat it as a normal evening and not hide behind closed curtains. And so I started to tweet one mundane but beautiful thing that I saw in each suburb I passed through (admittedly I eventually started to tire of the mundane but beautiful, and resorted to the slightly comical instead).

I realised, of course, that to anyone outside Sheffield reading my updates, I could come across as insufferably smug; I thought (with apologies to all in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Leicester and elsewhere) that this was a price worth paying. Civic pride breeds more civic pride, and I thought it better to try instilling some of this before riots started. Last night’s #steelcitynotstealcity/#steelnotsteal hashtags did the same thing. To be honest, I thought there was already enough pride in this wonderful city to prevent people from smashing it up (particularly while the city’s youth are still basking in the memory of the incredible and inclusive Tramlines festival). But how to know what other people think? This week I’ve heard, via Twitter and Radio 5 Live, many cries of confusion and disbelief from residents of the riot-hit cities; how are we to know until something kicks off whether our civic pride that “Sheffield is different” is justified or just hubris?

And finally, I wasn’t trolling for riots, and was 95% certain I wouldn’t find any, but I was prepared – at least inasmuch as I had a fast bike, a mobile phone, and my wits about me. If I had stumbled on some disorder, I would have informed the police if necessary, informed Twitter whether necessary or not (it’d be stupid to deny that I’d feel the slightest bit smug for sharing the news before anyone else, massively outweighed of course by sadness at unrest in my home city), and a small part of me hopes that I might have been able to mobilise a public tut-mob early enough to shame potential rioters into going home. A stupidly vain fantasy, of course, but I think we should all be defined by our stupidly vein fantasies.

As it turned out, I had a lovely cycle ride, got to see parts of this beautiful city which are normally hidden to me (including the most amazing view from Gleadless), had a bit of fun along the way, and spawned an idea which was proudly reported on Radio Sheffield this morning. Sorry to be smug (and fingers crossed that this isn’t hubris), but it was a good night for Sheffield.

[View the story "No Riot Here" on Storify]
Gullible comic
→ Zeigen | 8 Aug 2011 | 7:42pm GMT

(Click to enlarge)
Happier
→ Life Less Literary | 9 Jul 2011 | 9:07am GMT

Last year, I read the book 59 Seconds, by Professor Richard Wiseman. It’s wonderful – ostensibly the first “self-help” book underpinned by science. It’s packed full of tips on all sorts of topics – improving your self-confidence sorting out your love life, reducing stress, getting things done… in fact, it’s so full of handy hints that I did what I usually do: read them all with glee and then promptly forgot about all but a few.

One which sticks in my mind is the art of giving gratitude. This is a little like the “positive affirmations” beloved of other self-help books, but unlike vague and even counterproductive affirmations (“every day in every way, you are getting better and better and better”) it’s a specific and proven way of making oneself happier. The trick (established via a study by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCulloch) is to regularly list things that you are grateful for. Not necessarily big things, just… anything: a beautiful sunset, the taste of pale ale, the love of a partner or parent. The reasoning is that we become habituated to the constants in our life (in the same way that, if you work in a bakery, you will come to blank out the smell of freshly-baked bread). By bringing these small positives to the front of mind, we see them afresh and learn to appreciate them more.

Similarly, bringing to mind recent positive experiences (even if they’re as small as finding a parking space or managing to drag oneself out of bed on time) has the effect of reinforcing those experiences. (Other writing exercises which lead to significantly improved mood include writing out your perfect future – something realistic, but in which all of your choices produce a successful outcome – and writing affectionately about somebody you love or care about)

So, for a short while after reading the book I practiced writing things down, but, as already mentioned, I rarely manage to keep something like this going. It slipped back onto the list of “things I really ought to do if I had the time”. Then, just recently, I had a revelation. And here’s how it came about…

I had started using the web service OhLife to keep a diary (OhLife is a little like a standard blog, but entirely private; it emails you once per day to ask “How did your day go?”; you reply with an email saying what you’ve been up to; a building archive of your responses is kept on the web for you to read back through whenever you feel like it). OhLife has got me keeping a diary for the first time in years. But sometimes I can’t be bothered to write anything, or don’t feel like it, or there aren’t enough hours in a day. It was on one such occasion that I was reminded of the diary schedule recommended in 59Seconds. And while I didn’t have time to write, in any kind of detail, how my day had been, plucking out three vaguely positive things from the previous day and sticking them in bullet-points hardly seemed like a chore.

Since then, I have continued using OhLife, sometimes as a diary, other times just as a brief list of positives, however small (“smiled at the postman; heard a bird singing; enjoyed a TV programme”). And it’s early days yet but it seems to be working: I haven’t had any real black moods since I started doing it, and it seems as though my up-times are swinging even higher up. It takes up so little of my time (perhaps two minutes per day) that even the most time-poor person could easily squeeze it in. And I even get some little joy from knowing that, five years hence, I will be able to look back and know on which day the postman’s smile made a difference to my mood.

Buy 59 Seconds from Amazon UK
Instagram
→ Life Less Literary | 28 Jun 2011 | 8:50pm GMT

I… nah, fuck it. Life’s too short.
How to eliminate e-mail spam from the world entirely in two easy steps
→ Zeigen | 24 Jun 2011 | 7:42pm GMT

Spam represents more than 95% of the e-mail sent to the company where I work. On my personal Gmail account, my spam folder reflects the same experience: The daily volume there is approximately 20 times that of the legitimate mail sent directly to me.

Spam filtering, a dismal experience as recently as five years ago, is now relatively successful. Gmail’s filters are top notch, and the corporate filtering solutions we use are also excellent. However, both false negatives (spam not detected) and false positives (legitimate mail caught as spam, which I may not see for weeks if ever) are fairly common occurrences. I personally experience each of those at least once a week.

Simultaneously, not enough people seem to recognize how insecure e-mail is. I commonly see people sending passwords and credit card data via e-mail, because they apparently don’t realize that e-mail is exactly as secure as a snail-mail postcard (which is to say: not secure at all).

I first used e-mail in 1986, when I received an account for an undergraduate computer science class at U.C. Berkeley. It was my first experience with the internet. This was long before the web, of course, and the internet back then was a text-only environment that consisted mostly of news discussions (Usenet), file transfers (ftp), chat (irc), and e-mail. Back then, e-mail addresses didn’t resemble the ones we use today — there was no simple @ address. Instead you had to use a so-called bang path, telling people your account name and a list of machines that would have to be contacted one by one in order to reach the machine that had your account. So for me in that undergraduate class, it was something like mit!uunet!ucbvax!zooey!estephen. The process was error-prone and unreliable. But it was explicit about how many different machines would have to pass along your e-mail from one to another. (Sometimes a machine would not be able to deliver an e-mail until later that night; an average e-mail took 1-5 days to deliver from one end of the country to the other.) It wasn’t long before the modern @ style addresses came in, and you no longer had to tell your e-mail a long list of machines in a chain that had to be reached.

Anyone who used e-mail during that time knew first-hand that the root administrators could read every single piece of e-mail that went through their machine. Fewer people today seem to know that the same is still true now. Certain Google employees can read e-mail on your gmail account (same for Microsoft and Yahoo and their e-mail services). Your employer can certainly read your corporate e-mail. Certain AT&T employees can read all e-mail going through their backbones. Any kid with a packet sniffer can read e-mail you send from your laptop at Starbucks.

I want to say that e-mail has come a long way since my undergraduate days, but of course it hasn’t. Other than the dubious additions of text formatting (Yowza!) and attachments, the last 25 years of e-mail improvements have been minimal. Our vulnerability to spam and scams — as well as the insecurity of what we send — are proof of that. The best improvement has been the growth of free web-based mail services, especially the UI innovations of Gmail itself.

Encrypted e-mail (e.g., PGP) has been around for at least 20 years. But it’s suffered from a long-standing chicken-and-egg problem: people don’t use it because no one else is using it.

But let’s suppose that Google took the lead. Let’s suppose they changed Gmail so that the next time you logged in, you were required to create a PGP key. You were then guided through the process of storing, verifying and exchanging keys with your friends, family and frequent e-mail contacts. All of your banks and large companies would be on board as well. And starting with any e-mails sent from one Gmail account to another, 100% of the e-mails sent were encrypted and signed. There would be pressure on Hotmail, Yahoo mail and other mailing services to follow suit.

That’s step one.

Step two would be an option (completely up to you if you wanted to enable or not) to put any non-encrypted or unverified e-mail sent to you into an “Unverified Junk and Crap and Scams” folder. Over time, that folder would need to be used less and less, and the false negative spam and scams would collect there. Soon people would ignore it entirely, and only read the e-mail that was proven to be from who it was supposed to be from.

Pressure would mount for everyone to jump onto the PGP bandwagon if they actually wanted their e-mail to be received.

As a consequence: Spam would virtually disappear.

And you could send private information with a sense of security. (Not absolute security, of course, since there’s always the possibility of break-ins or the person on the other end not being able to keep your private information private.)

I want to live in that world. Let’s say goodbye to phishing e-mails purportedly from your bank, deposed Nigerian dictators looking for a little help transferring a quintillion dollars, and endless pitches for natural viagra. Let’s bring e-mail into a new era of security and reliability.
Trash
→ Life Less Literary | 10 Jun 2011 | 4:08pm GMT

In 1996, I was responsible for the “kiosk” in Diesel’s Covent Garden flagship store (a Mac running the Diesel website). I had to go into the store once a month to “fix” it.

On the website were two video ads and a handful of audio files. Netscape (1.2, I think) treated these links as “downloads” to be opened with a helper application. Every time somebody using the kiosk clicked on a video or audio link, a new copy of the file was “downloaded” (from the copy of the website stored on the Mac’s hard disk), and placed on the desktop. When I came for my monthly visit, the hard disk would be full, and the desktop would be stacked 6 or 7 deep with icons of the same few files.

My job then was to delete these files. Macs then (OS5 or 6 – or was it 4?) were a lot simpler than they are now, and I myself was no Apple genius. So I had to drag all 9-gazillion of the files into the Trash. Which was a problem. Because the Trash (and, indeed, the hard drive) was an icon on the desktop. And the Desktop was geological-layers-deep in icons. (And, because the Mac wasn’t totally locked down, the Trash icon itself could be anywhere on the Desktop).

And so I began an elaborate game of Towers of Hanoi. Before I could delete the files, I had to find the Trash. So I would painfully drag the files, one at a time, until I unearthed that little waste mpeg basket. After an hour or so of this, I would unearth the Trash icon. And then the work would begin all over again, dragging the files into the Trash and, finally, emptying it.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that this may be what first triggered my RSI; and my hatred of drag-and-drop as an interaction mechanism; and, quite possibly, a lasting suspicion of all Apple products.
Papillon
→ Zeigen | 13 May 2011 | 8:02pm GMT
Chicks
→ Zeigen | 8 May 2011 | 8:36pm GMT
You Shouldn’t Do That
→ Life Less Literary | 4 May 2011 | 12:53pm GMT

“My name’s Dan, and I’m a progaholic”

Ever since the launch of Playlist Club, I’ve been dead excited about getting my weekly hit of curated sounds, and even more excited at the prospect of contributing a playlist myself. So much so, in fact, that ever since the club launched I’ve been filing away ideas for submission (currently 12 playlists-in-waiting, and growing).

Most of these will never see the light of day, and it could be months yet before I’m assigned a slot, so in the meantime I thought I’d toss something out for shits & giggles. You Shouldn’t Do That [Spotify] follows the rules of the club; almost. Admittedly, there are 30 minute tracks, but they were not sneaked in so much as paraded slowly in on a juggernaut covered with bells. Thing is, this playlist is so irredeemably self-indulgent that I wouldn’t have the balls to unleash it under anyone else’s banner, much less expect someone to bother listening to it the whole way through.

I love proggy, choppy, changey, lenthy, self-indulgent twaddle. I spent way too much time listening to this sort of stuff in my teens, then became a bit too self-conscious and swept-it all under the carpet; but in the comfort of middle-age, I’m ready to out myself as a fan of excess. I think the turning point came when Karlheinz Stockhausen died, and I played 25 minutes of his “Sirius” on my Sheffield Live radio show. I cringed a bit while doing it; I fully expected to be shot down in flames. But something surprising happened: I started getting emails & messages of thanks, in fact I got more positive feedback about that one track than anything else I ever played on the show. And it made me realise: sometimes I self-censor far too much for the benefit of an imagined everyman. There’s nothing wrong with following one’s own peculiar urges once in a while, in fact, it’s healthy. And so I produced a laughably decadent, egotistically baroque Spotify playlist, and am putting it out there for the world to ~~hear~~ ignore. Enjoy it. I, at least, will.

Postscript: there is a big hole at the centre of this playlist where some Cardiacs ought to be. Sadly, none of their tracks are on Spotify (there’s some amazing videos on Youtube though). Originally, I made a nod towards this by including William D Drake’s Stone Carnation [Spotify] as the first track, but last night I heard Proper Rock by The Chap and — although it’s a bit, you know, poppy — it’s a gorgeous tune, with a slight Cardiacs feel to it, and the lyrics make a wry commentary on the rest of the playlist.

Listen to You Shouldn’t Do That on Spotify

Proper Rock – The Chap

My Favourite Things – John Coltrane, McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones

Elders – Ronald Shannon Jackson & The Decoding Society

You Shouldn’t Do That – Hawkwind

Yours Is No Disgrace – Yes

Down In The Sewer – The Stranglers

Spillane – John Zorn

You Never Blow Your Trip Forever – Gong
Social Networks and Your Mom
→ Zeigen | 31 Mar 2011 | 6:45pm GMT

(Sorry, mom.)

(click to enlarge)
Symphony for the Comet (a short film)
→ Zeigen | 30 Mar 2011 | 4:24am GMT

I’ve had this idea for a student film in my head for 10 years and always wanted to make it. But today I have admitted to myself that I will never actually film this. Instead, I release the words from my head.

EXT. SUBURB – NIGHT

Just past dusk. A suburban church spire is silhouetted against the hazy sky. Directly above the spire, as if being pointed to, the comet Hale Bopp is clearly visible, a Nike-like swoosh.

SUPER: [The comet Hale Bopp was known as the "Great comet of 1997."]

A car drives up to the church parking lot, and before the car has even fully stopped, the rear door opens. RICKY, a young junior high student, 12, with his tie loose and his shirt tail hanging out, rushes out, lugging a French horn case, and disappears through a side door into the back of the church.

SUPER: [In prehistoric times, comets were believed to be harbingers of doom.]

A few moments later, RICKY’S FATHER and RICKY’S MOTHER emerge from the car, close the doors without locking them, and casually make their way into the church, holding hands.

INT. CHURCH – NIGHT

The church is warmly lit by hundreds of candles. Comfortable pews line the church floor, easily enough seating for 300 people. On stage, behind a conductor, there’s an orchestra comprised of two dozen junior high students: two oboists, a bassoonist, two French horn players (including RICKY), and various violinists, violists, cellists, and a double bassist about half as tall as his instrument. Two dozen pairs of parents are seated in random locations, some close to the stage, some further back.

When the last pair of parents has sat down, the conductor and junior high orchestra teacher, MR. TYCHO, looks at his watch and then nervously stands up. Behind him, through the stained glass window, the comet is barely visible.

MR. TYCHO

Um, thank you, everyone. On behalf of the Cliffdale Junior High School Orchestra, I’d like to, er, thank everyone for attending, and, um, for all of your support. Well, the orchestra has worked really very hard on tonight’s program, so, um, this is… this is Haydn’s “Farewell Symphony.” Class!

He taps twice and the orchestra picks up their instruments. A nod and gesture, and the first turbulent notes of the allegro assai erupt from the violins. The first few seconds seem fine, but quickly the performance starts to fall apart. MR. TYCHO seems oblivious, stoic throughout. RICKY is the first to play an off note, but soon both the pace and the key of the entire ensemble deteriorate. Close-ups of the different parents show extremely visible reactions to each wrong note: A blink from one father. A frown from a mother. A series of nervous tics on a second father, in reaction to a sequence of wrong notes.

The orchestra continues on, undeterred, really doing their best. MR. TYCHO, with determined baton movements, tries to recover and get his class regrouped.

Interspersed with the performance, shots of the comet glowing brightly overhead, ominous, out of place.

Cutting ahead to the slow movement of the adagio, Haydn’s intended dissonance almost seems to be delivered by the orchestra. But one of the students drops his cello, a loud clatter from his folding chair as he scrambles to pick it up. A cut to someone who must be his father, hiding his face, he can’t bear it. He’s trembling.

The fast tempo of the last movement is next, the determination of the young orchestra obvious, sweat forming on MR. TYCHO’s brow. RICKY with his cheeks puffed up, snot running down his nose. While some parents sit passive (a close-up of one shows he’s wearing earplugs), most parents are in visible pain, reacting with spasms and jerks to each new wrong note or mistimed entrance. RICKY’S FATHER shakes his head while RICKY’S MOTHER grabs his hand. RICKY looks to them anxiously.

With a slow fade-out, finally, the last tortured note: A mournful dead cat’s howl of screeching pain.

Then: Silence.

MR. TYCHO stands stock still in front. Silence continues in the church. A survey of each parent: Shock, disbelief, pain, eyes closed, hands over ears, no motion, no words.

And then the expression of the students in the orchestra: Hopeful, expectant, exhausted, their young faces peering anxiously up from their instruments and searching around the room, looking for a reaction, any reaction. RICKY looks to his parents.

RICKY’S FATHER stands up and begins applauding. Within seconds, every parent joins him, cheering, jubilant, massive applause. It’s now a wave of standing ovations, the applause now thunderous. This is a genuine moment (no ironic slow clapping). Shouts of “brava” and other cheers. The reaction of the students is also genuine — they’re standing, bowing, giving off exhausted smiles throughout.

EXT. SUBURB – NIGHT

The comet. Silent. Motionless. When it finally leaves our night sky, it will not be seen again until the year 4534.

FADE TO BLACK
From Banners to Apps
→ Life Less Literary | 9 Feb 2011 | 7:10pm GMT

Last week I gave a presentation to the Midlands Flash Platform User Group. This was the result of some thoughts & conversations which started to fizzle around my brain during last year’s Flash on the Beach conference. The talk “From Banners to Apps” was a brief (ish) distillation of my 15 years’ in the Internet industry – what I have done and what I have learned. I was quite pleased with how it went (although it was far from perfect – if I were to do it again then I would try to encourage a bit more two-way communication with the audience).

Here is a PDF copy of my presentation, complete with vaguely-cryptic presenter notes.
Am I Completely Insane Or What
→ Life Less Literary | 3 Sep 2010 | 5:01pm GMT

Another ActionScript-related memory-usage post. I’ve been doing some experiments with flash.display.Loader (a class which has always seemed out to get me). Today I discovered something which is just so weird it makes me doubt my own sanity. I’d be grateful if any Flash/Tamarin experts out there could help me verify my sanity/insanity.

Here is the test script I’ve been running:
public static const NUM_LOADERS:int = 500;
public function TestMultipleLoaders() { init(); } private function init():void { for (var i:int=0; i < NUM_LOADERS; i++) { createAndDestroyLoader(); } }
private function createAndDestroyLoader():void { var loader:Loader = new Loader(); loader = null; } }

Compile this in Flash Builder and test it under the Profiler. Change the filter to include objects in the flash.* package. Observe how many Loader instances are in memory. Hit the garbage collector. Observe again.

If your system is running anything like mine, you will see 500. Which, in itself, is crazy. loader is just a local variable which, anyway, is set to null. But bear with me, this is going to get crazier...

Now try playing with the value of NUM_LOADERS. Again all things being equal, you will see this crazy behavious (NUM_LOADERS Loaders persisting in memory) for any number between 1 and about 600. Somewhere around that figure, perhaps a little higher (it doesn't seem to be predictable) you will see the number of Loaders persisting drop to either 1 or 0.

Now what the hell is going on here? My guess is that the Loader class is somewhat resource-intensive to create, and so Adobe are maintaining a pool of them somewhere, although the strategy for doing it seems a bit random.

Please can somebody, anybody, enlighten me?
Embed types in ActionScript and memory usage
→ Life Less Literary | 2 Sep 2010 | 7:20pm GMT

I’ve spent the last few days doing lots of fascinating ActionScript memory-tests – and hopefully I’ll post some of the results here if I get time – but while I have a quick moment I thought I’d share this finding which (while obvious now I think about it) caught me out.

The Embed meta-tag allows you to embed and access external files directly within your SWF, e.g.
[Embed(source = 'myImage.png')] public static const MyImage:Class;

Flash seems to automagically detect the MIME-type of your embedded content (in this case, image/png), so that when you call new MyImage() the resulting object can be cast to a Bitmap.

You can, however, explicitly set a MIME-type for the embedded asset. If you’re crazy enough, you can do this:
[Embed(source = 'myImage.png',mimeType='application/octet-stream')] public static const MyImage:Class;

This time calling new MyImage() will return an object of type ByteArray; in order to convert it into a bitmap, you will need to load the ByteArray into a Loader object.

Now, what caught me by surprise is the way in which the Flash compiler embeds the file myImage.png; I had foolishly assumed that the binary file would be embedded as-is, and then handled appropriately at run-time, but the compiler is a little smarter than that, and tries to handle the binary data according to its MIME-type. This is probably best demonstrated by example. In my test case, I embedded a large uncompressed PNG – the file was 1280×720 and came out at approx. 2.7MB.

With the first style of Embed (the “regular”), my compiled SWF was approx. 1.7MB or so in size, and when I ran it it decompressed to a similar size.

With the first style of Embed (the “byteArray”), my compiled SWF was a much smaller 800kB in size, but when I ran it it decompressed all the way back to 2.7MB.

I’m still trying to get my head around the implications of this (with a lot of help from Tish!) – it seems counter intuitive to me that the decompressed file sizes are so different, when presumably the “regular” version will have to be decompressed to a full 1280x720x4 (ARGB) bitmap data object. Any thoughts?
Some iPlayer performance tips
→ Life Less Literary | 21 May 2010 | 3:39pm GMT

Yesterday, Amy posted this on Facebook:

Amy Dutronc wishes that iPlayer worked properly. It’s like listening to the radio and watching a really boring slideshow.

It soon turned out that lots of other people were having the same problem. They all have good Internet connections, so that wasn’t the issue- actually, even when bandwidth is low, iPlayer has some amazing built-in logic for detecting this and respondng accordingly. The issue is that some of the high-quality video now available on iPlayer requires lot of decoding power, and some computers – especially older ones and Apple Macs – aren’t up to the job. (NB. I believe there are improvements in the pipeline which will help iPlayer to improve playback even on slow machines – but if you’re still unable to get decent quality playback, the tips below may help).

The first thing to check is that you have the most up-to-date version of the Flash Player plugin. Adobe have done a lot to improve video performance (and performance in general) in recent releases. If you’re feeling particularly brave, you can install the beta version of Flash Player 10.1 which has even more performance improvements. This will especially benefit Mac users, as the new “Gala” preview release is the first one featuring hardware video decoding for Macs. NB if you do install the Gala preview, you will sometimes see a white square in the corner of your video – so you may want to wait instead for the public release.

If, despite having the latest Flash Player, video still runs jerkily, here are some tips. Try them in the order shown below until you reach a level of quality which your computer can play back without stuttering.
- Don’t play the HD version of programmes. Obviously, HD is amazing; if your machine will play it then you should definitely choose the HD option. But if your machine is a bit old, or does not have a good video card, then HD can slow it down to a crawl. On each HD programme page is a link underneath the video saying “Also in normal quality”. Click that link for a version less likely to hammer your machine.
- Play the smaller version of the video. On “normal” programme pages, the video has an icon in the top right-hand corner showing two arrows (Update: on the new beta version of iPlayer, the size-toggle icon has moved. It is at the bottom of the media player, in between the volume and fullscreen buttons.). If you click on this, it will toggle between a big and a small version of the video. If you have problems playing the big version, click on the arrow to shrink the window down. The two actually use different video files (encoded at 1500kbps and 800kbps) – you can tell which version of the video is playing by right-clicking in the video window: a menu will pop up, and the second line will say something like “1500kbps | h264 | AK 3.5 (1) | 832×468“. The first part of that line tells you the bitrate.
- Play the low-bandwidth version. If your machine is so clunky that it struggles even with the 800kbps video, then there is one more option: the low bandwidth version. Normally you would only see this version if your Internet connection is very poor – but you can force iPlayer to play it by clicking on the “Use lower bandwidth version” hidden near the bottom of the page. Once you’ve done this, right-clicking on the video will tell you that you’re looking at a 480kbps version. If you want to swap back up to the higher-quality version, the link at the bottom of the page will now read “Use normal version” – just click it.
- My Life in Photography
  → Life Less Literary | 22 Jul 2009 | 10:03pm GMT
  
  A while ago, Theo Simpson interviewed me about my photography, for a project he was doing. I just stumbled upon the interview, while cleaning up my hard disk, so here it is:
  
  How did you first begin interest in photography?
  
  In childhood – my dad gave me a Kodak Brownie when I was 4 and we developed & printed the photos together.
  
  Have you had any formal training in photography?
  
  I took a photography O-Level when I was 17 in 1986, and did a week’s photojournalism course in 2006, but am mostly self-taught.
  
  What kind of photographer would you say you are?
  
  Always hard to categorise, but I think the term “documentary photographer” more-or-less covers it.
  
  Is there any particular photography you prefer?
  
  Photographs of people, photographs at night… but to be honest most types of photography interests me.
  
  How did you start working commercially?
  
  I was approached by the Mail on Sunday to buy a photo I had taken. Most of my commercial work has been through approaches from others, but this is because I don’t make most of my living from photography and still often feel uncomfortable about promoting myself as a photographer.
  
  Did you start working alone?
  
  Yes, I always work alone.
  
  What steps did you make to set up a company/business? Or did you test the waters so the speak first?
  
  See above – I haven’t gone very far in this direction. I already have a company, specialising mainly in website development, so have used this to manage the commercial side of my photography, but I’ve never formalised my commercial work.
  
  What are the pressures you have found working commercially?
  
  There is a great pressure to perform and get everything right, although this mostly comes from myself. Also I suppose keeping the business side of things organised: keeping notes of expenses, insurance, tax etc.
  
  What kind of portfolio do you have?
  
  I have a self-produced book, as well as a website. I also have a large, rather chaotic but more often updated Flickr account.
  
  How do you get people to see it?
  
  Various ways – I give out copies of my book to people who may be commissioning photography. But mostly I tag my photos extensively on Flickr and ensure that my website has good, descriptive and relevant text, plus plenty of links, so that search engines will rank it highly.
  
  Has your website been a part of your commercial success?
  
  Yes, my own website and my Flickr portfolio have probably been the main source of business for me – although I don’t think this would be sustainable if photography were my main business.
  
  How much competition is there?
  
  There is a lot of competition, although a lot of it is not great quality.
  
  What do you do to advertise yourself?
  
  I have done some online advertising, e.g. using Google Adwords and Bidvertiser, but mostly I just use Search Engine Optimisation techniques to make my photographs easy to find online.
  
  What makes your work stand out from other people?
  
  I like to think I have a fairly well developed personal style – this is not necessarily something I’ve planned, rather something I can’t help. I don’t like covering the same ground that people have already covered, so I am always looking for different approaches to a project, and I think this helps my work to stand out.
  
  Do you advertise?
  
  See above – I have done a small amount of advertising in the past, but don’t at the moment.
  
  How much creative input are you allowed when working for certain clients?
  
  I’ve usually been allowed a fairly good degree of creative freedom. I’ve come to realise that my photography doesn’t always fit easily within rigid guidelines, so I would be unlikely to accept any future commissions without a great degree of creative freedom.
  
  How much free time do you have for yourself to work on other photography projects?
  
  Not a great deal, but I squeeze in whatever I can.
  
  What advice would you give to someone starting working commercially?
  
  I’m not sure that I’m best placed, but I would say try to stay true to yourself while always pushing yourself in new directions. Don’t write anything off out of hand – learning can come from the most unexpected directions.
  
  How do you maintain your client base?
  
  I don’t really have one
  
  What equipment do you use?
  
  Camera bodies: Canon EOS 40D and 20D.
  Lenses: 16-35mm f/2.8
  24mm f/1.4
  50mm f/1.4
  70-200mm f/2.8 IS
  Flash: Canon 480 EXII
  Tripod: Manfrotto
  
  What computer software do you use?
  
  Mainly Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Also occasionally Adobe Photoshop.
  
  How do you back your work up?
  
  External hard disk.
  
  How do most clients want the work presenting to them?
  
  Initially by web gallery. Then prints, photobooks or high-res files.
  
  How are you equipped for that?
  
  I use Lightroom to produce quick web galleries, and produce other formats as required.
  
  How is your client base spread?
  
  Most of my clients have been in Sheffield, with a few in London.
  
  How far do you travel to get work?
  
  Usually not far, but will travel all over the country for the right job. Furthest so far has been to Glasgow.
  
  In a situation where you might feel technically challenged, what steps do you take to make sure the job is carried out properly, for example in unusual lighting conditions?
  
  Experiment with conditions, check details of photos (and download to computer if possible), take as many photographs as possible, using different settings/lighting.
  
  What do you do if you make a mistake?
  
  Keep going and try to learn from it!
  
  What photographers have influenced your current work?
  
  So many… but particularly Garry Winogrand, Brian Griffin, Terry O’Neill.
  
  Is Sheffield a good place to set-up a business?
  
  Hmm… not sure!
  
  Do you maintain copyright on all your work?
  
  Yes.
  
  Do you arrange royalties and rights before you do a job?
  
  Generally.
  
  Do you ever work for free?
  
  Yes, depending on the client and the job.
  
  What are the most important aspects to working commercially?
  
  I am lucky in that I don’t need to make most of my money from photography, so for me the most important aspects are the opportunity to learn & to take interesting photos.
  
  How do you take yourself forward?
  
  In fits and starts, but usually through intense bouts of taking photos & contemplating photos.
  
  What are your plans for the future
  
  Watch this space!
- Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Mixed Beats
  → CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 10:00pm GMT
  Part 3 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
- Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Dubnbud (Live Extended Version)
  → CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 9:00pm GMT
  Part 2 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
- Live at Fetico Gallery, Chicago 2001: Opening Improvisation
  → CraqueCast | 15 Jun 2009 | 8:00pm GMT
  Part 1 of 3: A gallery show in Chicago where I was accompanied by dancers being painted with flourescent paint and performing under blacklight with similarly coloured plexiglass panes hung from the ceiling.
- Metaphors
  → AlienFlower Blog | 18 Sep 2008 | 3:13pm GMT
  Subject: Metaphors
  To: aliflo, alienflower.org
  
  Hello,
  
  I require some help regarding the definitions of descriptive, organic and structural metaphors. What definitions I have found are very vague and do not give me enough data with which to differentiate between the different definitions.
  
  Any help that you could give me would be most welcome.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Chris Hamilton
  
  ---
  
  Dear Chris,
  
  Thank you for sending your question. My first thought is for us to search for poetry dictionaries that clearly define these terms. In my search this morning on the internet, I have not found anything yet. I will keep searching for dictionary definitions and share any new information.
  
  Let's start with organic metaphor (vs dead metaphor?). I found Alfred J. Drake, Ph.D.'s web page on Organic Metaphor:
  
  http://www.ajdrake.com/e491_fall_04/materials/guides/gd_rom_organic_metaphor.htm
  
  He begins his text by quoting The Portable Coleridge (Samuel Taylor Coleridge):
  
  "Coleridge says that "the spirit of poetry" must "circumscribe itself by rules"; it must "embody [itself] in order to reveal itself.""
  
  Does organic metaphor "embody" the poem?
  
  ---
  
  Tim Love's article (link shared below) asks,
  (in reference to descriptive metaphor?):
  
  "Are they metaphors of animals, or nature, or politics?? Maybe the image that is used is of importance in the reader's understanding of the stories."
  
  ---
  
  Structural metaphor is defined on the Summer Institute of Linguistics web site:
  
  http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAStructuralMetaphor.htm
  
  "A structural metaphor is a conventional metaphor in which one concept is understood and expressed in terms of another structured, sharply defined concept."
  
  Example: "I demolished his argument."
  
  ---
  
  I am curious to know what definitions you have you found so far, even though they are vague. Will you share them with us please? And also what definitions might any other AlienFlower reader have to share with us?
  
  ---
  
  Metaphor in poetry enlivens, paints a better visual image with words, adds depth and breathes life, and brings beauty and understanding that might otherwise be lost to the reader. I found a metaphor essay written by British Teacher Tim Love on Tim's Web site:
  
  http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/workshops/metaphor.html
  
  ---
  
  The University of Oregon is home to the Metaphor Center:
  
  http://philosophy.uoregon.edu/metaphor/metaphor.htm
  
  ---
  
  And I found a web site article that discusses "Making Sense of Metaphor" as it relates to the American legal discourse and system. There is discussion of cultural uses of language and metaphor. Here is one of the reviews quotes of the article:
  
  "In 'Making Sense of Metaphors', Professor Bernard Hibbitts mines the richest possible vein of understanding, one that leads directly to the heart of the transformations affecting not just contemporary legal discourse but also the nature and structure of our entire legal system. Words and language are not a mere assemblage of clichés or conceptual archetypes: they serve as an organ of collective perception. And metaphor is the matrix of all verbal activity. The media of the last century and a half have rendered written codes obsolete: the electronic word is oral and kinesthetic and invested with a paradoxical permanence far more stable than that which writing can confer. In this provocative analysis of the medium, Professor Hibbitts uncovers the patterns of change that inform present events and will continue to do so for generations to come."
  
  Eric McLuhan
  Co-author (with Marshall McLuhan), The Laws of Media; co-editor (with Frank Zingrone), The Essential McLuhan
  
  "A truly astonishing article...surely one of the most significant of contributions to the relative role of the senses in social life."
  
  John Urry
  Professor of Sociology
  Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK
  Author, The Tourist Gaze
  http://www.law.pitt.edu/hibbitts/meta_int.htm
  
  ---
  
  Here is the general definition of metaphor for those who like dictionary definitions:
  
  http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=metaphor
  
  ---
  
  metaphor
  
  n.
  
  1. A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world's a stage” (Shakespeare).
  2. One thing conceived as representing another; a symbol: “Hollywood has always been an irresistible, prefabricated metaphor for the crass, the materialistic, the shallow, and the craven” (Neal Gabler).
  
  [Middle English methaphor, from Old French metaphore, from Latin metaphora, from Greek, transference, metaphor, from metapherein, to transfer : meta-, meta- + pherein, to carry; see bher-1 in Indo-European Roots.]
  
  n : a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity
- Craque DJ set: The Commonwealth Lounge, Fullerton, CA
  → CraqueCast | 22 May 2008 | 8:00pm GMT
  Wednesday night I played a closing set for the private CD release party of jazz quartet Stop Time, led by John Harrington of Delta Nove fame. Styles ranged from jazzy to semi-dark electronica, but mostly it was some good smooth loungey big beat, broken beat and house. Enjoy!
- Amalgamation: Live at Smartbar, Chicago, 2002
  → CraqueCast | 9 Jan 2008 | 8:00pm GMT
  A set I did at SmartBar (beneath Metro) in March of 2002. I'm playing many looping devices driven by live sampled sound from miscellaneous objects and guitar, and a laptop for softsynth control and vocal samples.
- Craque + Viv + Carol : Uir
  → CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 2 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
- Craque + Viv + Carol : Evo
  → CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 3 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
- Craque + Viv + Carol : Ava
  → CraqueCast | 11 Oct 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Matt Davis (voice, sampled objects and electronics), Carol Genetti (voice) and Viv Corringham (voice) : Part 1 of a free improvisation at The Nervous Center Festival of Electronic Music, Chicago 2002
- Phonography 1, 2006-2007
  → CraqueCast | 10 May 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Five unedited recordings from the past year as juicy slices of concrete life: a charcoal grill, a santa ana windstorm, a juice blender, more fire in the grill, and the departure of a locomotive.
- Improv at Myopic Books, Chicago, 03/19/2001
  → CraqueCast | 19 Apr 2007 | 6:00am GMT
  Free improvisation with turntable and electronics in Chicago a few years back.
- Social software provides buffer for shy people
  → xian's running monolog | 15 Aug 2006 | 2:25pm GMT
  
  I think 12 frogs is onto something here with Why social software is good for introverts.
  [The Power of Many]
- Blogging and identity panel proposal for SXSW
  → xian's running monolog | 14 Aug 2006 | 2:05pm GMT
  
  Hugh Forrest, the indomitable lead organizer of South by Southwest Interactive has announced a public process for voting on and vetting panel ideas for next year’s conference. Apparently it will take several rounds, with the first round narrowing down the 173 panel proposals.
  
  The voting is open to anyone, but the votes of past attendees of SXSW are weighted more strongly and those of past presenters are given even further weight.
  
  Here’s part of Hugh’s announcement:
  
  I wanted to alert you that the online interface for panel proposals for the 2007 SXSW Interactive Festival is now live. This page allows users to give us their feedback on which of the many outstanding panel proposals they feel are most appropriate for next year’s event.
  
  …
  
  Complete directions for the voting process are listed on the site. Deadline for voting is September 8.
  
  I’ve got two panel proposals in the running, the first of which is more directly related to the mission of this blog:
  
  Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online
  
  No privacy? Spy on yourself and commodify your attention stream! Countless representations of ourselves flood the net with information daily. What is happening to our models of attention? trust? reputation? Rate my new fighting style unstoppable and I’ll trade you this artifact I forged in Worlds of Warcraft… Expect a lively debate from noted experts on attention and identity and skeptics who think most of the sentences above are content-free.
  
  (filed under blogging and education / sociological)
  
  and
  
  You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!
  
  Resolved: the tagging meme has overstayed its welcome. No, tags aren’t going away but they are not a user-experience panacea. Are we folksonomic yet? Some ideas about the next frontier in malleable, emergent information architectures and classification schemes. Plus, how to apply the lessons of the global social internet to more niche oriented web application development projects. Tag pioneers, theorists, and skeptics beat a dead horse.
  
  (filed under social networks and user generated / open source)
  
  Vote for my panels and eight others! (occasional RFB contributor Liza Sabater has three great proposals up, including one on net.art and another on blog "sheroes" and Jon Lebkowsky, my partner in hosting the blog conference on the Well has a couple more worthy of a vote). I also recommend Prentiss Riddle's panel idea bout teaching children to program with Lego Mindstorms.
  [Radio Free Blogistan]
- Speaking of 'Connecticut for Lieberman'
  → xian's running monolog | 11 Aug 2006 | 1:17am GMT
  
  Looks like his team forgot to register the domain: The Connecticut for Lieberman Party
  [Edgewise]
- Another tactical blunder by Lieberman
  → xian's running monolog | 10 Aug 2006 | 6:13am GMT
  
  Even if you grant that Lieberman should run in the general election as an independent (and I do not), shouldn’t he at least have taken a page from Jed Bartlett and Howard Dean and called his party-of-one “Lieberman for Connecticut” instead of the self-centered sounding “Connecticut for Lieberman”?
  [Edgewise]
- Jason Scott on 'the great failure of Wikipedia'
  → xian's running monolog | 8 Aug 2006 | 10:51pm GMT
  
  I was looking at the Haddock blogs aggregator and in their links gutter I came across a transcript of a presentation given at Notacon 3 (whatever that is) in April of this year by Jason Scott. You can listen to the audio if you prefer.
  
  I tend to like the Wikipedia idea, warts and all, but this talk is a pretty compelling look at its flaws. Here are a few choice excerpts that jumped out at me:
  
  What Wikipedia has taught us now, is that in a vacuum of politics, politics will be created. There is no vacuum of politics. People who are encountering this space where they can not lord over others for technicalities and gain power for themselves will then proceed to invoke technicalities, take power from other people. They just do this. This is what human beings do.
  
  and
  
  One of the big fallacies that people currently have is “well, even if people undo your work, at least you can see it.” It’s not true. People will go to the history of an article that’s disputed, and they will find that that history’s actually been utterly and completely purged from Wikipedia. The history is gone.
  
  and, also
  
  Wikipedia tends to be, at this point, the first hit for most proper and non-proper nouns. Putting in anything gives you the Wikipedia entry. In fact, if you have Trillian, Trillian has an automatic setting so that any word you have in there that matches on Wikipedia ends up as an underlined word. You click on it, and it tells you what the answer is. To someone who’s using instant messaging, they don’t know where this entry came from when they clicked on it, they also tend to be out of date because they index it across the Trillian … and so on. So as a result, you can’t say just go in and change it, because it’s actually using older and older indexes. That’s what I mean by the concern I have, the worry that I have, when I make these big points.
  [The Power of Many]
- OpenID info evening (for developers)
  → xian's running monolog | 7 Aug 2006 | 8:36pm GMT
  
  Kaliya “Identity Woman” Hamlin writes:
  Webwide distributed SSO is finally happening… Learn more from the core guys behind this emerging standard for user-centric digital identity. August 10th 6-9 in Berkeley at 2029 University, Upstairs. RSVP to me kaliya (at) Mac (dot) com and please pass this along to those who might be interested… OpenID is the emerging standard for web wide distributed single sign-on. It works with OpenID enabled URLs and i-names. The goal of the evening is not to geek out on identity but to connect with developers working on applications that require users to log in. Find out more about what it is… how it works… how you can install it. The incentives to learn are high with the $5000 bounty for having OpenID in Open Source projects. Presenting and answering Questions:
  - David Recordon formerly of Live Journal/Six Appart now of Verisign will be presenting a bit about the origins of OpenID but most importantly how it works… and how you install it.
  - Andy Dale from ooTao will talk a bit about i-names and how they work with OpenID2 and looking forward to what comes next after authentication - profile sharing. ooTao is also data sharing, are running ibroker services.
  - Scott Keveton from Jan Rain a development shop in Portland that has been ond of the leading instigators of OpenID. He just posted a walk through on his blog.
  - Mary Hodder CEO of Dabble will talk about the work happening around the development of itags.
  If you know a developer - pass the word along.
  Perhaps the vision of a universal single sign-on on the Web isn’t just a utopian pipedream after all?
  [The Power of Many]
- zorca interviews xian
  → xian's running monolog | 7 Aug 2006 | 5:27am GMT
  
  Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book on blogging called Dispatches from Blogistan (catchy title, eh?) for Peachpit / New Riders. Naturally, she’s been blogging the whole process and posting snippets of work in progress and the texts of interviews she’s conducted for the book.
  
  I know Suzanne from The Well, where I host the blog conference and where I’m known as <xian> and she’s known as <zorca>. A while back she interviewed me via email and she recently published the results on her book’s blog: Dispatches From Blogistan - interview with christian crumlish.
  
  In the interview we talk about blogging (of course) as well as social media, RSS, wikis, politics, media, authority, trust, online presence, the long tail, and other stuff I hope you’ll find interesting. I know I had fun doing it.
  [Radio Free Blogistan]
- Is ANWR as ugly as they say?
  → xian's running monolog | 1 Aug 2006 | 3:02am GMT
  
  Jim Goldstein was up in Alaska in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge recently and brought back these photographs.
  
  He says, “A conservative friend asked me, ‘Is ANWR as really as ugly as they say it is? This alarmed me a great deal after having one of the best photo trips I’ve taken to date. The beauty of ANWR is almost unparalleled.”
  [wake up!]
- 'Tamper' Chapter Four
  → xian's running monolog | 17 Jul 2006 | 5:20am GMT
  
  1978 - Psychoanalysis
  
  by Bill Ectric
  
  “You should stop blaming your parents for your quarrel with reality,” said Dr. Carnes, casually. He leaned back nimbly in his chair, hands behind his head, framed diplomas on the paneled wall behind him. I almost thought he was going to prop his feet up on the desk in front of him. My psychiatrist wasn’t much older than me - maybe thirty.
  
  “I’m not blaming my parents,” I said to the shrink. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
  
  “Well, go on, then. You say your mother gave you paregoric?”
  
  I studied the pastel Aztec pattern in the arm of my comfortably stuffed easy chair. Nice texture.
  
  “You know what paregoric is, right?” I asked, still looking down.
  
  “They stopped making paregoric in the late fifties,” Dr. Carnes answered correctly. “It was a medicine made from camphor and alcohol with a small amount of morphine. They gave it to children for cough medicine.”
  
  “Very good,” I said, looking at him. “Well, my mother says she used to rub it on my gums when my teeth were coming in. When I was a baby. I have this memory of lying in my crib in my bedroom. There were these cartoon pictures on my wall. Eight pictures – two on each wall. They were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You know, Happy, Sleepy, Doc…”
  
  “Yes, I’m familiar with the dwarves,” said the shrink, a bit impatiently, I thought. “But you were very young. You actually remember this?”
  
  Ignoring his question, I continued, “So I’m lying there, and I look at the picture of Grumpy, and he seems to be frowning at me. It was scary. His eyebrows moved up and down and he blinked. Then I looked at Happy, and his red grin got wide and crazy and his nose started stretching and bending sideways. His big eyes were crossed and his tongue stuck out! It scared me so I looked away and closed my eyes. Then I could see stars glittering, and a big, bright golden crescent moon. In slow motion, a cow floated up into the black, starry sky and sailed over the moon!”
  
  “Were you traumatized?” said the doctor, stifling a laugh.
  
  “I think so. But I felt so good I didn’t care."
  
  “But, Bill,” the shrink frowned. Relying momentarily on his neck muscles to support his head, he used both hands to brush back his hair in a motion that ended with his hands clasped again behind his head. “You were too young to even know what paregoric was. How…”
  
  “No, listen,” I said. “Years later, my mother found those pictures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when she was cleaning out the attic. She said, ‘Do you remember these?’ and I said, ‘Yeah’ and then she told me how, when I was a baby, teething, I would cry and cry, because teething hurts, so she said she rubbed paregoric on my gums. After that, she said, I stopped crying and just looked up at those pictures until I fell asleep.”
  
  “Did you use any other drugs when you were a kid?” asked Dr. Carnes.
  
  “I had bad hay fever.”
  
  “Allergic to pollen?” the shrink clarified unnecessarily.
  
  “Yeah,” I said. “It made my eyes itch I sneezed a lot. I had to take antihistamine for years. Sometimes the antihistamine allowed me to dream these amazing Technicolor dreams if I took it at night.”
  
  “I’ve dreamed in color,” said the shrink. “Some people say we only dream in black and white, but I’ve dreamed in color.”
  
  Whoop-de-doo, I thought. Big deal. I never doubted people dreamed in color.
  
  “Sometimes,” I continued, “When the pollen was extra bad, I had to stay indoors. While other guys were playing baseball, I was inside drawing pictures and writing stories. Our kitchen had a linoleum floor with all kinds of squiggly designs in it, and if I stared at those squiggles I saw faces and other things.”
  
  “People do the same thing looking up at clouds,” said the doctor.
  
  “I’ve seen big shapes in the clouds,” I said. “But there is something more … intimate, when faces emerge from the floor tiles. I also saw them, sometimes, in the towels hanging in the bathroom. In the little threads.”
  
  “Is that why you are so interested in Richard Shaver’s art?” asked Dr. Carnes.
  
  Very astute.
  
  I should explain who Richard Shaver was. Primarily a writer of science fiction, he also created some unusual art. He split rocks open and saw patterns in the grain, then used paint and ink to enhance the images so that other people could see them. He called these "rock books" and said that an ancient civilization had created them.
  
  Shaver was, by all accounts, a strange man. You can read about him on the Internet, but I’ll give you a little background.
  
  A man named Hugo Gernsback created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Amazing Stories is the magazine that Forrest J. Ackerman famously says, “jumped into his hands” when he was a boy and inspired him to become a literary agent and later the editor of Famous Monsters magazine.
  
  Around 1940, Richard Shaver sent a story to the magazine about a race of evil mutants, called Dero, who lived in underground caverns and sometimes captured humans to torture and eat. According to Shaver, aliens from another planet had abandoned these subterranean creatures on Earth, back in ancient times, and centuries of inbreeding underground had made them insane and sadistic. Shaver also claimed that the Dero were using some kind of energy beam to send disturbing voices into his own mind. He called this mental harassment "tamper." The story was all the more remarkable because Richard Shaver claimed that it was entirely true!
  
  It was never clear whether Ray Palmer, the magazine’s editor, believed that Richard Shaver was serious or not, but Amazing Stories continued publishing Shaver stories because it increased their sales and thousands of letters poured in. Some of the letter writers claimed that they, too, heard strange voices in their heads. This annoyed the more serious science fictions fans, who looked upon the "Shaver Mystery" as a ridiculous hoax.
  
  Years later, in an interview, Palmer admitted that Shaver, like me, had spent some time in a mental institution
  [Telegraph]
- Democratizing the art market
  → xian's running monolog | 17 Jul 2006 | 5:11am GMT
  
  David Hinojosa has got a project called Stock Artist that offers a simulation (for now) of a rationalize the art market.
  
  I’m not sure I fully understand the concept, but this appears to be the nut of it:
  
  The central nucleus of Stockartist is the “transformed art piece’s concept.” This concept consists in dividing the value of one work, or a group of them into little pieces called “stock-art.” The stock-arts have two characteristics: they represent one part of the value of the “transformed art piece” and they are themselves art works. In other words, the stock-arts are at the same time art works and an instrument of investment that besides of representing their own value, they represent other’s. The stock-arts share some common physical characteristics as: maximum weight, maximum size, security codes, etc, and they contain unique characteristics imposed by their creator.
  [The Power of Many]
- Navigation
  → Mediajunkie | 23 Feb 2006 | 6:08pm GMT
  
  Authors
  
  Clients
  
  Publishing Platform
  
  Latest Posts
  
  Portfolio
- Mediajunkie clients
  → Mediajunkie | 23 Feb 2006 | 6:05pm GMT
  
  A reminder to our hosted bloggers: I occasionally post tips about our blog content management system at Above the Fold.
  
  And author clients, we have a new author/agent agreement available. If you’ve signed up under the older agreement you can continue to be represented under those terms or you can “upgrade” to the new agreement. It’s up to you.
- Response Poems
  → AlienFlower Blog | 13 Aug 2005 | 4:38am GMT
  
  Weathervane Sketch
  by David Kaneda
  
  ---
  
  maggie and milly and molly and may
  by E. E. Cummings
  http://poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15406
  
  ---
  
  Writing Response Poems
  by Thom Williams
  
  *e.e.cummings is so great. I remember distinctly how I felt when I read it the very first time. I was sort of copping an attitude about its childlike ethos. Then, it slammed into me. He deployed a universal theme, a vast theme-the idea that we are alone, yet tied-in to everything. Each thing that the girls found opened their world and made them come back to themselves. I am healed by the simple things: water, a starfish, the otherorldliness of a crab. I have gone to the sea so many times for peace. In the churning of the sea beneath the jetty, I feel the power of life, and I am part of it, too. The sea reminds me of the power I have to make or break my own way. The true genius of the poem to me is the way it leaves you with an idea you already had but you forgot. A good poem sort of wakes you up to something like a recovered memory, a good one.
  
  When I think about writing a response piece to a poem, I make sure to give myself maximim freedom. My intention is not to analyze the poem; this is not schoolwork. I look at the poem and I let myself find a connection without rules. Pick anything; but pick something that pushes your buttons. I might write about the time I got stung by a jellyfish; how I lifted my arm from the sea and saw the tentacles wrapped around it, how I handled the situation, how it scared me.
  
  I might write about the idea that we are alone and are not alone. Sometimes I think life is like a shipwreck where we are washed up on the shore of existence. We have each other and survival. The constellations stretch over head; they turn by the hour. The sea shows me how to survive. It tells me to be blue and keep many things below the surface. The sea shows me that danger is nearer than I thought, but so is beauty.
  
  Let your response seek its own level, like water. Poetry can be like a river that has been flowing always. It is only for the poet to dip into the flow. Let the current of inspiration push you along a bit. Perhaps imagination is just about to come in on the tide. Perhaps in one more moment some healing or some hope might wash up at our feet. Let your response find you. You'll recognize yourself quite soon.
- Testing out the new banner
  → Mediajunkie | 28 Jul 2005 | 5:48pm GMT
  
  Not animated yet, and probably messes up the motto, but I'm tired of Times New Roman.
- Why we were down last week.
  → Mediajunkie | 28 Jun 2005 | 6:02pm GMT
  
  We were hacked by script kiddies. They didn't accomplish anything but they did trash the web server. We're back up now and we've tightened security measures. I won't go into details because why draw the vandals a map?
- The essence of publishing
  → Mediajunkie | 28 Jun 2005 | 2:20pm GMT
  
  Patrick Nielsen Hayden from Making Light points us to an article he's quoted in from the Book Standard:
  
  The Book Standard, an up-and-coming online trade magazine about the book industry, does a reasonable job of covering experiments in the online distribution of free-and-unfettered novel e-texts as a means of building an audience, including ventures from entities as diverse as Cory Doctorow and Baen Books. Among those quoted are Cory, Jim Baen, Charles Stross, Tim O'Reilly, and me. I'm particularly glad they used this bit of summing-up:
  
  "Publishing is not about just making a paper copy of a book," says Hayden. "The essential enterprise of publishing is finding texts that audiences want to read and signaling to those audiences that, hey, this is something neat," he says. "Those skill sets are going to be just as valuable with new forms of publishing."
  
  Not as well-put as I might have managed if I hadn't been blathering over a long-distance phone line, but it's a point I find myself making a lot, and I'm glad to see it passed along.
- Avoid getting unpaid
  → Mediajunkie | 26 Jun 2005 | 10:07pm GMT
  
  Some fresh book-deal advice from Matt Wagner, my old agent at Waterside (after Bill Gladstone and before Danielle Jatlow and Margot Maley), warns about how, if presented with a book deal, you should do all you can to avoid agreeing to a cross-collateralization clause: The Varieties of Co-Accounting.
- → Mediajunkie | 23 Jun 2005 | 12:33am GMT
  
  View image
- Art Department
  → Mediajunkie | 22 Jun 2005 | 10:52pm GMT
  
  Media Junkie's New York Office Art Department has officially opened
  with veteran image maker Xourmas at it's helm!
- Book site shaping up
  → Mediajunkie | 11 May 2005 | 12:11am GMT
  
  After a hurried site launch to coincide with the author's book tour, Marie Myung-Ok Lee's site for her novel Somebody's Daughter received some long overdue attention today and is now much more nearly ship shape. Please drop by and let us know if anything isn't as it should be.
- East Bay for Democracy
  → Mediajunkie | 12 Apr 2005 | 8:59pm GMT
  
  We've relaunched the East Bay for Democracy site using CivicSpace, thanks to expert assistance from Scott Chacon.
  
  We're still fleshing out some of the content areas, but the site is no longer in the staging area and is ready for signup by locals.
- Let Me Sing Longer
  → AlienFlower Blog | 5 Mar 2005 | 3:01pm GMT
  Writing a Cinquain
  
  ---
  
  A cinquain (sing-KANE) is a short, unrhymed poem. This style was named and created by Adelaide Crapsy (1878-1914) in the early 1900's. Her poems were not published until after she died.
  
  Its form consists of 22 syllables:
  
  First Line: a one word title (two syllables)
  Second Line: a two word phrase that describes the title or you can just use two words (four syllables)
  Third Line: a three word phrase that describes an action relating to the title or just actions words (six syllables)
  Forth Line: a four word phrase that describes a feeling relating to the topic or just feeling words (eight syllables)
  Fifth Line: one word that refers back to the title (two syllables)
  
  The title, due to the shortness of the poem, takes on a greater weight because it is one sixth of the poem.
  
  --
  
  Niagara, Seen on a Night in November
  by Adelaide Crapsy
  
  How frail
  Above the bulk
  Of crashing water hangs
  Autumnal, evanescent, wan,
  The moon.
  
  ---
  
  Moon Shadows
  by Adelaide Crapsy
  
  Still as
  On windless nights
  The moon-cast shadows are,
  So still will be my heart when I
  Am dead.
  
  ---
  
  Amaze
  by Adelaide Crapsy
  
  I know
  Not these my hands
  And yet I think there was
  A woman like me once had hands
  Like these.
  
  ---
  
  Carl Sandburg wrote a poem about reading her poetry and to honor her memory.
  
  Adelaide Crapsey
  by Carl Sandburg
  
  Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
  I read your heart in a book.
  
  And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
  
  And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.
  
  And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:
  Mother of God, I’m so little a thing,
  Let me sing longer,
  Only a little longer.
  
  And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.
- Inside the Rhyme Machine
  → AlienFlower Blog | 2 Mar 2005 | 2:40am GMT
  A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem usually in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme. The shortness and strict rhyme scheme create a musical effect. This is a good form to practice because it focuses and challenges much of the poet's technical and artistic skills.
  
  There are two main types of sonnets: the Italian (Petrarchan) and the English (Shakespearean).
  
  The Italian sonnet has a first division (octave) of eight lines rhyming abbaabba and the second division (sestet), consisting of six lines rhyming cdecde, cdccdc, or cdedce. The octave presents the narrative, states the proposition, or raises a question; the sestet brings the narrative home by making an abstract comment, applying the proposition, or solving the problem.
  
  The English (Shakespearean) sonnet has four divisions: three quatrains (each with a rhyme-scheme of its own) and a rhymed couplet. The typical rhyme-scheme for the English sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. The couplet at the end is usually a commentary on the foregoing, an epigrammatic close.
  
  Here is a Web site with a long listing of sonnet poets and their poems:
  
  http://www.sonnets.org/alpha.htm
  
  After reading through the poems at sonnets.org for awhile, you might find it easier to write your own.
  
  Here is one Italian sonnet I found there written by Katharine Lee Bates:
  
  To a Crow
  
  Come hither, taunted bird, and I will stroke
  Thy ruffled plumage with a verse, O triste
  And sombre minstrel at our Twelfth Night feast,
  A music masquerading in thy croak.
  How often, when the wild March mornings broke,
  Have I descried thee, like a demon priest,
  Heaping hoarse curses on the riotous East
  From the bare branches of some tossing oak!
  Yet ever welcome is thy wizard flight,
  --Most welcome now, when Earth lies imaging
  The sleep of death beneath a winding-sheet
  Of frozen snow intolerably white,
  A pallid waste crossed by the sudden, fleet,
  Beautiful shadow of thy sable wing.

Antiweb Feedbag

Recently Posted…

Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Presence, and Reputation Online

You’re It! Tagging is so over! It’s the People, Stupid!

1978 - Psychoanalysis

by Bill Ectric