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

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1. Fallacy of the excluded middle
   → Zeigen | 4 Jul 2009 | 12:53am GMT
   

   So many times we believe that there are only two choices, that something is either good or bad, and there is nothing in between.

   As Hamlet said in Act II, scene 2, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

   But this is a fallacy, and it has a name: The fallacy of the excluded middle. Here’s an example:

   • Too much water, and you drown.
   • Not enough water, and you die of thirst.

   Therefore, water is always a bad thing and we should avoid it, right?

   “You’re either with us, or against us,” I’m told. Not necessarily. Perhaps I support some of what you do, some of the time, in my own way.

   Humans can’t achieve perfection, but nothing is ever a total failure either. I find that everything is somewhere in the middle.

   "like" this entry on friendfeed.com

2. Second Interlude: July Breather
   → Literary Kicks | 2 Jul 2009 | 3:49am GMT
   

   I’ve posted a chapter of my memoir every week since January. This will be the first week I skip in five months. I think I’ll take a breather next week too, and then I’ll return with Chapter 24 the week after.

   Some have asked me how I manage to keep up this pace, and wonder if I’d begun some of this writing before. I have not; it’s all new. If you’re reading a chapter of my memoir on a Wednesday night, that probably means that I spent the prior Thursday night to Monday afternoon in a state of advanced writer’s block. I then finally started writing late Monday night, scrapped it and started over Tuesday night, and wrote the whole thing on the train in to work Wednesday morning. I then revised it all day, posted it at 5, published it at 7, and fixed the spelling errors and factual mistakes by midnight before I went to sleep. This has not been an easy schedule to keep.

   From the beginning, I intended this to be an automatic writing project, though I didn’t realize it’d turn out to be such an exercise in brutalism. I’m sure I would never have revealed certain things that I’ve revealed in these pages if I hadn’t turned off certain filters. It feels fine. But if it isn’t obvious that the method I’m using here was inspired by Jack Kerouac’s experiments with automatic writing, then I must not be doing my job very well.

   Some have asked me why I think this memoir has any importance, suggesting that I’m just reminiscing about old friends and old places. I’m not writing this for nostalgia, I assure you.

   But I might be writing it as a form of self-therapy. I sure have learned a lot about myself. Some times I like what I find, sometimes I don’t. It’s a little scary when I try to explain some decisions I’ve made and realize I can’t.

   We’ve now time-travelled from 1993 to 1999, where we’ll pick up in two weeks. The years coming next are the apocalypse years, the Y2K years. The years I got rich and then got broke. The years I scuttled Literary Kicks (first) and then began rethinking it (second). The years I walked away from a relationship that was supposed to last forever, and then met and fell in love with the person who’s sitting next to me right now, playing Wii Golf as I type.

   Life beckons, and I need a break. Hope you’ll keep reading my story, which will pick up again in two weeks, and here’s a new landing page to make it easier to read it from the beginning, if you wish.

3. For English to evolve, grammarians must die
   → Zeigen | 2 Jul 2009 | 2:28am GMT
   

   Consider these three word pairs:

   • Choose vs. chose
   • Loose vs. lose
   • Noose vs. nose

   Loose and noose rhyme, but they don’t rhyme with choose. Chose and nose rhyme, but they don’t rhyme with lose.

   There are lists of frequent grammatical errors; mistaken use of choose/chose and loose/lose are commonly found on such lists.

   I could pick on hundreds of other English irregularities, but these ones happened to set me off today.

   My son Sammy is nearly four and we’re teaching him to read. The irregularities of English are sufficiently common that I spend more time teaching the exceptions rather than the rules.

   Simultaneously, as use of cell phones for texting proliferates (along with other communication typed in real-time, such as game chat or status updates, where character limits apply), there’s an emphasis on brevity that favors abbreviations, slang, acronyms and intentional misspelling.

   In the early grades, as English is taught, correct spelling is the least important skill, taught last. The lesson plans emphasize vocabulary and the more common sounds for letters, even if it means young kids create sentences that don’t have a single correctly spelled word. The exceptions are cleaned up in the later grades.

   English is a difficult language for non-native speakers to learn, because of the pervasive exceptions. But that flies in the face of English’s growth as a worldwide universal langauge.

   English does evolve over time — just look at how many new words are added each year to various dictionaries. Novel forms of speech are created constantly, and are adopted based on an evolutionary model: If it’s simple, readily understood, and fills a gap in our forms of expression (or more efficiently gets an idea across in one or two syllables compared to a lengthier, traditional construction), then it will be spread from group to group, and eventually be considered “standard.” In general, this evolution makes English simpler, since complex or non-standard constructions are not spread as readily. So, evolution of English is “good” in the sense that it makes English easier for non-native speakers or young learners.

   However, standing in the way of English’s evolution is prescriptionism. Linguists (those that study language) are generally either descriptivists (who observe and describe how language is actually used) or prescriptionists, who dictate how language should and shouldn’t be used.

   No one has enjoyed a quick spelling or grammar flame more than me, but today I’ve come to the conclusion that English needs to evolve faster, and armchair grammarians (even ones with linguistics degrees, like me) must stop what they’re doing in discouraging novel forms of expression.

   For everyday communication online, from now on, my only consideration is if I understood the other person. Instead of, “Is every word spelled and used correctly?”, my standard will now be, “Is the intent clear?”

   Starting today, I resolve to never make another spelling or grammar flame. For informal forums, I may gently encourage others to stop making such corrections as well.

   I’ll still apply higher standards for business communications, especially for my own e-mails and from prospective employees . Bad spelling as a signifier for low intelligence is a deeply-ingrained bias in our culture, and misspelling a few words in a widespread corporate e-mail is still a career-limiting maneuver.

   The next barrier will be lowering my standards for my own informal writing, such as here on this blog. It’ll take a while before I’m ready for that leap.

4. Carver Park Reserve
   → scot hacker's foobar blog | 1 Jul 2009 | 10:17pm GMT
   

   Wrapping up an excellent – but sad – 10 days with relatives in Minnesota. Excellent because Minnesota is always excellent this time of year, lush and verdant, with endless trails and meadows fed by those famous 10,000 lakes. Excellent because it was wonderful to see family and because I really needed the downtime. Sad because we were there to say farewell to my father-in-law, who passed away a few weeks ago and is deeply missed by all of us.

   
   Carver Park, Minnesota (Hiking) | MN, USA
   
   Click Replay for hike animation

   Wrapped up the visit with a lovely 3-mile walk through Carver Park Reserve with the family and kids through rolling hills. Returned with a few tics and lots of great memories.

   Farewell Ben – we’ll always miss you.

5. Treacle Song, Radio 3
   → Life Less Literary | 1 Jul 2009 | 12:06am GMT
   

   Her voice, singing,
   Baked in a land of brown, black and purple.
   Light, milk coffee clouds;
   Dark, cook chocolate shadows;
   Sparkle Stabs of Sugared Violet.

   Ohne Zucker Bitte.
   Kein Kandis.

6. How Michael Jackson Liberated Eastern Europe
   → scot hacker's foobar blog | 30 Jun 2009 | 2:59pm GMT
   

   For Stuck Between Stations, Roger Moore on how Michael Jackson liberated Eastern Europe from communism: The Aviator, Part I:

   As with Elvis, I dismissed most of what he did long before he left. But MJ was an arresting presence even for those who, like me, did my best to ignore him. Elvis even seems an inadequate comparison for his stratospheric global reach. A closer comparison might be Howard Hughes, another man-child of erratic brilliance, whose master aviator’s soaring heights later gave way to reclusive paranoia and heartbreaking tailspin.
   

   Then, in The Aviator, Part II: Sky Saxon Moore pays tribute to Sky Saxon of The Seeds, whose death was completely overshadowed by Jackson’s.

   The Seeds discovered trippy keyboards before the Doors, and were unleashing raw power before the Stooges. They were their best at their simplest, exemplifying Woody Guthrie’s dictum that if you use more than two chords, you’re showing off.

   See also: Mayra Andrade’s Lunar Mission

7. The Roth Remix
   → Literary Kicks | 30 Jun 2009 | 3:39am GMT
   
   

   1. After interviewing Philip Roth, James Marcus turned a culturally significant Roth utterance into an audio dance track (via Moby Lives).

   2. Sarah Weinman unearths another writer in the Singer family, Hinde Esther Singer.

   3. Kenyon Review: “What happens when a poet’s own name is invoked in a poem of her own making?”

   4. Adira Amram of the wonderful musical Amram family has released her first record. Looking forward to hearing this!

   5. McNally Jackson bookstore in Manhattan now has an Espresso Book Machine. As we pointed out before, Espressos are cool.

   6. One interesting thing about this Persepolis fan-fic about the Iran elections, originating in Shanghai, is how well it captures Marjane Satrapi’s style.

   7. It’s an old formula, this “post some ridiculous emails you’ve received about your blog” blog post. And yet, it’s still fun.

   8. Michael Jackson read books. Good for him.

   9. I’m glad that Bill Ayers has the courage to publish a book, a graphic memoir. Maybe it’ll come out on the same day as Dick Cheney’s.

   10. Once upon a time, Literary Kicks was a website devoted to the Beat Generation. I know some of my early readers wish I had stuck with and perfected that formula, and if I had, maybe Peter Hale’s The Allen Ginsberg Project is what this site would have been like. Hale, who works closely with the Allen Ginsberg estate, has been putting high quality stuff up — rare Kerouac videos, beautiful images, surprising texts, with a wide range of coverage and a friendly touch — week after week. If you’re into modern-era experimental/alternative literature, you might want to follow this site.

8. Natural Bridges, Santa Cruz, CA
   → Zeigen | 28 Jun 2009 | 8:50pm GMT
   

   Saturday was the beginning of the heat wave, so we head to Santa Cruz for some beach time.

   When heading down Highway 17, usually I expect the least traffic at the crack of dawn or after noon. But even waiting until noon didn’t help, and it took over two hours to get there (when normally it’s about 45 minutes). The slowest traffic was on the surface streets in Santa Cruz, and even trying some offbeat routes didn’t help. We stopped downtown to eat the Walnut Street Cafe to give the tangle some time to disperse before heading to Natural Bridges. (It costs $8 to park now! How on earth can it save the state money to close these parks when they charge what should be enough to break even? I was happy to pay if it meant helping out the state during the budget crisis.)

   As it turned out, we got there right after the morning fog burned off, and there was a bit of a wind, so it was a great way to cool down.

   I experimented a bit with the new video feature of my new iPhone 3GS.

   Now that’s after upload to YouTube, and that process seems to introduce a lot of artifacts. On the plus side, iPhone video is convenient — I will amost always be carrying my phone — and it’s not nearly as sensitive as the Flip to shake. But the brightness changes are jarring, and the overall image quality is not as good. (You can view my other video tests on my YouTube channel.)

   sammy

   ^^^^^ Sammy typed that. Pardon the intrusion.

   After the sun started to sink, we headed to the wharf for bread-bowl clam chowder and to watch the seals and sea lions and pelicans. Sheets of mist draped the pier, giving the whole scene a surreal and wonderful edge.

   Armed with salt water taffy from Marini’s, we headed home at 9, and once again ran into crushing traffic. While everyone else slept in the car, I tried every trick I knew to take the non-beaten path, but wasn’t able to get home until 10:30pm.

   Worth it.

9. Reviewing the Review: June 28 2009
   → Literary Kicks | 28 Jun 2009 | 12:21am GMT
   

   A dustup is always fun. Caleb Crain basically murdalizes a non-fiction book called The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work by Alain de Botton in today’s New York Times Book Review. It’s an exciting article, but after examining the plays in detail I’m not quite sure who wins.

   A critic who sets out to write a strongly negative review ought to open with a powerful point, but Caleb Crain actually punches himself with the opening paragraph, which posits many doubtful assertions as fact:

   Work is activity that earns money. Lucky people enjoy their work, but even they might not do it without pay. To the extent that pay motivates, people work for the sake of something else — so they can buy food, shelter, clothing, security, luxury or leisure — and against their inclinations. Now, to do anything against one’s inclinations is to put one’s dignity at risk. It is fascination with this cold truth that draws children to blend sludge out of refrigerated leftovers and then dare one another: “Would you drink it for a hundred dollars? For a thousand?” Everyone has a price in theory; a worker is someone who has agreed to a number. He is exposed as someone under constraint, like a prisoner in a stockade. To mock him for being less than perfectly free in his thoughts and actions is easy.

   This is some dense prose, and it expresses a surprisingly shallow point. Our connections with our jobs go much deeper than money. For many people, work is identity. It gives us our pride, our sense of self. Certainly work is a key part of who we are, not an activity we engage in with calculated detachment. I really don’t know where Caleb Crain is coming from with this opener. He also doesn’t mention the book he’s reviewing.

   He’s better when he gets to the book, which, in his opinion, reeks of condescension. Crain finds de Botton a highly unreliable and capricious journalist, and he scores one killer punch here, describing de Botton’s account of a dull interview with a bureaucrat in London:

   De Botton decides that he pities the man for his hollowness. But it is evident that he was outplayed — that he wasn’t prepared with questions detailed or insightful enough to oblige the executive to take him seriously. It shouldn’t have surprised him that the head of an accounting firm would know well how to keep his cards to himself while going through the forms of transparency.

   Crain’s point about de Botton’s unconscious snobbery is a serious one, but interestingly Crain’s prose has a snobbish undertone too, as when he drops a reference to the classical music term “ostinato” into a sentence. I can’t stand that kind of pretension — if I want to read about classical music I’ll read a damn book by Alex Ross (and, to be honest, I don’t want to read about classical music).

   Crain’s review also fails to connect the book to the long tradition of non-fiction literature about Americans at work: The Organization Man by Wiliam Whyte, Working by Studs Terkel, Gig by John Bowe and Marisa Bowe. All in all, I’ll hand this match to Alain de Botton. Caleb Crain does not have a strong enough offense to pull this bad review off.

   That’s about as exciting as this weekend’s NYTBR gets. Paul Bloom’s meditation upon The Evolution of God by Richard Wright is meant to be a rave (he calls the book brilliant) but the points I manage to glean from this review are wishy-washy. Speaking of condescension, both Bloom and Wright seem to assume that only monotheistic Western religions deserve our awe, and I don’t think much of the attitude expressed by this:

   In fact, when it comes to expanding the circle of moral consideration, he argues, religions like Buddhism have sometimes “outperformed the Abrahamics.” But this sounds like the death of God, not his evolution.

   It’s strange to imagine that anyone would want to read a modern history of religion that doesn’t take Buddhism seriously; this book is called The Evolution of God and in my observation the Eastern religions have a more highly evolved sense of God than the Western ones.

   Today’s NYTBR also features David Gates on Love and Obstacles by Alexsander Hemon and Jeremy McCarter on a new biography of playwright Arthur Miller by Christopher Bigsby.

10. django-profiles: The Missing Manual
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 27 Jun 2009 | 5:59pm GMT
    

    The User model in Django is intentionally basic, defining only the username, first and last name, password and email address. It’s intended more for authentication than for handling user profiles. To create an extended user model you’ll need to define a custom class with a ForeignKey to User, then tell your project which model defines the Profile class. In your settings, use something like:

    AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE = 'accounts.UserProfile'

    To make it easier to let users create and edit their own Profile data, James Bennett (aka ubernostrum), who is the author of Practical Django Projects and the excellent b-list blog, created the reusable app django-profiles. It’s a companion to django-registration, which provides pluggable functionality to let users register and validate their own accounts on Django-based sites.
    

    Both apps are excellent, and come with very careful documentation. But here’s the rub: Bennett’s documentation style comes from the mind of an engineer, rather than an average user who just needs to get things done quickly. For people who write Django code every day and are intimately familiar with the official Django docs, they’re probably sufficient. For those of us who don’t have the luxury of being full-time programmers, who don’t live and breathe Django, they’re frustrating. Sample templates are not included, and no clues are given as to what should go in the templates you create. Likewise, the ability to customize the default behavior of the apps is only hinted at, not spelled out. Users coming from a CMS world where you install and configure a plugin and get instant functionality for your site quickly become frustrated.

    From IRC logs, it appears that Bennett believes banging your head against a wall is a great way to learn. To an extent, that’s true. I know there’s no better way to learn a new tool than having to solve real-world problems with it. But at the same time, learning doesn’t only take place in the Django docs – it happens on mailing lists, in code samples on djangosnippets.org (which, by the way, is another of Bennett’s projects), and, yes, in documentation for add-on apps like django-profiles.

    Let’s take an example: A developer wants to let users edit their own profiles. They get their Profile model registered, install django-profiles, and create a template at profiles/edit_profile.html. What goes in that template? Not much is needed, but the django-profiles docs don’t give you a clue (nor do they give you a clue where to find the answer in the Django docs). You’ll need something like this:

    {% extends "base.html" %}
    {% block title %}Edit Profile{% endblock %}
    {% block content %}
    <h1>Edit contact info for {{ user }} </h1>
    <form method="POST" action="">
    {{ form }}
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Update">
    </form>
    {% endblock content %}

    Now access /profiles/edit/ and you’ll see all fields on your profile model represented with appropriate field types. So far so good. Now you probably want to customize two things, right off the bat. You may have fields on the profile that only administrators should be able to edit, and you want to hide those fields. And you may want to modify the success_url, to control where the user is sent after a successful form submission. The docs for django-profiles say that the provided edit_profile view takes optional form_class and success_url arguments. But how can you pass in arguments? You’re simply linking to the predefined URL /profiles/edit/ – there is no code of your own from which you can pass in arguments.

    This is where things became inscrutable to me. I was at an impasse, with no clue or hint as to what to do next. If the django-profiles docs had included a link to the section of the Django docs that contained the answer (or some kind of directional indicator) I could have done the research and gotten things moving. Fortunately, a friend and fellow Django developer had been down this road before and had the solution. Here’s how the pieces connect:

    First, you need to create a custom ModelForm based on your Profile model. If you don’t already have a forms.py in your app, create one, then add something like:

    from django.db import models
    from django.forms import ModelForm
    from ourcrestmont.itaco.models import *
    
    class ProfileForm(ModelForm):
      class Meta:
          model = Foo
          exclude = ('field1','field2','field3',)
    

    The idea is to pass your custom ModelForm to django-profiles with the name form_class, thereby overriding the default object of the same name. django-profiles will then operate against your custom ProfileForm rather than from a default representation of your Profile model. Once I understood this, the light went on and things started to snap into place.

    Still, how can you pass this custom form_class to django-profiles, when there’s no view code in your own app to handle this? That’s where trick #2 comes in: The seldom-used ability to pass dictionaries of custom values in from your urlconf. So wiring things up now becomes a pretty straightforward task. In urls.py, import your custom form and pass it through to the django-profiles view, right after the reference to the django-profiles urlconf (you want to do this after, not before, so the last matching URL for /profiles/edit/ is the one you define, not the one django-profiles defines:

    from projname.appname.forms import ProfileForm
        ('^profiles/edit', 'profiles.views.edit_profile', {'form_class': ProfileForm,}),
        (r'^profiles/', include('profiles.urls')),

    You can pass in your custom success_url value in the same way:

    from projname.appname.forms import ProfileForm
        ('^profiles/edit', 'profiles.views.edit_profile', {'form_class': ProfileForm,'success_url':'/my/custom/url',}),
        (r'^profiles/', include('profiles.urls')),

    Now access /profiles/edit/ again and you’ll find that the view is using your custom form definition, rather a default one derived from the profile model. Pretty easy once you see how the pieces fit together. Unfortunately, I was not able to find these answers from the Django docs on my own – a friend supplied the answers.

    If you need even more control than that, there’s another alternative to passing a dict in through the urlconf – write your own view with the name edit_profile, overriding aspects of the provided view of the same name:

    from profiles import views as profile_views
    from myprofiles.forms import ProfileForm
    
    def edit_profile(request):
      return profile_views.edit_profile(request, form_class=ProfileForm)
    

    (I haven’t tried this method).

    profile_detail and profile_list

    django-profiles enables other templates as well. As documented, the “details” template lets you retrieve all data associated with a single profile by sending an object named “profile” to the template profile/profile_detail.html, e.g.:

    <p><strong>Address 2:</strong><br>
    {{ profile.address2 }}
    </p>
    <p><strong>City:</strong><br>
    {{ profile.city }}
    </p>

    It’s not quite so clear how to get a list of all profiles in the system. The docs say:

    profiles/profile_list.html will display a list of user profiles, using the list_detail.object_list generic view

    You’ll access the list view at /profiles/, with template code along the lines of:

    {% for p in object_list %}
    <a href=http://birdhouse.org/blog/feed/rss2/”{% url profiles_profile_detail p.user %}”>{{ p }}</a>
    {% endfor %}

    (in other words you can ignore the “list_detail.” portion of the object name referenced in the docs).
    ——————-

    I have one remaining question: A common task when editing profile data would be to change one’s email address. But since the email address is included in the User model and not in the Profile model, it doesn’t show up in the {{form}} object. Anyone know how to get it in there?

    With a few well-placed links and code samples, the django-profiles docs could be a great learning opportunity for this kind of Lego-like site construction. Until then, I’ll update this post with any other tips users provide on django-profiles implementation.

    Despite my gripes about the docs, many thanks to Bennett for all of his excellent free code, writing, and other contributions to the Django community. And a ton of thanks to mandric for the golden ticket on how to wire up the pieces.

11. Swine flu graph update #3: A(H1N1) modest rate increase
    → Zeigen | 27 Jun 2009 | 6:07am GMT
    

    I last updated this graph 15 days ago. In that time, the number of worldwide confirmed cases doubled from nearly 29,000 to nearly 60,000, according to the World Health Organization.

    These are not the number of fatal cases. The official count of worldwide fatalities has risen from 144 to 263. That’s a fatality rate of 0.4%, or 1 in 250.

    Various news reports this week stated that there were 1 million cases in the U.S. (for example, this article on the Discovery Channel’s site). Those reports are based on projections, not confirmed cases, and honestly to me the figure simply does not seem credible. The 1 million number is not backed by the CDC data, which matches the WHO’s report for U.S. cases. I do believe reporters have confused the concept of “number of vaccines needed in the worst case” with “number of people who have been infected.”

    However, it does seem apparent that the rate of new cases has increased. Previously we had seen about 4,500 new cases each week, for a period of three weeks in May. That increased to around 6,500 cases a week in early June. We’re now seeing about 15,500 cases per week for the last two weeks.

    It’s hard to say if we’ve seen the point where the number of cases is doubling consistently. It took two weeks to get from 15,000 cases to 30,000, then two weeks more to get from 30,000 cases to 60,000. It will be very interesting to see if the number of cases double again to 120,000 in the next two weeks. At that point, I predict news cycles would start to take things very seriously again.

    
    (Click to see full-size chart.)

12. JOB-HUNTING: BROADCAST AND IVILLAGE
    → Literary Kicks | 26 Jun 2009 | 1:23am GMT
    
    

    (This is chapter 23 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

    In July 1998 a three-year-old Internet streaming audio startup called Broadcast.com began selling shares on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The shares opened at $18 and shot up to $74 on the first day — a stunning success, and one of the biggest first-day stock jumps in modern financial history.

    Internet stocks had been exciting high-risk buys on Wall Street since Netscape’s historic initial public offering in August 1995, but it was still a shock to see a small, little-known company like Broadcast blow the ceiling open. I had visited their site once or twice, but they didn’t have much music and I figured they were mainly good for college basketball webcasts. Yet somehow Wall Street’s many-to-many mind chose Broadcast.com as a super-winner must buy, and shot it to the sky on its first day.

    Future anthropologists studying the strange event known as the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s must understand that there were two separate phenomena operating at once: there was a dot-com craze, and there was an IPO craze. The dot-com craze happened when it became the fashion for investors to take unusual risks on futuristic Internet companies with very hazy business models. More and more professional and amateur investors began playing the dot-coms, thought traditional and conservative investors naturally scoffed at the airy stocks. My savvy stepfather Gene had always enjoyed playing the stock market, and had made out very well over the years with blue chips like IBM and General Electric. He advised me to go ahead and work for a dot-com — Pathfinder was a dead end, he said — but said I should never, ever put my own money into one.

    Playing the dot-com market had become a sport. My friend Dan Woods, former Pathfinder head of application development, joined Jim Cramer to become CTO of TheStreet.com, a highly reflective dot-com that reported in detail on the dot-com market while positioning itself for a huge IPO.

    The IPO craze was a unique aspect of the overall dot-com bubble. This was a new trend for Wall Street: investors were suddenly more interested in what happened to a stock on its initial public offering day than in its long-term prospects.

    The IPO thing was really a bit of a scam, and I never understood (even when I soon began profiting from the scam) why regulators allowed it. If you are an insider at Broadcast.com, or an early investor or a “friend or family”, you get to buy a stock at $18 a share on opening day. You instruct your stockbroker beforehand to flip the shares as soon as they reach a certain threshold — say, $58, or $68 (depending on your tolerance for risk).

    The stocks are artificially priced low on opening day to ensure that they shoot up like a rocket. If you bought 1000 shares of Broadcast.com at $18 and flipped them at $68, you made $50,000.

    1000 shares? Screw that. That’s what the Assistant VP of Whatever’s uncle gets. The Assistant VP of Whatever, on the other hand, gets to buy 10,000, and makes half a million. The management team and dozens of early investors make much, much more than that. Many lucky dot-com players and investors are still living off the instant wealth they made by flipping shares on IPO days between 1998 and 2000 (when the bubble finally burst).

    The IPO scam was fully legal, even though it clearly undermined the very purpose of a Wall Street initial public offering, which is to fund a company, not to reward the individuals who have shares in the company. If Broadcast.com was worth $74 a share, the shares should have been priced at $74 a share. The underwriters who set the price at $18 did so precisely because they wanted to profit off the price jump. I still don’t understand why this was legal (but then I don’t understand why a lot of things are legal, and I also don’t understand why a lot of other things aren’t legal).
    

    By any healthy business ethic, launching a company on the stock market to profit from the IPO is wrong. It’s like marrying someone for the wedding night. Not that that probably doesn’t happen often too.

    Anyway, I wish I could say I took an ethical stand against the IPO craze. But I didn’t. I got caught up in the fun and excitement. The NetGravity IPO had been a bust — I only purchased half the 1000 shares I got as “friends and family”, and flipped them for almost no profit — but the experience left me hungry for more.

    I began seriously thinking about a job-change when Charlie Thomas, a friend of mine and the former ad sales chief of Pathfinder/Time, jumped ship to join Mark Cuban at Broadcast.com. He urged me to interview for the sales/marketing tech team, which built prototypes and demonstrations for sales. I went to visit the New York sales office in their nondescript Chelsea building and liked what I saw. They made me an offer — $125,000 a year, more than $20,000 above my salary at Time.

    But there was a big problem: the IPO was over. I wanted to play the game, but a company can only go public once, and the big day was over. I stalled on the job offer and ultimately said no. I guess I was infected with IPO fever, by proxy.

    I also just didn’t want to leave the Time-Life Building. It was a cushy and homey place to work. I was now spending most of every day on the Time Magazine floor building a rudimentary feed system in Vignette Story Server and TCL to transfer Time’s headlines to the Pathfinder main page automatically. My co-developer on this project was a pleasant young man named Andrew Arnold, who would go on to write the Comics column for Time Magazine. I never knew he was into comics; we just talked about feeds and TCL.

    We worked in a circular office, and there was a fancy made-up desk with a bunch of studio lights and TV cameras pointed at it in the center. Every afternoon at 4:30 Walter Isaacson, now Time Magazine chief, would sit down and do a half-hour cable news broadcast.

    Before this, I’d always wondered what it was like to be one of the busy people working behind a broadcaster during a news show. I always assumed there was something phony or put-on about the whole set-up. Here’s the surprise: they did the show in our office every day, and nobody seemed to care. Walter sat in the center of the room and spoke inaudibly into a mic, cameramen and boom mics swirled around, making no noise (the cameramen always spoke in a whisper), moving almost like mimes, and we all simply ignored the commotion and went about our business. Nobody involved with the show ever instructed us as to what or what not to do, nor did they ever thank us for not making funny faces at the camera (I can’t be the only one who was tempted).

    The feed system Andrew and I were building was so cool we often forgot to notice the show. Our project was a success, though it would have been cooler if we had known about the universal XML-based feed format a computer scientist named Dave Winer was inventing right around this time. Our approach was basically to clump data into packets and take it apart. XML? Not quite. But Dave Winer created a very friendly and sensible standard called RSS that I wish we had used for the Time Daily feed.

    1998 was a year of exciting tech innovation. E-commerce companies were starting to put together transaction systems that didn’t make customers want to jump out of windows and that actually managed to work correctly more than 50% of the time. Meanwhile, early adopters were starting to buzz about a new search engine, something called “Google”, which had a gorgeously blank front page and returned surprisingly good results.

    My C++/Sybase/Perl/Java/TCL skills were in super-high demand in late 1998, and I knew I could join any Silicon Alley firm I wanted. I could have found some really smart company doing innovative things to help humanity, but instead I just kept watching the IPOs. In November 1998 a frankly dumb community website called TheGlobe.com — they allowed members to build chintzy-looking “home pages” — had the single most successful IPO in history. They opened at $9 a share and jumped up to $97. This had never happened before in any modern stock market. It was the greatest single day jump in the history of western finance.

    TheGlobe.com? With a home page that looked like a toothpaste coupon? I didn’t understand how they could be worth so much, just as I didn’t understand how Broadcast could be worth so much. (In fact, these companies were on to something — TheGlobe was an early prototype for MySpace, and Broadcast was an early prototype for YouTube).

    I found another company that seemed to have much more substance, more of a real and grounded community. iVillage.com had begun as a message board for women on America Online and had grown under the feisty leadership of Candice Carpenter into Silicon Alley’s most promising next IPO. The launch was scheduled for April 1999. My friend Paul Schrynemakers, a graphic designer for Pathfinder, had just left to become their art director, so I now had a connection there.

    I had been enthralled by a Candice Carpenter speech at a conference earlier in the year. She was unlike any other entrepreneur. She spoke of her stewardship of iVillage in deeply personal and dramatic terms, and I related to her sense of “whole life” involvement in her mission. She spoke of forest retreats and rock climbing challenges as metaphors for work, and the Thoreau connotations pulled me in.

    I also thought iVillage’s IPO was going to be a big winner. They had everything TheGlobe.com had — a strong community presence, an aggressive ad sales operation — and also maintained loyal and enthusiastic message boards that really worked, mostly focused on “women’s issues” like feminism and parenting.

    I went down to the chic Chelsea office across the street from the Flatiron Building to interview at iVillage. I found a happily disheveled hive. I met Chief Financial Officer Craig Monaghan, a gruff Korean War veteran who’d come from Reader’s Digest and was clearly the iVillage management team’s designated “square”. We got along very well.

    He had an emergency, he told me. The web server operators — the techies who kept the website alive day after day — were in full revolt against their former manager, who had now been displaced. Nobody was currently in charge of the web server operation. The angry, overworked and neglected techies had a long litany of complaints, he told me, most of them probably justified, and they were now at the point of total mutiny, and refused to even hold peace talks until certain demands were met. They had the power to destroy the company’s entire web presence.

    It was certainly an unusual situation for a company that intended to go public in three months. That’s why Craig wanted to move fast to bring me in. I would be the new boss of the web operations department, and I’d take control of the situation before it doomed the IPO.

    It seemed like a situation out of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. After speaking to Craig I met Chief Operating Officer Alison Abrahams, who told me a different version of the same story. They were frankly desperate for me to join, and I was in a great position to ask for a good stock option deal. They offered me $110,000 a year with 25,000 stock options. I accepted on the spot.

    I had a poignant and raucous farewell party with all my Time/Pathfinder friends. It was a big and well-attended event, and for once I felt truly popular and well-loved at my place of work. It’s only when you leave, I guess, that you find out people liked you all along.

    

    I look pretty excited in the blurry photos from that night, smiling big with Flora, Ariel, Vicki, Janice. We look pretty out of it because most of us were drunk, and whoever was taking the picture was probably drunk too. Oh, and there would be more drinking and partying in the months to come.

13. Celebrity deaths do not come in threes
    → Zeigen | 25 Jun 2009 | 11:32pm GMT
    

    A year ago, I wrote this post attempting to debunk the superstition that deaths come in threes.

    With the passing of Ed MacMahon on Tuesday, along with Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson today, I’ve seen this superstition resurface. Yet my arguments from a year ago still stand.

    I’d also like to add this refutation: Dom DeLuise died alone.

    Take this list from Wikipedia of celebrities who died in May. I’d argue that Dom was the “most famous” of all the names listed there, but please feel free to assert differently if you disagree. So, where are the other two, if deaths do indeed come in threes?

    We can repeat the exercise for other months.

    RIP, Ed, Farrah, Michael and Dom. Please don’t cheapen their memory repeating a baseless superstition that tries to find a pattern where none exists.

    UPDATE June 28th: Billy Mays has also passed away today, breaking the pattern for even the current three.

14. The Blog and Turfs
    → Literary Kicks | 24 Jun 2009 | 5:49pm GMT
    
    

    1. How delightful to learn that James Joyce may have invented the word ‘blog’ during a typical conversational ramble in Finnegans Wake! Here it is in context:

    Now from Gunner Shotland to Guinness Scenography. Come to the ballay at the Tailors’ Hall. We mean to be mellay on the Mailers’ Mall. And leap, rink and make follay till the Gaelers’ Gall. Awake ! Come, a wake ! Every old skin in the leather world, infect the whole stock company of the old house of the Leaking Barrel, was thomistically drunk, two by two, lairking o’ tootlers with tombours a’beggars, the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers, trou Normend fashion, I have been told down to the bank lean clorks? Some nasty blunt clubs were being operated after the tradition of a wellesleyan bottle riot act and a few plates were being shied about and tumblers bearing traces of fresh porter rolling around, independent of that, for the ehren of Fyn’s Insul, and then followed that wapping breakfast at the Heaven and Covenant, with Rodey O’echolowing how his breadcost on the voters would be a comeback for e’er a one, like the depredations of Scandalknivery, in and on usedtowobble sloops off cloasts, eh? Would that be a talltale too? This was the grandsire
    Orther. This was his innwhite horse. Sip?

    Enough puns for you there? I assume that “blog” is a play on “bog” (and in fact the word “blog” has always seemed to carry an appealing sort of Joycean phlegmatic physicality). Pictured above: an Irish peat bog.

    2. Gogol’s Nevsky Prospect.

    3. Advocating abortion for mixed-race children was not Richard Nixon’s best moment. And linking to this is not my best moment, but what the hell.

    4. A new edition of Richard Hell’s early book The Voidoid, featuring new artwork by Kier Cooke Sandvik.

    5. Alfred Leslie was a Cool Man in a Golden Age

    6. Shared Worlds is a creative writing summer program at Wofford College in South Carolina, featuring guidance by the likes of Jeff Vandermeer, who has asked five writers to describe their ideal fantasy/science-fiction real-life city.

    7. Always a favorite topic around here: Chad Post on paperback, hardcover and paper-over-board book formats.

    8. Bolano’s Savage Detectives visualized.

    9. Sarah Hall appreciates Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan.

    10. Marion Winik on the pitfalls of writing a memoir. Hmmm ….

    11. I totally agree with Ed Champion about the joys of Nicholson Baker.

15. Life is not fair.
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 24 Jun 2009 | 6:05am GMT
    But Life is fairer than I warrant, and my comrades more gracious than I deserve.
    
    I feel fortunate.
    
    
16. Sneaking Spaces
    → Literary Kicks | 23 Jun 2009 | 3:58am GMT
    
    

    Like Harriet M. Welsch, I love sneaking into places. For instance, when they started building a new baseball stadium for the New York Mets in 2007 I just knew I’d have to find a hole in the fence (this is my philosophy of life: every fence has a hole in it somewhere) and explore. I took my daughter Abby early one Sunday morning, and we scored big-time. We even got to stand on the rudimentary pitchers mound and take pictures.

    

    Maybe this was my way of marking my space. I’ve been going to Shea Stadium since I was a little kid, and if they’re building a new stadium in the Shea parking lot and turning Shea into a parking lot itself — well, hell, I have trespassing rights. Anyway, the spot looked a whole lot different when we went to see the New York Mets play the Tampa Bay Rays on Friday night. It was a fun game, though I don’t like the new CitiField quite as much as Shea. Shea Stadium was a perfect simple circle, and everybody faced towards the middle. CitiField has more angles, more distractions, more exhibits and shops and restaurants. Anyway, it was strange to be there with 30,000 people and think about how different the spot looked two summers before when we snuck through the fence.

    

    Anyway, the Mets won, and it was a rollicking happy crowd like every time I’ve seen the Mets at home. The best part of the game was after the game when we walked out to the parking lot where Shea used to be and found the old third base. Marking our space again, I guess.

    Let’s Go Mets! The Home Run Apple still works, so Queens will be okay.

    And now, a parting poem from Frank Messina, talented poet laureate of the New York Mets, author of Full Count: the Book of Mets Poetry, and a fine spoken word poet too.

    It Was I, Mrs. Wiley

    It was I, Mrs. Wiley
    who swiped
    your garbage pail lids
    and turned them into first, second and third,
    It was I who lifted
    the welcome mat from your front stoop
    -unbeknownst to you-
    It was I who proudly placed it down
    and crowned it “pitcher’s mound”

    It was I, Mrs. Wiley
    who laughed out loud
    as balls ricocheted
    off the side of your house
    and into your pruned rosebushes
    and it was I, Mrs. Wiley who
    cracked a home run
    through your second-story window
    It was I, Mrs. Wiley
    who hid behind the Apple tree
    as you hollered through the broken panes

    It was I, Mrs. Wiley
    who had the chance to confess
    when I saw you in Church
    but instead, looked away
    and it was I, Mrs. Wiley
    who your dog chased
    through the pickets
    without looking both ways

    and it was I who watch
    you repair the window
    with putty and tape,
    stifling my giggles
    as you balanced the ladder
    It was I, Mrs. Wiley,
    who broke your window
    and caused you such despair
    yes, Mrs. Wiley, it was I

17. Surgery successful.
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 22 Jun 2009 | 8:30pm GMT
    A brief post to say my surgery was a success. I'm out of the hospital after seven days. They really did a great job. I still feel like I got stabbed in the gut, but that's to be expected. Okay, back to opiate induced sleep. I feel stronger after each rest. I have a wonderful nurse. Every leaf looks greener and I'm happy to be alive and around.
    
    All solidarity with the protesters in Iran.
    
    Check out this 18 minute TED talk on the past present and future of surgery. It shows the robot they used in my surgery:
    
    "Catherine Mohr: Surgery, Past, Present, and Robotic Future."
18. Reviewing the Review: June 21 2009
    → Literary Kicks | 21 Jun 2009 | 10:52am GMT
    

    (Today’s special guest reviewer is Scott Esposito, founder of The Quarterly Conversation, a literary review, and Conversational Reading, an associated blog.)

    The June 21 issue of the New York Times Book Review gets off to an bad start with Katie Roiphe’s front-page review of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-First Century by Cristina Nehring (the review also briefly discusses Against Love by Laura Kipnis).

    The problem with Roiphe’s review is twofold: lack of specificity and excessive credulity. She continually hints at “riveting stories” and “creative interpretations,” yet, as Rolphie presents them, Nehring’s ideas sound as cliched as possible:

    Elsewhere, Nehring interrogates our steadfast insistence on balanced, healthy relationships, our readiness to condemn doomed, impossible entanglements. She argues that it may in fact be a sign of health to enter into a relationship that is turbulent, demanding or unorthodox. She praises long-distance relationships, arduous relationships, relationships with men who are elusive, relationships the therapeutic culture adamantly opposes. She asks, “Could it be that the choice of a challenging love object signals strength and resourcefulness rather than insecurity and psychological damage, as we so often hear?”

    If Rolphie in fact sees this for the bland attempt to be contrarian that it sounds like, she doesn’t let on. Elsewhere, Rolphie quotes Nehring: “We have been pragmatic and pedestrian about our erotic lives for too long,” and is content to let this remark stand, despite the masses of “hotter sex” books available in any bookstore, as well as the mainstreaming of various sexual devices and techniques considered the purview of perverts and Penthouse readers only a generation or two ago. The review concludes with that most damning of critical responses, faint praise:

    Nehring takes on our complaisance, our received ideas, our sloppy assumptions about our most important connections, and for that she deserves our admiration. Even if one doesn’t take her outlandish romantic arguments literally, this is one of those rare books that could make people think about their intimate lives in a new way.

    Dennis Lehane’s review of The Secret Speech, the second novel by writer Tom Rob Smith, is purely average. It’s your typical “several grafs of plot summary plus a couple grafs of opinion”; none of the writing is particularly good or bad, with the exception that one character is described as “beset by galactic levels of guilt.” I only remark on it here since it is one of only two full-length fiction reviews in this issue and therefore seems like a precious thing.

    Toni Bentley’s review of The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters is a good example of a review that would have been fine if it was better edited. The book is about harems and Western explorers’ interaction with them, a topic not difficult to say at least a few interesting things about. Bentley does just that and quotes the book’s interesting thesis: “most of the world [pre-20th century] still subscribed to what I have been calling the harem culture, and in only the few countries of the West, the small peninsular domain of Christendom, did a different attitude prevail.”

    So far so good, although a little more than halfway through, the review loses focus entirely and just becomes a series of unrelated paragraphs. It probably could have been a fine review, but the length draws attention to the loss of focus; additionally Bentley, a dancer and author of books about dance, is way out of her depth here, and it shows. There are also an alarming number of annoying parentheticals, such as “It is not news that Christianity, with its Virgin Birth (just to start things off right), has had little interest in exploring human sexual desire or potential. Sexual energy is way too out of control even for the most committed Christians (see the Holy Trinity of Bakker, Swaggart and Haggard).” As a final note, none of the book’s illustrations are discussed, perhaps forgivable in a review of another book, but not in one of a book about harems.

    Ginia Bellafante’s review of the novel The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (our second and last full-length fiction review), starts off annoyingly enough with a paragraph devoted to gossiping about the million dollar advance paid to the author. But after that first graf the review is actually rather good. It seems that author Reif Larsen has written something like a cross between the pomo novel of information and What Maisie Knew. That Bellafante gives a sense of this without dull plot summary or a lapse of critical opinion is fine work. Her negative review feels merited and her observations feel precise: “Roland Barthes made distinctions between those texts so micromanaged that they ensured reader passivity and those texts, active texts, that invited a greater degree of participation. The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet merely creates the illusion of choice.”

    However, I disagree with Bellafante that one of the plagues of MFA programs is that they produce writers who don’t “aim to mean much” with their books. I have no idea if MFA programs produce writers of this type or not, but if they do, that’s a good thing. I’ll take one writer who just cares about the craft of fiction over ten trying to make their novel “meaningful.” Good art creates its own meaning, by virtue of being good art.

    Ross Douthat’s review of Digital Barbarism, a nonfiction work by the novelist Mark Helprin, is interesting, largely because Helprin is one of very few public intellectuals to try and argue that American copyright law doesn’t go far enough in protecting intellectual property. However, we cannot count on Douthat to present the other side of this issue; for instance, his statement that “a more latitudinarian copyright regime” as “a cause celebre for a certain class of Internetista” is a ridiculous mischaracterization of a widespread movement backed by far more than a few over-active bloggers and cranky professors.

    Unfortunately it’s tough to find much of either side of the argument here. In his review, Douthat seems more interested in demeaning bloggers and commenters on websites than actually outlining what Helprin says or explaining exactly which people and ideas Helprin is arguing for or against (other than the obvious boogeyman, Lawrence Lessig). In other words, this is more like one of the op-eds that Douthat has been hired to write than a book review. The closest Douthat gets to giving us a flavor of Helprin’s argument is this sentence:

    Helprin worries, plausibly, that the spirit of perpetual acceleration threatens to carry all before it, frenzying our politics, barbarizing our language and depriving us of the kind of artistic greatness that isn’t available on Twitter feeds.

    Douthat is, of course, entitled to his beliefs (and he seems to believe that this sentence is largely accurate), but he does those beliefs no service by not even acknowledging the staleness of what Helprin says or the straw men that have been erected here. Much as I disagree with Douthat’s politics, though, at least his writing is far more engaging and professional than a lot of what Sam Tanenhaus seems –judging by this issue — to permit in his review of books.

    Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s “Fiction Chronicle” (covering four new novels) reads roughly like publisher’s copy found on the back of new paperbacks. I understand that 300 words isn’t a whole lot of space to write about a book, but there’s a right way to do a 300-word review and a wrong way. These are wrong. For an idea of what can be accomplished in 300 words, see this review (among other successes) in the recent Review of Contemporary Fiction. But to return to the Times, the “Fiction Chronicle” does do me the service of presenting absolute worst book title I have read this week: “The Exchange Rate Between Love and Money.” And from the same book comes this quote-worthy line: “How do you make love to something that’s not even in the animal kingdom?”

    Maurice Isserman’s short essay on Michael Harrington and his groundbreaking study of poverty in America, The Other America, is lucid, engaging, and appreciated. It’s a nice example of how a review of books can keep important works from the past in the conversation, and Isserman’s fine piece is only marred by the sentence that opens its final paragraph: “Today the poor are no longer invisible, thanks to writers like William Julius Wilson, Alex Kotlowitz and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and to a popular culture that has young people in middle-class suburbs emulating the styles of the inner city.” I must disagree: of course America’s poor are still very much unnoticed today, and if they are more seen now than before that owes more to unmitigated disasters like Hurricane Katrina than the work of journalists or (quite condescendingly) the decision of the children of the well-off to wear overpriced simulacra of the clothes worn in certain inner-city neighborhoods.

    Gary Rosen’s review of of The Age of the Unthinkable is a quick, clean, and successful deflating of a book that sounds pretentious, self-satisfied, and ultimately not even one-eighth as innovative as the author would hope (think of an aspiring Tom Friedman). It’s a lean, taut review, and the editors of the Review should aspire to cut down some of the more bloated pieces in their publication to resemble Rosen’s.

    Megan Marshall’s review of We Two by Gillian Gill is perfectly adequate and more or less bored me. So are, and did, Liz Robbins’s review of A Terrible Splendor (which, in addition to having a dreadful title, sounds like a dreadful book) and Marilyn Stasio’s roundup of crime novels.

    “Inside the List” informs me that something called the The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane debuted in the #2 spot for hardcover fiction, which does nothing to change my impression of the state of fiction in this country. The #1 spot is occupied by some Dean Koontz book about a novelist and a critic fighting to the death over a review. Does anyone honestly care?

    “Paperback Row” seems to be mostly obsessed with memoirs with awful conceits (”Gilmour, a film critic, allowed his troubled 15-year-old son to drop out of school on the condition that he watch three movies a week of Gilmour’s choosing.”) and the kind of petit cultural crit that should have remained a feature article in some glossy magazine. The inclusion at the end of Paul Auster’s previous work of fiction reminds me that he’s been publishing a lot of books lately.

    In the letters section it’s nice to see Ezra E. Fitz from Brentwood, Tennessee, sticking up for translators.

    I don’t have much to say about the “Editors’ Choice” list, except to note its lack of diversity.

    And rounding out this issue, the less that is said about the “Up Front: Dennis Lehane” by “The Editors,” the better.

    Not counting the “Fiction Chronicle,” this week’s issue of the Review covered 2 works of literary fiction, an abysmal performance by virtually any standard. All in all, the fiction coverage in this issue has done nothing to sway me from my belief that the Review is virtually irrelevant for anyone who seriously cares about literature in this country.

    Oddly enough, the nonfiction coverage in this issue of the Review gives me a renewed appreciation for Bookforum. True, that publication has seriously downgraded its fiction coverage over the past year, but at least the nonfiction coverage found therein is something that doesn’t consistently insult the intelligence of educated adults. And even the fiction coverage, in its weakened state, is infinitely preferable to what I read in this issue of the Review.

    I suppose if I were to grade this issue I could give it a “C,” in the sense that this is probably not much better and not much worse than the reviews of books still extant in the nation’s newspapers. However, if I were to grade the issue based on the standard that the Review sets for itself as the nation’s pre-eminent and most important weekly review of books, then I’d have to say that it’s failing to meet its expectations.

19. FRINGE
    → Literary Kicks | 19 Jun 2009 | 3:09am GMT
    
    

    (This is chapter 22 of my ongoing memoir of the Internet industry.)

    My satisfaction with the response to Notes From Underground didn’t last very long. It’s a strange thing to suddenly get public attention, especially if you are a shy or quasi-Asperger’s person as I generally am. Being noticed is both addictive and repellent.

    As slight as my brushes with “web celebrity” were during the middle and late years of the 90s, they always left me feeling uncomfortable and embarrassed. It’s easy to see why big celebrities like Lindsay Lohan or Any Winehouse or Michael Jackson or Britney Spears go stark-raving insane. I don’t know how they manage to deal with fame every day. It enervated me just to get my name in WIRED magazine twice.

    By the time the Notes From Underground clamor died down I’d sold about 350 copies, nowhere near enough to break even, and despite the good reviews I felt very discouraged. The truth is, there’s nothing like a small taste of success to make a guy feel like a real failure. It’s only when you reach for something far away, sometimes, that you discover your own limits, or your own fatal flaws.

    What, I tried to remember, had I been working so hard for the past four years? I knew I was aiming towards some grand literary vision, but I didn’t seem to have achieved my goal. I had spent the last four years running myself ragged, pouring my heart out into a Beat Generation website, then a tribute to the borough of Queens, then a hectic literary anthology, and then a goddam movie …! Nobody could accuse me of not putting in the hours. But what was it all for?

    And what had I gained? An empty bank account, an alienated marriage, and a frustrating day job with the media flunkies of midtown Manhattan. I was slightly known in the literary world, but only as an oddity, a member of the fringe. Yeah, I was really rocking the house.

    I could not decide, at this time, whether Literary Kicks was helping or hindering me. I often considered shutting it down and starting something else fresh. There wasn’t really much to Literary Kicks at this time — it was still the same flat HTML site it had been since 1994, all the files hand-coded using the ‘vi’ editor. I updated “Beat News” about once a month. There was no commenting, no community, no “Action Poetry”.

    I sometimes asked my stepfather Gene for business advice, and he suggested I transform the site into something commercial, perhaps an online version of Writer’s Digest. The idea didn’t thrill me.

    The online content business was struggling badly all over Silicon Alley in 1998. It’s funny that the late 1990’s are now remembered for the rollicking dot-com stock market, which people imagine was flying high every day of the week during these years.

    In fact, even at the very height of dot-com mania, Internet stocks were considered highly suspect, and often sold at depressed prices. What’s now remembered as a fast-moving dot-com stock market actually only moved fast at unpredictable moments, in sudden fits, starts and spurts. Painful failures and disappointments were rampant at every level of the growing Internet industry.

    For a year and a half I’d been looking forward to the initial public offering of NetGravity, the advertising software company I’d been closely involved with as one of the first end users. The IPO was finally scheduled for June 1998, and I was granted a valuable “friends and family” offer to buy 1000 shares at the opening price, which was wavering between $9 and $10. It was on deals like this that early investors in companies like Netscape and Amazon scored big on a popular stock’s opening day.

    But as NetGravity’s IPO day approached my friends in the company sadly told me “the stock’s not hot”. Wall Street wasn’t going for it. NetGravity was in the advertising sector, but investors wanted e-commerce plays. I bought 500 shares of the stock, which opened with a fizzle, flipped them immediately on Gene’s good advice, and netted about $200 for all my trouble. Some bonanza.

    Online content was just not hot in 1998, and this was especially true at Time Inc. New Media/Pathfinder, though we kept plugging away. My team (C++ programmer Diane King and data analyst Ken Gerstein) and I launched an exciting new service to help the ad sales team, the User Profile Server, a primitive attempt to support ad targeting through real-time cookie-based user profiling. It was an exciting piece of software and a true feat of engineering that took nine months of hard work, and yet it’s the sad truth that we never closed a single deal based on our ability to target ads. Another great moment in Pathfinder history.

    In early 1998 we got a new technology chief, Igor Shindel. The buzz about Igor was that he was a “turnaround guy”, expert at managing troubled software departments, which basically meant he was going to whip our scatter-brained asses back into marching formation. This was fine with me. I was bored with surfing the web in my office, and I wanted to work on something cool. But I didn’t want to manage the ad technology team anymore, so I asked Igor Shindel for a new responsibility.

    My best idea was to rebuild our web server architecture so that our magazine properties could have URLs like “Time.com” and “People.com” (instead of our embarrassing “Pathfinder.com”). I also wanted to get rid of the long strings of random characters that made our URLs look silly. These long random character strings were a painful remnant of the unused e-commerce/personalization software originally installed by Open Market, which was still active on the site because we were afraid of what might break if we shut it off.

    We were simply carrying around too much baggage in our web server operations, and I put together a Powerpoint proposal for a project to rebuild the entire platform from scratch. We would throw Open Market out and rebuild with Netscape or Apache software. Because my proposed architecture would allow magazines to have distinct URLs, I had the support of influential people within the organization, like Hala Makowska, a brash and charming People magazine editor who ran the popular “People Online” section of the website and saw Pathfinder as a pointless bureaucracy that gave her nothing and constantly held her back. All the magazine editors were angry about our shoddy server capabilities and performance, and I really thought my proposal had a chance.

    
    
    

    I was invited into Igor Shindel’s office about a week after I emailed the proposal around. He closed the door with the clinical grimness of a surgeon and told me it wasn’t going to happen. Jorgen Wahlsten, the guy who’d been managing our web server operations since Pathfinder was born, was against my plan, and Igor couldn’t take the risk of Jorgen walking out in anger.

    I liked Jorgen Wahlsten a lot, and so did everybody else. He was a very nice and smart guy with a professorial demeanor and a Swedish accent, and he was an awesomely talented techie. But it was obvious, to me and to many others, that after four years of wrestling with our web servers he’d been soundly beaten to the ground. He’d run out of ideas and given up hope, and our physical racks were a hopeless mess and he just kept patching bugs. It was clearly time to throw the guy a life preserver, give him a Rubik’s cube or something to relax with, and bring in some new blood on the server farm.

    I said all this to Igor, sputtering in frustration as I sat in his office about how sure I was that I could do a better job managing our web servers. Igor shook his head and smiled and offered me a consolation prize.

    There was a big project in the air, a content syndication deal code-named “Bell Canada”. Content syndication was one of the hot trends on Silicon Alley, and we were leading the wave with an ambitious deal that was just about to close with Bell Canada to produce a custom subscriber-only web entertainment system for their new DSL home service.

    The reason this was a big deal was the whopper price tag. For some reason (none of us could figure it out), Bell Canada was willing to pay us two million dollars to launch this beast, and another million a year to maintain it. The whole thing didn’t quite make sense, but I was appointed the software manager for the Bell Canada project, with two young developers on my team.

    The Bell Canada project interested me for a few reasons. I wanted to learn about this hot new thing called XML that I was reading about on websites and in InfoWorld magazine. This was a new protocol for storing and exchanging data, amounting to the first really major change in the technology of data management since the invention of SQL in 1970. Content syndication would be a good opportunity to get my hands dirty with some real XML. I was also looking forward to doing some work with Macromedia Flash, which would be the basis of our user experience.

    I also liked the project chief, a somewhat crusty but vigorous old salt Time magazine veteran named Dick Duncan. He was a big talker and a rainmaker, and he’d been responsible for roping the Bell Canada guys into the deal at the beginning. He had a proud sea captain’s bark and a gung-ho attitude that was refreshing to see around the office. I thought we might get along very well together.

    And then … surreally, magically, as if in a slowly unrolling dream … the Bell Canada project began to softly and steadily disintegrate into yet another cosmic clusterfuck, just as bad as Personal Edition had been, as if we’d never learned any lesson, another complete mess. As soon as the project began I discovered that Dick Duncan hated my guts, because I was one of those smarmy tech guys with the short pants and the skateboards (even though it wasn’t me with the skateboard, that was Aaron Costa, who he hated just as much). He chewed me out and yelled at me a lot, and then the whole project fell apart into a big crazy mass when suddenly Bell Canada announced that they weren’t going to buy the package after all. It had all, apparently, been a misunderstanding.

    I guess I got the last laugh at Dick “Captain Ahab” Duncan on the crazy day that Bell Canada fell apart. It didn’t feel great at the time. I wish I’d gotten a chance to get the last yell.

    I knew it was time for me to move on from Time Inc. I needed a new frontier. But something kept calling me back every day. I think it was the ghost of Henry Luce.

    I started thinking a lot about Henry Luce, the founder of Time and Time Inc., after I read his biography in the spring of 1998. He’d been a bright young Yale graduate when he founded the newsweekly with a friend in 1923. Time magazine became quickly known for its brash voice, rapid-fire prose style, skepticism, sarcasm and curiosity for unusual topics.

    Henry Luce was an earnest Christian and a strong believer in a virulent American military presence around the world. I don’t agree with most of his politics, but I admire him for his dedication to journalistic innovation, and for the gusto with which he worked. When he and Briton Hadden founded the magazine, they explained that they would try to report without prejudice, but then listed six “prejudices” they would allow themselves to be influenced by:

    1. A belief that the world is round and an admiration of the statesman’s “view of the world”.
    2. A general distrust of the present tendency toward increasing interference by government.
    3. A prejudice against the rising cost of government.
    4. Faith in the things which money cannot buy.
    5. Respect for the old, particularly in manners.
    6. An interest in the new, particularly in ideas.

    Henry Luce died in 1967, but I felt his spirit in the elevators (where, it was said, he liked to pray), in the grand hallways of the nicer floors, in the magazines themselves (Fortune, it was said, was Luce’s favorite). I guess I admired Henry Luce because I couldn’t think of anything I’d enjoy more than creating a publishing empire. I decided to start praying harder when I was in the elevators alone.

    

    Did I mention that the dot-com stock market moved in fits and starts and spurts? Something big was about to happen. For no discernible reason that anyone could detect, online content was about to briefly become the hottest property on Wall Street, and I was about to step onto the wildest roller coaster ride of my career. Pathfinder, it turns out, was just an apprenticeship for the next stop on my journey.

    But first I had to find my way out of this morass and to my next destination.

20. Seventeen imminent replacements for Twitter
    → Zeigen | 17 Jun 2009 | 5:40am GMT
    

    You may have read about the recent Twitpocalypse, which has killed off Twitter entirely. Sure, for some users, things may seem fine at twitter.com, but really that’s just fumes. The whole thing has imploded and should be considered an ex-service.

    

    Micro-blogging is here to stay, however, so I present to you a smattering of Twitter-replacement sites, each limiting you to 140 characters, that will shortly overtake Twitter in popularity.

    1. Bitter: Angsty updates from divorcees and teenagers.
    2. Litter: Just trash talk, from litterbugs and teenagers.
    3. Fitter: Automatically sends updates every few minutes when you’re working out at Gold’s Gym, from gym rats and teenagers.
    4. Knitter: It’s your grandma’s micro-blogging service. And her related teenagers.
    5. Sitter: Yup, they’re in your house, eating your pizza, watching your TV, talking to their significant others, and sending “seats.” Statistically, most babysitters are in fact teenagers.
    6. Flitter: Changes topics automatically mid-tweet, for those suffering from ADD as well as teenagers.
    7. Quitter: Trying to stop smoking or sniffing glue? This is the micro-blogging service for you; updates from 12-steppers and teenagers.
    8. Spitter: Great expectorations, from watermelon-seed-lovers and teenagers.
    9. Fritter: Some fried apple donut content, but this is mostly a service where the freeps hold a contest to see who can come up with the biggest time-wasting activities. Each minute brings hundreds of hour-squandering suggestions from the idle rich and teenagers.
    10. Glitter: It’s not gold, but it’s got a lot of Mariah Carey discussion, from her fans and other teenagers.
    11. Slitter: An exclusive status-updating site for Jason Vorhees and those he stalks: teenagers.
    12. Ritter: When you roll a seven in Settlers of Catan or eat imported chocolate bars, tweet about it here; from grognards and teenagers.
    13. Titter: Every update brings the LOL, teehee, from nitrous-oxide abusers and teenagers.
    14. Jitter: Red Bull-branded site emphasizing extreme caffeine consumption status updates from Starbucks baristas and teenagers.
    15. Hitter: Very heavy updates, from boxers, Tae Kwon Do masters, and teenagers.
    16. Snitter: This one’s not very different from Twitter, actually.

    Of course, there’s another site, and everyone uses it every single day, but modesty demands that the only thing I say about it is that each update from this site consists of just the letters TMI. It’s kind of a crappy service.

21. Marcel Proust: Beyond the Madeleines
    → Literary Kicks | 17 Jun 2009 | 1:46am GMT
    
    

    When I was young, I used to go to the public library and head straight for the “P” aisle in the fiction section. Then I would wander through the stacks until I came to Proust. I would gaze with awe at the seven volumes of the work that was called, at that time, Remembrance of Things Past. I would take a volume off the shelf, leaf through it, and put it back. The strange sounding titles, Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way, The Sweet Cheat Gone, seemed to me like the chronicle of some secret world; a world that I could experience if I just read the novel. However, I never checked out any of the books. The thought at the time of reading a novel that long seemed too daunting. I said to myself, someday I will read it. Someday.

    Someday came about five years ago when I took a class on Proust, specifically on the novel- within-a-novel which appears in the first volume. The first volume is entitled Swann’s Way, and the novel-within-a-novel is titled “Swann in Love”. I took the class as part of a personal effort to become proficient in the French language, a language that I had studied in college, but then neglected for years. I struggled through “Un Amour de Swann”, but when I finished it I was hooked. The characters, the writing, the discussions of art and literature were something that I had not seen before in another novel.

    After I finished “Swann in Love” I went on to read the entire first volume, then the second, and then finally the entire novel. Many people read Swann’s Way and then give up, because it takes some effort to read Proust. The prose style is something that you have to get used to. Once you do, however, you find it a thing of enjoyment. The long, convoluted sentences that span multiple pages are at first difficult to follow, but soon they become something to look forward to. The pace of the novel is stately and measured. During the course of the narrative, when the protagonist encounters a rose (or any other flower, for that matter), he will stop not only to smell it, but also describe it in great detail. And if the flower is a Hawthorn, well:

    And then I returned to the Hawthorns, and stood before them as one stands before those masterpieces, which, one imagines, one will be better to ‘take in’ when one has looked away for a moment at something else, but in vain did I make a screen with my hands, the better to concentrate upon the flowers; the feeling they aroused in me remained obscure and vague, struggling and failing to free myself, to float across and become one with them.

    In short, if you are going to read Proust, you need to throttle back almost to idle. If reading Kerouac’s On The Road is like driving a fast car at breakneck speed cross-country, then reading Proust’s novel is like settling back in a horse-drawn carriage for a leisurely amble toward the sea. This is not a bad thing, just a shift in gears.

    Before we get into the detail of Swann’s Way, 1et’s take an overall look at the seven volumes of the novel and how they relate to each other. The only way you can discover this is by reading the work from beginning to end, and then the architecture of the books makes sense. But if you are starting out with volume one, you are going to spend a significant amount of time reading the entire novel. It might be nice to get a sense of where you are going, so that when you reach the end, you will have a better insight into what the work means.

    First and foremost, the series of volumes that comprise In Search of Lost Time, as it is now called, follows the growth of the protagonist, M. (also identified as Marcel in one section of the work), from his childhood at Combray through his seaside vacations at Balbec, culminating in his excursions into the literary and social world of Paris. He falls in love, experiences its joys and agonies, and then the freedom that comes with time and forgetfulness after love ends. The novel encompasses World War One and its aftermath, and addresses one of the great political events of its day, the Dreyfus Affair. Along the way, M. struggles to establish himself as a writer. He has always had the desire to write a great work of literature, but his indolence and lack of self-confidence prevent him. Finally, near the end of the last volume, he experiences a series of unconscious memory flash-backs. These bring back events from his past with such clarity that he realizes that he can mine his past and transform it into compelling fiction. He decides to write the massive work that we have just read. The novel thus circles back upon itself, the ultimate story-within-a-story. Proust likened it to the Mille et Une Nuits, our Thousand and One Arabian Nights, which was one of his favorite texts.

    In Search of Lost Time is not composed simply of beautiful descriptive passages and interesting characters. The work also discusses major themes. Some of these are: the persistence of memory, the complexity and bitterness of love, and the preference of imagination to reality. Memory, we find, can be called out involuntarily and then used to serve art. Love, that is, Proustian love, is filled with jealousy and suspicion, and the desire for the lover to subjugate the loved one. No major character in the novel has a selfless, non-possessive love for another, and in fact love is often likened to an illness, which is painful during its course, and only “cured” by time. Imagination in Proust’s world always paints a brighter picture than reality. The young hero obsesses for months about seeing the actress Berma (a thinly disguised Sarah Bernhardt) perform in Racine’s play Phedre. He imagines the beauty and drama of the scenes. But when he sees the actual performance, although wonderful, it does not reach the levels that he had set for it in his imagination, and he is disappointed. Some of the major themes are discussed at soirees or at the salon of the Verdurins. The Verdurins are a nouveaux riche couple with more money than taste, and the members of their circle often serve as a foil for Proust’s ideas. The themes are also examined during the constant ruminations of the protagonist, M.

    So this is what you are getting yourself into with Proust. Part philosophical treatise, part discussion of art and literature, part psychological analysis of love and other human behavior, In Search of Lost Time follows the history of France from the Belle Epoque to the aftermath of World War One, with the subsequent rise of the bourgeoisie and the decline of the aristocracy. Thrown in for good measure are wicked satires of the various social classes and their mores, and deft skewering of the pompous. All of this is framed by the coming of age story of young M, who enters the world of literature and art and struggles to make his mark.

    Swann’s Way opens with the reflection of an older narrator looking back at how he used to fall asleep when he was a child, staying at his Great Aunt’s house in Combray, where his family took their spring (and often summer) vacations. He thinks back to that time, when sometimes he would drop off to sleep in an instant, while other times he would fall asleep, then wake up, and spend the night pondering some issue close to his heart. But his most anxious moments came when his mother was not able to come upstairs and give him a kiss goodnight. It is here that we see the fine line that separates the narrator from the protagonist known as M. The narrator is omniscient, is of mature age, and also has his own set of opinions on different characters, art, and society. M., the subject, wends his way through the story, and ages appropriately. I would place him at about eight years old in the “Combray” section of Swann’s Way. The narrator reflects back on a subterfuge that the protagonist pulled off to get his mother to give him a kiss good night, and it is the stuff of 007 espionage mixed with commedia dell’arte farce. His mother is being detained, at the hero’s bedtime, over coffee with their neighbor, Charles Swann. The hero despairs of getting his good night kiss, so he writes a letter to his mother begging her to come upstairs for an important reason that he cannot put in writing. He then entrusts the family cook, Francoise, to deliver the letter, although he is unsure if she actually will deliver it. Finally, Francoise assures him that the note was delivered. He now lives in the agony of waiting for his mother to come to his room, and he will not be able to sleep until she does. He also faces grave consequences if his father discovers the plot and disapproves. He waits. Finally, his parents bid farewell to Swann and come upstairs to bed. M. is terrified: what will happen? Waiting on the landing, he sees his mother and throws himself upon her. Her response: “Off you go at once. Do you want your father to see you waiting here like an idiot?” He implores her again, “Come and say goodnight to me.” Then he sees his father’s candle. “Go back to your room. I will come.” His mother says. But it was too late. His father was upon them. M. mutters to himself “I’m done for.”

    But something quite the contrary to punishment occurs. When his mother tells his father what had happened, the father, instead of getting angry and punishing the boy, says to his wife “Go along with him, then. You said just now that you don’t feel sleepy, so stay in the little room for a while, I don’t need anything.” More than just getting a good night kiss, he gets his mother to spend the night with him. His grandmother had bought him a collection of books by Georges Sand and others. The books were a little “old” for the young Marcel, but his grandmother would rather have M. read substantive and well-written books than light reading, which she considers to be like candy and bad for his mind. His mother unwraps the book Francois le Champi by Georges Sand, and reads it to him. Marcel is enchanted by the story, and also gets a sense of the style of the author. A near disaster becomes a literary awakening.

    But the remembrances of these sleep events are a bit grey, as if they have faded into the black and white distant past. The next event in the novel turns these grey events to Technicolor. The narrator was beginning to wonder if his memories of Combray were dying out, if even some were already dead. Then, one cold and dreary afternoon he returns to his mother’s house in Paris. She has made him an infusion of tea, and has offered him a little cake called a Madeleine, which is molded to resemble a scallop shell. He unconsciously dips the Madeleine into the tea, and sips the tea from the spoon in which he had dipped the morsel of cake. Then: “no sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped…An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.” He attempts to recreate the sensation, with diminishing results. Then suddenly the memory is revealed to him. He used to take these little cakes dipped in tea at Combray on Sunday morning, when he visited his Aunt Leonie. Suddenly, he experiences a flash back of memory, where he can see the town of Combray in color. He can see the square, the flowers in Swann’s garden, and water-lilies on the river Vivonne. The petit Madeleine has opened the floodgates of his memory.

    In the next chapter, “Combray”, we enter completely into M.’s early life, all the places vivid with colors and sounds. We now see the protagonist as a young boy in this country town, and the cast of provincial characters that populate it. Some of the characters are not just provincials, however, and they go on to span the entire length of the novel. We have begun our journey through M.’s life.

    We then encounter a novel-within-a-novel, “Swann in Love.” The story takes place long before the hero’s childhood, so the narrator recounts it in third person. This story shows us the character of Charles Swann, a wealthy stockbroker who has exquisite taste in art and who is much sought after by the smart aristocratic set of the Faubourg Saint-Germaine. He is a personal friend of the Prince of Wales, and is a member of the prestigious Jockey Club. Swann, despite having much better prospects, falls in love with a beautiful courtesan, Odette de Crecy. Odette is not really his type, and definitely beneath his social standing, but he falls in love with her nonetheless. Swann attempts to possess her completely, but he cannot. This leads to several years of agony, jealousy, and despair as Swann attempts to dominate this woman who constantly deceives him. He likens his love at one point to a disease, and hopes that he will die to free himself from the pain. Finally, the love passes, and Swann is well again.

    “Swann in Love” introduces the theme of Proustian love. It is love that is based on jealousy and the desire for possession. During the love affair, one partner is consumed with jealousy and suspicion for the other. The blissful moments are few and far between, as jealousy constantly interrupts the lover’s bliss. This model of love will be repeated several times within the span of In Search of Lost Time. “Swann in Love” also introduces “the petit clan” — the salon of Mme Verdurin, which is used for comic relief throughout the work, as well as a sounding board for Proust’s theories on art, music and literature.

    The last section of Swann’s Way, “Place-Names: The Name”, moves the story ahead several years. The protagonist and his family are now in Paris, and FranCoise takes young M to play in the gardens of the Champs-Elysee, where he meets Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette. Swann and Odette have, surprisingly, married, and they live in Paris with their daughter. Swann is no longer in love with Odette, but he dotes on his daughter Gilberte. The protagonist develops a crush on Gilberte, and they become friends. The book ends with the hero observing the promenades that Mme. Swann — Odette — takes in the Bois de Boulogne, and admiring the elegant fashions that she wears, a scene that will be reprised in the next book.

    Swann’s Way introduces many of the main characters, gives us a wonderful look at French country life in Combray, and sets the narrator on his course to become a man of letters. We taste the bittersweet fruit of Proustian love, and along the way we discuss art and literature. It is a truly remarkable novel that will draw you in on the strength of the characters and the beauty of its writing. This is just the beginning. The best (and worst) is yet to come.

22. FriendFeed comment plugin installed
    → Zeigen | 16 Jun 2009 | 7:36am GMT
    

    I’ve added Gürkan OLUÇ’s FriendFeed Comment plug-in, which should allow for any new posts I make here to have their FriendFeed comments and likes displayed as well.
    

23. Coffee circle
    → Zeigen | 16 Jun 2009 | 5:35am GMT
    

    

24. Comix For Bloomsday
    → Literary Kicks | 16 Jun 2009 | 2:17am GMT
    
    

    1. For your Bloomsday enjoyment: comic strip artist Robert Berry is visualizing James Joyce’s Ulysses. This project appears to be off to a great start.

    2. More Bloomsday action: Dovegreyreader on a new book called Ulysses and Us by Declan Kibberd.

    3. Farewell to poet Harold Norse.

    4. It must be a good sign that somewhere inside the giant paradox that is the nation of Iran, they are loving the inventive and hilarious early writings of Woody Allen.

    5. I did not know that novelist Roxana Robinson was a member of the Beecher family. But what’s this about Lord Warburton being the man Isabel Archer should have married? I was rooting for Ralph Touchett.

    6. The word technology is derived from the same root as textile.

    7. We need a poetry reality show right here in the USA.

    8. A digital Gutenberg would be nice to look at.

    9. What could it possibly have been like to be married to Harold Pinter? Fortunately claims Antonia Fraser, it was not a Pinteresque experience.

    10. “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” (Or, I’d like to add, one man).

    11. Eric Rosenfeld appreciates Thomas Pynchon’s use of description.

    12. Kafka Tribute in New York

    13. Michelle Obama reads Zadie Smith, a better choice (in my opinion) than her husband’s Joseph O’Neill. (Barack is also cited as reading What is the What?, a good choice though not exactly fiction).

    14. The Who’s Quadrophenia GS Scooter has been sold at an auction. (Though it’s from the movie, not the record album photo shoot).

    15. Via Bookninja, what the book you’re reading really says about you.

25. 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.
26. 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.
27. 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.
28. chop chop chop
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 15 Jun 2009 | 4:31pm GMT
    Sigmoid colectomy is today. They'll also be fixing some other stuff, a fistula through my bladder, etc. Its all a series of tubes, donchaknow. We're going to beat this thing or die trying.
    
    I'll try to post when I get out the hospital in a week or so. Maybe I'll have access to the interwebs from the hospital.
    
    There has been no bedside conversion thus far. ;-)
    
    I'll save ya some white meat...
29. End Times
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 14 Jun 2009 | 8:57pm GMT
    

    Who let Jason Jones of the Daily Show in to talk to New York Times staffers? Hilarious and on the money.

    The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
    End Times
    www.thedailyshow.com
    Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

30. This is NOT “doing the laundry”
    → Zeigen | 13 Jun 2009 | 5:28pm GMT
    

    Fellow men,

    “Laundry” means sorting, folding, and putting away the clothes. Dumping the dirty stuff into the washer, moving it to the dryer — that’s all the easy part.

    I have learned this the hard way and hope you profit from my downfall.

    How about dem Bears?

    Now, please excuse me because I need to go use some power tools.

    Your bro,
    Stephen

    P.S. In other news, “doing the dishes” apparently means doing more than just piling the dirty dishes in the sink. I’m still investigating this one.

    

31. Pop quiz on racism
    → Zeigen | 13 Jun 2009 | 8:49am GMT
    

    Which of the following is racist?

    1. A latina who says, “I’m proud to be a latina.”
    2. A white man who says, “I’m proud to be a white man.”
    3. All of the above.
    4. None of the above.
32. The case of PFC, Stephen Dale Green
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 11 Jun 2009 | 7:11am GMT
    One case I cannot seem to get out of my head. It eclipses other, perhaps more important, thoughts.
    
    Its the case of Pfc Steven Dale Green.
    
    In March 2006, after an afternoon of card playing and drinking, Green and three other soldiers went to the home of 14-year-old Abeer Qassim al-Janabi near Mahmoudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad. Green shot and killed the teen's mother, father and sister, then became the third soldier to rape her before shooting her in the face. Her body was set ablaze. 
    
    On May 21, 2009, a Kentucky jury sentenced former 101st Airborne Division Pfc. Steven Dale Green to life in prison.  Many wanted the death penalty.  Stephen has an honorable discharge from the us army.
    
    

    ---

    
    This is Stephen's statement. One that I doubt any us army recruiter will show to their hopefuls:

    GREEN: What I am about to say is completely my own. No one told me what to say. No one wrote this for me. Not my lawyers, not the government, not anybody ...

    I am truly sorry for what I did in Iraq and I am sorry for the pain my actions, and the actions of my co-defendants, have caused you and your family. I imagine it is a pain that I cannot fully comprehend or appreciate. I helped to destroy a family and end the lives of four of my fellow human beings, and I wish that I could take it back, but I cannot. And, as inadequate as this apology is, it is all I can give you ...

    Before I was in the Army, I never thought I would kill anyone, and even after I was in the Army, but before I went to Iraq, I never thought I would intentionally kill a civilian. When I was in Iraq, something happened to me that I can only explain by saying that I lost my mind. At some point while I was in Iraq, I stopped seeing Iraqi's as good and bad, as men, women, and children. I started seeing them all as one, and evil, and less than human. When that happened, any natural, learned, or religious morality, that normally would have stopped this, was gone.

    But I see now that I was wrong ...

    Most of all I am sorry for the deceased, but aside from them, I am the most sorry for the boys whose family are gone. I know what we did left a hole in their lives, and scars on their minds, and that there is no making up for that. I only hope for them that they can somehow, and I don't know how, move forward, and have a good future despite the nightmare in their past that I helped create. They have my apologies and my prayers, as meaningless as they must seem ...

    ... But in the end, whether in one year or fifty, I will die, and when I die I will be in God's hands. In the Kingdom of God where there will be justice, and whatever I deserve, I will get. On the day of judgment, God will repay everyone according to his works, and affliction and distress will come upon every human being who does evil. I know that I have done evil, and I fear that the wrath of the Lord will come upon me on that day. But, I hope that you and your family at least can find some comfort in God's justice.

    I see now that war is intrinsically evil, because killing is intrinsically evil. And, I am sorry I ever had anything to do with either.

    And, I cannot say this enough times, whether or not you can ever forgive me, and I don't see how you could, I am and will always be sorry for what I did.

    
    I think of this everytime I hear the television tell me we liberated Iraq.
    
    

    ---

    
    This is the young girl he raped and murdered, Abeer Qassim al-Janabi.
    
    
33. Slippery slope!
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 6 Jun 2009 | 4:00pm GMT
    
34. "In The Name of God" - David Rovics
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 4 Jun 2009 | 10:51pm GMT
    David Rovics leaked a rough cut of a song he's writing about the assassination of Dr. Tiller:
    
    Download: "In The Name of God" MP3
    
    
    
    
    In the Name of God
    
    I woke up this morning
    And I turned on the news
    It was a Sunday morning
    They were sitting in the pews
    The doctor's wife was in the choir
    She was about to sing
    She saw it all in front of her
    And she heard that awful ring
    
    In the name of God he held his pistol
    Pointed at the doctor's head
    In the name of God he pulled the trigger
    Now the doctor's lying dead
    
    Dr. Tiller had a family
    Three daughters and a son
    Two girls were both doctors
    Who were proud of what he'd done
    They knew someone had to do something
    Before they left this world behind
    If it wasn't them then who would serve
    The cause of womankind
    
    In the name of God...
    
    This is not Afghanistan
    It's the Heartland USA
    Where a girl has to wonder
    If she'll get acid in her face
    Where they bomb the women's clinics
    Because the preacher told them to
    Where the man there on the TV
    Tells them that's what they should do
    
    In the name of God...
35. anti-choice terrorists strike again
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 1 Jun 2009 | 4:11pm GMT
    An Operation Rescue terrorist murdered a doctor this weekend. We've had 36 years of terrorism against a womans right to choose and this has led us to another doctor laying dead. Moderate Christians have reason to fear, as this slaying was done at a church likely as a message to moderates that they're also considered the enemy. We are expected to die quietly, but we shall not.
    
    "
    
    Mr. Terry is available for comment at 904-687-9804.
36. GMail vs. Mail.app
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 1 Jun 2009 | 3:30pm GMT
    

    Confession: I’ve never liked webmail – I was a hardcore Eudora user for ages, then spent five years with BeOS desktop mail clients, then a year with Entourage on the Mac before finally switching four years ago to Apple’s Mail.app, with its flawless IMAP implementation. Every time I’ve tried the “next generation” of webmail clients, they’ve felt anemic to me, and I’ve felt like my workflow slowed way down — not because they were slow per se’, but because of the dozens of small niceties you get with desktop clients that you don’t get with webmail. I’ve relegated webmail to something you use when you’re not at your own machine for some reason and/or aren’t able to take the two minutes it takes to configure IMAP at a foreign machine.

    That’s why I’ve always been amazed to see how many developers and gear-heads use GMail. These are tech-savvy people, who I’d think would have the same frustrations with webmail that I do. What are they seeing that I’m not seeing? I totally get the convenience factor of being able to access my mail through any web browser, anywhere. I wouldn’t mind having that, but so far it hasn’t seemed worth the sacrifices. I know GMail keeps getting better, so thought it was finally time to give myself over to GMail for a week and see how it goes. Here are some notes on that experience.

    n.b.: I’m using Google’s official list of keyboard shortcuts. I used the 3rd party tool A to G to convert Apple’s Address Book to CSV, then imported 1200 contacts into GMail’s contact system.

    My list of GMail gripes, with a few faint praises in the mix:

    - No way to change the default reading font. Really??? The default reading/writing font is just too small to be comfortable (for me), and it’s ridiculous that something this straightforward and ubiquitous in desktop clients would not be there. How hard can it be to give the user a choice of common font faces and sizes? Does not compute.

    - No way to quote previous text before replying. Every desktop mail client I’ve used lets you select a block of text in a message, then hit Reply. Only the selected text appears in the reply. This is so core to netiquette and to my every day workflow that it seems like a non-negotiable feature. And yet no webmail client I’ve tried supports it. Not even GMail. No wonder over-quoting is such a problem these days. Later… OK, I discovered that this “feature” is actually available under Settings | Labs. When I enabled it, it complained that it could “not be loaded,” and continues to complain every time I exit the Settings menu, though it did work correctly in my first test. Cool, but why is it in Labs, as if it’s some kind of optional convenience that only a few people might want? How can this not be part of the default package? Core functionality.

    - Inline photos. A family member sent 10 photos as attachments. When viewed in Mail.app they’re displayed inline, nice and large; GMail only shows thumbnails inline, though you can click “View all images” to see them full size on a separate page. There is of course no option to “Save all to iPhoto” in GMail. Since they were family photos, that’s exactly what I wanted to do.

    - No preview pane. For realsies? I know of at least two webmail clients (RoundCube, which is available on Birdhouse, and Apple’s mac.com (errr, me.com)). If they can do it, why can’t one of the most popular webmail clients of them all?

    - More clicks to view the next message. When done viewing one message, if you click Delete or Archive, you’re taken back to the full message list, which lacks a preview pane. So you then need to click again to view the next message. This kind of “more clicks/keystrokes to accomplish common tasks” is all over the place in GMail.

    - No way to turn external mail checking on/off. I now have GMail configured to work as a POP client to two external accounts (would have configured it as IMAP, but GMail doesn’t support that, even though you can use external clients to talk IMAP to GMail – weird). Now I’d like to have GMail stop checking those two external accounts for a while, without removing all the config info. Too bad – the only way to make it stop is apparently to delete the account completely. Grrr…

    - Poor conversation threading. GMail does an OK job at this – better than other webmail clients, but nowhere near as clean visually or as easy to navigate as threaded discussions in desktop mail apps. And because GMail shows a thread all on one page (thanks again to no preview pane), deleting individual messages out of the thread takes a lot more scrolling and clicking than it does in a desktop client. GMail’s threading is a pale imitation of technology we’ve had on the desktop for years. However, I really do like being able to see my own replies automatically in the context of the thread, even without having explicitly cc:’d myself, and without having to dig through the Sent folder. But the ease of expanding and collapsing a thread, of jumping to the next unread message in a thread, of deleting individual messages from a thread… all vastly superior in Mail.app.

    
    In Mail.app, a thread is indicated by the presence of an arrow in the left column.

    
    Cmd-RightArrow expands the thread; spacebar jumps you to the next unread message in the thread. The actual conversation is shown in the Preview pane. It’s easy to delete individual messages from the thread.
    

    - Keyboard shortcuts. Yes, there are some. Yes, they work for the most part. But they’re not as ubiquitous or as clean to use as the keyboard shortcuts in a desktop client. I found myself doing a lot more mousing in GMail than I’m accustomed to doing in email.

    - Adding contacts. I get a message from someone who’s not in my Contacts list. If there’s a way to add this person to my Contacts list on the fly, I’m not seeing it (yes, I looked). Mail.app makes this common process trivial and intuitive.

    - Moving messages between accounts. One of the ways I rely heavily on IMAP is the ability to drag and drop messages between various mailboxes and servers. If I receive a message at work that I want to handle at home, I drag it from calmail to birdhouse, and vice versa. If I want to pull something out of cold storage (e.g. from a local mail store and put it back on a live mail server for handling), I can do that. GMail can be configured to talk to multiple accounts, but since it itself does not work like an IMAP client to foreign mail servers, it can’t do any kind of inter-server message moving. I guess the idea is that its model makes this kind of thing irrelevant, but it feels like a big missing piece of the modern mail experience.

    - Integrated chat. Both GMail and Mail.app have this, but GMail clearly wins here when you’re at someone else’s computer since you don’t have to set up both the mail and chat clients (thanks @jrue for this point).

    - “Send Again” feature. Not something you use a lot, but when you do, it’s a real time saver. Use this after sending a message to someone who’s address has died and you want to try again to the right address, or when you left someone off the original cc: list. Mail.app and other desktop clients have it. GMail doesn’t.

    - Breaks quoting. Let’s say you’ve got a paragraph of quoted text in an incoming message and you want to reply to it in two parts. In a desktop client, you put the cursor where you want to break the graf and hit Return. A new quote mark is automatically added to the beginning of the new line. Not in GMail – you end up with the first line that should be quoted suddenly unquoted. Later… turns out this does work properly in rich text mode in GMail, but not in plain text mode. But I prefer to stay in plain text mode, only switching to rich text mode when necessary.

    
    While replying in plain text mode in GMail, insert cursor in the middle of a paragraph and hit Return to start your reply. The new line lacks a starting mail quote mark, breaking netiquette and readability for the recipient.

    - No Data Detectors. OK, this is only available in Mail.app, not all desktop mail clients, but it really is a killer feature. Roll over any date or time in any format, or any person’s name or email address, even in a plain text message, and you get a little drop-down menu that lets you quickly add that item to your calendar or address book.

    

    Data detectors do an amazing job of figuring out all the right fields — almost magic (try it with messages referencing “tomorrow” or “next Tuesday.”) GMail does have an “Add Event” option but it’s nowhere near as intelligent or as slick, and it works for the whole message, not for individual text snippets within the message. Big win for Mail.app.

    - Partial word searches. The search feature in GMail is nice, but is not better than the one in Mail.app. Yes, Google is a bit faster at returning results, but not by much (yes, Apple’s Spotlight is *that* fast). But here’s the kicker – Google and GMail can’t do partial-word searches. So if I’m looking for an email that I know includes the word “question” but I just type “quest” [Return] into GMail search, it turns up nothing! Wildcard searches don’t work either. Very frustrating. Even on their native search turf, Google loses to Apple. Update: There are also types of searches Mail.app can’t do, such as combined OR statements. So let’s call this one a draw.

    - End-of-line key combo. On the Mac, the standard keyboard shortcuts to jump the cursor to the start/end of the current line are Cmd-RightArrow and Cmd-LeftArrow. These don’t work in GMail. In fact, as far as I can tell there’s no keyboard short to do this on the Mac in GMail. Which amounts to one more reason GMail is a lot more mouse dependent than using Mail.app or other desktop client. Can’t blame this on rich text editors either — WordPress uses a TinyMCE variant, and Cmd-RightArrow works there just fine. GMail is just broken in this respect.

    - Ads in my email. They just bug me. I totally understand that that’s how I pay for the service. I get that. I still don’t like looking at them. Irritating. In fact, I found the whole GMail experience more cluttered and just… less elegant than working with a desktop client.

    ADDED LATER

    - Multiple windows. Sometimes I like to have two or more messages open at once, plus a compose window, so I can copy/paste bits around and between messages, or for reference while writing something new. Easy to do in a desktop client. Assumed I could do similar in GMail by cmd-clicking messages to open them in various tabs, but nope – GMail doesn’t allow that – forces you to only be looking at one thing at a time. Is that a feature they haven’t implemented yet, or an intentional limitation? Feels like the latter.

    Upshot: I didn’t follow through on my promise to try GMail for a week. The frustration was too much to deal with, and I quit after four days. I’m back on Mail.app now. I probably missed out on some of GMail’s goodness, but overall, I left feeling exactly like I did going in. GMail has its advantages, but to me, it seems like they’re vastly outweighed by the absence of basic functionality and elegance present in all desktop mail clients (and by additional features in Mail.app) that I just missed too much. Feels good to be home.

37. Maker Faire 2009
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 31 May 2009 | 5:43pm GMT
    

    There were stickers scattered randomly around this year’s Maker Faire: “Last year was better.” The weird thing was that whoever made them would had to have printed them up before the fair began. How could they know in advance? What would have happened if this year had been better than ever? Unfortunately, the stickers were right.

    We’ve attended all four years of Maker Faire now, so Miles has been there at ages 3, 4, 5 and 6 (does that qualify as a tradition?) I still think it’s one of the Bay Area’s most amazing explosions of talent and creativity — there’s nothing else like it. But this year there were noticeably fewer amazing giant steel sculptures, a much smaller presence from the incredible Cyclecide, more guard rails and safety precautions, more people (again), and more attendance from professional organizations. Year by year, the fair is starting to feel a bit less like a family-friendly version of Burning Man, a bit more like an opportunity for professional Lego collectors to network.

    I don’t want to make too much of that though – Maker Faire most definitely has NOT started to suck. It’s still dazzling, inspiring, amazing. Just that it’s started to feel a bit… safer than it once did.

    That said, Miles and I had an amazing day watching the Giant Mouse Trap, building inventions with computer scrap parts, learning about the SCA, “driving” the amazing snail car, watching the human llama wobble around, riding the wooden bikes (my fave part of every MF), digging on a thousand kinds of robots, taking on challenges at the Instructables booth, spending way too much time at the various Legos exhibits, eating great good food on a perfect spring day. And the R2D2 Miles wanted so badly to see last year finally showed up – the little Padouin was beaming with happiness.

    This year’s photo gallery (63 images and 10 videos):

    Click icon at lower right after starting to view full-screen.
    View the whole set at Flickr (includes captions you don’t get with the slideshow).

    See also: my photos from Maker Faires 2008, 2007 and 2006.

38. Books that Changed My Life
    → Life Less Literary | 31 May 2009 | 11:36am GMT
    

    A meme’s been doing the rounds on Facebook. Instructions are as follows:

    Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

    I did that… but then wanted to offer more explanation of why these books are so special to me, and why you should probably read them as well. And so, I spent far too long writing up 16 potted book-reviews (After posting the original 15, I remembered one other which absolutely had to be on the list). Here they are (in no particular order), complete with links to Amazon via my associate account, so that you can buy them and earn me a few coppers if you like the sound of any of the books here (if anyone knows of a good alternative to Amazon for a very low-volume affiliate account, please let me know).
    

    1. Viriconium Nights, M John Harrison. I read this aged 17. At the time, I read only fantasy/sci-fi (which I thought this was). It is, in fact, anti-fantasy: all of its short stories seem to finish unresolved; no quest is ever completed satisfactorily. Suddenly I understood: this is what life is like; there is no beginning, middle and happy end. Despite this, the writing is so beautiful, the choice of words so unconventional and vivid, the stories can be enjoyed for those reasons alone. Reading this book taught me that sometimes it’s all about the journey, not the goal. I realised the fallacy of fantasy, and have never really bothered with it since. This one book completely changed my reading habits.
    2. Pastoralia, George Saunders. Probably the funniest, but also the saddest book I’ve ever read. Again short stories, they are a perfect exaggerated satire of life in the corporatised early 21st century (just as Gogol nails the early 19th century and Kafka the 20th). Saunders started, and has continued, in the same vein, but this his 2nd book is the peak of his originality & brilliance.
    3. All Quiet on the Orient Express, Magnus Mills. Like Pastoralia, warped sad, funny, chilling satire, and also a 2nd book which I prefer to the (more critically acclaimed) 1st, or subsequent ones. A young man camps in the Lake District, and takes on some farm work to subsidise a planned motorbike trip to the Orient. The atmosphere is very similar to League of Gentlemen. But nothing happens. Ever (except for one shocking, terrifying incident). But it "doesn’t happen" in such a way that makes this book the most compelling of page-turners. Surely, any moment now, something will happen! I read this for a book club once, and one of the other members said "how could anyone identify with this book? The hero is so spineless, nobody could be like that in real life." I identify 100% with the hero, I could be just that spineless, and I can appreciate that a story this unlikely could all too easily just happen. (I should also add that the original, Ladybird-style cover for this book is gorgeous. Sadly they’ve reprinted it in something generic and instantly forgettable).
    4. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, Angela Carter. Angela Carter writes like an angel on acid, and nowhere is her writing more trippy than in this book. It’s a story of a young man from a ministry in an unspecified city in an era which seems to hover unobtrusively somewhere between medieval times and the 21st century. The city is under siege from Doctor Hoffman and his hallucination engine, so that nothing is ever what it appears to be. Carter can use language like absolutely no-one else I’ve ever come across. I’ve never experienced synesthesia except while reading her books. She can put one word unobtrusively alongside another in such a way that you can actually smell what she’s talking about, even though that smell is contaned in neither of the two words. Nearly 20 years after I read this book, I can stll remember its exact taste (and still don’t understand why it’s persistently out-of-print).
    5. Geek Love, Katherine Dunn. Again (like Carter) there is a smell, feel, taste which I associate with this novel. Without meaning to sound sexist, it sems that female authors often have a more sensory way of writing than men (although Harrison sometimes comes close). The story of an American family of circus freaks, deliberately and lovingly mutilated during gestation through a variety of bizarre and sickening practices. It’s an extremely beautiful, extremely moving study of the bonds and dependencies which arise within a group who are alone within society.
    6. Gödel, Escher, Bach - an eternal golden braid, Douglas Hofstadter. This was on my 3rd year psychology BSc reading list, for a course in Cognitive Ethology taught by Dr. Susan Blackmore. The book (and the course) changed my life completely: showed me all kinds of metaphors for how human consciousness may operate, and banished the need for any kind of "magic spark" from explanations of consciousness.
    7. The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins. Part of the same Susan Blackmore-led module as Gödel, Escher, Bach, this book did the same for my understanding evolution.
    8. Songlines, Bruce Chatwin. Chatwin’s brand of half travel-writing half musing and philosophising is, in my experience, quite unique and quite magical. This is the story of his trip to Aboriginal communities around Australia, but it is also the story of the human race. He builds up a theory, that humans are natural nomads who draw their energy and inspiration from the rhythms of walking, and who have lost much of their spirit by being coralled into permanent residencies. It’s very convincingly argued, and another example of a book which changed my opinion of what it is to be human.
    9. The Engineer of Human Souls, Josef Skvorecky. I read this during my first two weeks apart from Gill - she was in Egypt while I was buried under a duvet in a squat in Leytonstone. It still conjures up memory of the magic of our young love mixed with the melancholia of separation. The story follows hero Danny (a not-even-thinly disguised version of Skvorecky) during two periods in his life. He is an aging Czech literature professor in a University in Canada, lusting after his young students, but his mind wanders back to his forced-employment and ultimately meaningless sabotage in the Messerschmidt factory in WWII rural Czechoslovakia, lusting after his tuberculosis-stricken co-worker. The novel is divided up according to the authors Danny is teaching at the time - Poe, Hawthorne, Twain. It’s incredibly complex, and I’m sure there is much here which I don’t quite "get", but its melancholy synthesis of youthful uncertainty/optimism and aged wisdom/cynicism really, really buries its way deep inside my heart.
    10. The Photographer’s Eye, John Szarkowski. Szarkowski is my favourite writer on photography (though I’ve long meant to read Geoff Dyer, who is by all accounts a genius on the topic. Sontag and Barthes I’ve struggled with but not yet engaged with). Although this is mainly a (very good) photobook, with an all-encompassing survey of photography at the time of the accompanying exhibition (1964), what most insprires me is the accompany essay and the way the book is structured: split into 5 aspects the photographer must tackle (even if subconsciously) when making a photograph: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point. His explanation of these 5 is so clear and succint that even a child could read it and instantly become a master of photographic critique. It also articulates (again quite perfectly) what it is that makes photography different from other art forms (it’s all in the frame - quite literally).
    11. Slaughterhouse 5, Kurt Vonnegut. Extremely clever, extremely moving, extremely thought-provoking. An example of the kind of sci-fi which I still find quite acceptible, post-Viriconium. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. While captured during World War II, Billy is abducted by aliens who live simultaneously in all times, and he begins to see reality as they do, jumping from one point in his life to another, via old age, the death of his wife, the marriage of his daughter, a WWII bombing raid in reverse where aeroplanes mercifully suck fire & destruction out of a German city, to the finale in a fire-bombed slaughterhouse in Dreseden. One of the most powerful anti-war (but not anti-glacier) books ever, and a constant reminder that every single death is important, yet unavoidable. So it goes.
    12. Exquisite Corpse, Robert Irwin. Robert Irwin is one of the most intelligent, yet one of the most easily readable, authors I know of. This is a fictionalised autobiography of an English surrealist painter, which tells the history of the surrealist movement from the 30s to the 60s. Again, I find myself drawn to the WWII period, where surrealism was unnecessary with "a white horse galloping around inside a burning meat market… a girl in a blue dress emerging with her skipping rope from clouds of black smoke and skipping calmly by… facades of buildings curving and distending like the sets of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari… staircases which led nowhere, baths suspended apparently in mid-air, brick waterfalls flowing out of doorways and objects jumbled incongruously together". The novel also has one of the most audacious twists of any novel I have ever read, truly worthy of a surrealist. Read more of my thoughts on Exquisite Corpse here.
    13. The Good Soldier Švejk, Jaroslav Hašek. I was made aware of this (and also the excellent War with the Newts by Karel Čapek) through frequent references in the work of Josef Skvorecky. I usually struggle with books more than about 50 years old, but this one proved to me that during the First World War there was at least one author who shared a sense of humour with the writers of The Young Ones, Blackadder and The Office. Side-splittingly funny (but sadly uncompleted due to the author’s death), Švejk is the archetypal "little man", who subversively stands up to, and is much cleverer than, those in authority. By obeying their orders to the letter, he brings chaos everywhere he serves. I’m told by various friends that this is one of the absolute classics of Eastern European literature; also that the English language does not contain the range and nuance of swear words required to accurately translate the book.
    14. The Tin Drum, Günter Grass. The Tin Drum. An epic novel on the making of modern Germany. Again, it stays with me particularly because of the imagery and unusual incidents: Oskar’s violent birth, the worn-out drums, his father’s fall into the cellar, and (especially) the horse’s head with the eels. I also have a DVD the excellent Oscar-winning film of this (which only covers about the first half of the novel), plus a copy of the book in its original German (Die Blechtrommel, if I remember correctly), which I dream of one-of-these-days reading even though so far I’ve not managed to struggle very far into page two.
    15. À Rebours (usually Against Nature in English), Joris-Karl Huysmans. I read this on the recommendation of my friend Caroline Simpson, and am very glad I did. The story of Des Esseintes, a fin de siècle decadent aristrocrat who, having experienced all of life’s supposed pleasures and indulgences, tires of it all and has himself bricked up inside a house (with only a small hatch through which his servants deliver his meals). Like the Magnus Mills book, this sounds like it could be a tedious read, but its limitations are part of what make it quite magical: the attention to detail is as breath-taking as an intricately jewel-encrusted tortoise. The writing is quite dense, and this book taught me that reading is also an activity which can benefit from a "slow movement" approach: I lingered over and savoured every single word, and got a huge reward from doing so.
    16. Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban. A post apocalyptic parable written entirely in not-quite-English (I know some people find this kind of thing very hard to read, but I find that if you let the sounds of the morphemes wash over you then within a couple of chapters it all makes sense). I’m told that every single word in the book has at least two meanings (prime among them: Addom, the biblical first man whose splitting caused the nuclear event which created the current state of this Kentish archipelago). Biblical and scientific double-meanings abound, parliament is a ritual carnival carried out by Punch-and-Judy men, and tradition and survival determine everything in this harsh future environment. Absolutely unique, absolutely genius, and once read never, ever forgotten.

    I could have added at least another 15 kids books to this - especially the Uncle & Agaton Sax books. And When Little Bear met Great Bear (or was it the other way around), which I’m sure I didn’t dream up, but I have never managed to find listed in any online catalogue or in any of the booksellers in Hay-on-Wye. Anyway, I hope that you enjoy these reviews and that you’re inspired to read some of the books as a result.

39. ‘Out of the Closet’ — Black Atheists
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 30 May 2009 | 3:16pm GMT
    "‘Out of the Closet’ — Black Atheists"
    
    
    
    May 28, 2009
    

    BY SIKIVU HUTCHINSON

    In some black communities it’s akin to donning a white sheet and a Confederate flag. In others, it’s ostensibly tolerated yet whispered about, branded culturally incorrect and bad form, if not outright sacrilege.

    For black atheists like myself, proclaiming one’s non-belief amidst genial wishes to “have a blessed day” is never easy in the seemingly innocuous context of casual chit chat between black folk.

    Yet, according to The New York Times, a small but growing segment of the American population, galvanized by the hyper-evangelical climate of the Republican Pleistocene, have begun organizing nationwide and becoming more vocal about their atheism.

    Although African Americans are not visible in the “movement,” [*]some are easing away from religion. For black atheists, actively breaking with religious tradition is an even graver rejection than that of white intellectuals electrified by the “pew-storming” rhetoric of atheist gurus such as Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins [**].   This is partly due to the fact that the history of African American civil and human rights resistance is heavily steeped in Judeo-Christian religious dogma.

    Despite the White Anglo Saxon Protestant religious justification for slavery and domestic terrorism, African Americans converted to Christianity and utilized it as a source of succor, community and spiritual redemption.

    No matter one’s actual deeds, life path or personal mores, to be unquestioningly religious in some quarters is to be inoculated from criticism. Noting this historical irony in his blog “The Black Atheist,” Wrath James White states, “In these (black) communities you find more tolerance towards gangbangers, drug addicts, and prostitutes, who pray to God for forgiveness than for honest productive citizens who deny the existence of God. This, for me, is one of the most embarrassing elements of Black culture, our zealous embrace of the God of our kidnappers, murderers, slave masters and oppressors.” 

    While there have been critical appraisals of African American adoption of Christianity within the context of European conquest and racial slavery, few propose atheism as a corrective. Indeed, atheism would seem to fly in the face of a cultural ethos that frames earthly pain and suffering as a crucible for achieving rewards in the afterlife.

    In the midst of extreme brutality, religious faith can either be seen as a means to mental health, or, as Karl Marx put it more bluntly, an opiate.  

    In this sense, contemporary black religiosity is the legacy of a culturally specific survival strategy. Many black community-based organizations still look to the black church as a coalition partner and resource. Disturbingly, the church is often uncritically perceived as the “backbone” of the black community.

    However, as the debate over California’s Proposition 8 demonstrated, the notion that there is a monolithic “marching in lockstep” black community is terminally outdated.

    On issues of gender and sexual orientation, the overwhelming opposition of many prominent black churches to granting civil rights to partnered African American gays and lesbians is morally indefensible.

    When it comes to attitudes about traditional gender roles, gender-based assumptions about black female religiosity are double-edged. While black male non-believers are given more leeway to be heretics, black women who openly profess atheist views are deemed especially traitorous, having eschewed their family role as purveyors of culture and religious tradition.

    Images of black women faithfully shuttling their children to church and socializing them into Christianity are a prominent part of mainstream black culture. If being black and being Christian are synonymous, then being black, female and religious (whatever the denomination) is practically compulsory. Black women with children who don’t fall in line, who raise their children as atheists, may find their race credentials revoked.

    On the national level, the contradictions between American secularism and religion have produced a schizoid tension in the U.S., whereby religious fundamentalism and intolerance for secular thought have become the norm. When it’s practiced in the non-Western world, Americans routinely brand this kind of propaganda as backward and extremist.

    Yet, in this, the most swaggeringly liberal humanist of all nations, “coming out” as an atheist in a culture that parades religious dogma as a substitute for true morality may be the final frontier.

    Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM.
    
    
    
    

    ---

    My comments:
    
    * - Neil Degrasse Tyson isn't visible?  He should be...
    
    ** - I would add Sam Harris, PZ Myers, and Daniel Dennit to that list.
    
    
40. Fidelity
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 28 May 2009 | 4:07am GMT
    

    This week’s California Supreme Court Ruling to uphold the voters’ recent decision to bake discrimination into the Constitution was tragic, though it was made for reasons that have little to do with the Supremes’ actual position on gay marriage.

    That’s OK. Now we’ve got two years to ramp up a properly prepared campaign for the 2010 elections, in which we can upend this topsy turvy, nonsensical situation and restore reason and compassion to our state.

    Courage Campaign has launched a pledge campaign to overturn Prop 8 by 2010. It may take all we can muster to turn this around, but it’s the duty of every person who considers themselves a fair, honest human being with a basic, non-negotiable conviction in basic equal rights. Please join us.

    This excellent Fidelity video is already starting to air on TV across the state:

41. Simple process for homepage optimization.
    → Extra! Extra! | 27 May 2009 | 8:07am GMT
    

    During the initial phase of an engagement and during the post launch optimization, we’re always looking for simple methods for improving a sites ability to hit specific goals.  Below is a fairly simple process for bringing your users closer to what they are looking for and hopefully gaining a couple conversion points in the process.

    1. Start by estimating the value of a conversion event on the website. Let’s use lead generation as our primary goal.  If we have an average web lead / converted customer ratio of 4% and our average value of a web customer is $7,500, then the average value of a web lead can be estimated (roughly) at $300.00. 
    2. Next, in your analytics tool associate the value ($300) with the conversion event (Lead Generation).  Most Analytics tools will help you do this if you can associate a dollar value with your conversion event.  For our demonstration, we will assume that there is a Thank You (and next steps) page after each lead form.  Users that reach the Thank You page are worth an average value of $300.  The way to do this in each analytics tool is a little different.  For example, if you are using Google Analytics this would be the $Index value. 
    3. For the next step, log in to your analytics tool and decipher which content is most highly valued to your converted users.   Again, this will be different depending on which analytics tool you use.  Sticking with our Google Analytics example, go the Reverse Path report see which pages are viewed before conversion events and go to the Top Content report to see the value of those pages.
       
    4. Now you know which content your web leads are looking for and which content is most influential to them!! !  Update the link structure on your homepage by adding prominent links to the most valued content and eliminating links to the least valued (or least visited content). 

    2 Notes

    * First: Be sure to measure your average conversion of the event (lead generation) both before and after the homepage has been optimized.

    ** Second: Use common sense when optimizing links on the homepage. Some links require context before you put them in front of a user.  For example, just because terms and conditions on a home loan application are highly valued and highly visited by customers that convert, doesn’t mean that it is the first page a visitors wants to see on your homepage. Customers looking for home loans may need to see rates first in order to put the terms into context.

    If you have questions about how to implement this process, please contact us at 650-212-3900 or info@extractable.com

    
42. Price of Sex
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 27 May 2009 | 6:03am GMT
    

    Birdhouse Hosting is proud to welcome a chilling, but expertly produced new web site by photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, priceofsex.org:

    Chakarova has spent more than six years reporting on sex trafficking in Eastern Europe and parts of the Middle East. The site features a series of interviews with young women sold into prostitution against their will, multimedia video pieces, reporting notes, previous work that launched on PBS’ Frontline/World, NGO resources and ways to get involved. Chakarova says:

    Please spread the word and leave comments on the site. Your input is invaluable. And as always, I am grateful for your support and interest in my work.

43. Fuck you, California Supreme Court.
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 26 May 2009 | 5:52pm GMT
    California has embarrassed itself again, continuing to prove itself to be a backward, repressive, and regressive state. All that money we just denied our ailing economy....what bigoted short sighted stupidity. I'm ashamed to call California my home state. Homophobnia is more like it.
44. Gemini Rising
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 25 May 2009 | 4:39pm GMT
    

    This week at Stuck Between Stations:

    Roger Moore on the appearance of Metallica’s Lars Ulrich on the Rachel Maddow Show: Heavy Metal Drummer.

    Scot on the greatest prog rock band you’ve never heard of: The mythical Gemini Rising takes to the web’s faux airwaves.

45. Fake it
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 25 May 2009 | 3:58pm GMT
    

    

46. Rachael Maddow: "Indefinite detention? Shame on you... President Obama"
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 22 May 2009 | 6:43pm GMT
    
    
    Obama wants to abort rule of law and detain people without trial indefinitely. I'm impressed with Rachel's reporting.
47. Webcasting with Django
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 20 May 2009 | 7:16pm GMT
    

    The Knight Digital Media Center, which runs on Django, hosts week-long workshops for working journalists who come from around the country to learn multimedia and internet technology skills. We fill many of our lunch and dinner sessions with talks by journalism industry experts and pundits, and webcast their presentations live. After workshops are over, we post the archived video for posterity. There’s more to handling multi-day, multi-part live and archived video with Django and a genuine streaming server than meets the eye, so thought I’d break it down.

    An “event” can last any number of days, and can include any number of presentations, each of which may or may not include a webcast. While the event is in progress, you want the ability to advertise a single URL, where all of the live webcasts will happen. But for the archives, which is where the vast majority of viewing happens over the course of time, you want a separate page/URL for each presentation. Presentation pages include details on that speaker, summaries of what was presented, and optional downloads of PowerPoint or Keynote presentations. Our Presentation model is foreign-keyed to a master Event model (or, in our case, the Workshop model).

    Because they’re time-based, synchronous events, webcasts are different from typical web pages. There are five possible “states” a webcast page can be in at any given time, all of which require different things to be inserted into the view:

    Upcoming: The event is announced but there’s nothing yet to show. Tell user that webcast will be live at posted time (along with schedule).

    In progress: The event is occurring. Insert appropriate object code to embed live QuickTime stream.

    Concluded: The live webcast has ended, but the archives haven’t yet been prepared and posted (this can take us a few days). Tell user to come back soon.

    Archive: The archived video is prepared and available on the streaming server for posterity. Insert appropriate object code to display streamed archive file from QuickTime Streaming Server.

    External: We sometimes host events at other locations on campus, in which case UC Berkeley handles the webcasting rather than us. If so, we need to link from our events database to theirs. Insert appropriate message and link.

    In Django, we represent these choices with the typical CHOICES construct:

    webcast_state = models.CharField(max_length=4,choices=WEBCAST_STATE_CHOICES)

    … which ends up looking like this in the Django admin:

    

    Depending on the current state, different content (text or object/embed code) is inserted into the page in real time (using simple conditionals in Django templates). The Django admin thus becomes a handy tool our student helpers can use to make the master workshop page embed the right thing in the right place at the right time without requiring tech skills. Remember, during the course of a workshop week, all video is happening in the master Workshop page – later, streaming video archives will go into separate Presentation pages and be automatically linked to from the parent Workshop page.

    Stream Handles

    At the J-School, we use QuickTime Streaming Server, in part because it’s free, and in part because all of our  workstations and most of our servers are Macs. We’ve contemplated switching to Flash streaming, but the simplicity of keeping everything Mac-native keeps us on QTSS for now.

    Embedding a stream from an external QTSS server is not quite as straightforward as embedding a typical QuickTime movie. Video comes from QTSS over the rtsp:// protocol, rather than http://. And there’s the catch: You can’t embed an rtsp stream directly into a web page — instead, you need to embed a fake QuickTime movie (a “reference movie”), which is actually a text file with the .mov extension. That text file simply references the full URL of the rtsp stream coming from QTSS. The contents of a reference movie file might look like this:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <?quicktime type="application/x-quicktime-media-link"?>
    <embed src="rtsp://streamer.domain.edu/events/131.humanity_2.0.mov" />

    Here’s where things get interesting as far as Django is concerned. We don’t want to have to create a physical reference movie for every single stream we serve. And yet, at the HTML level, we have to embed something that looks like a reference to a physically external movie file, e.g.:

    <object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" 
     width="480" height="376" 
      codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab">
     <param name="SRC" value="/presentations/webcast-archive.227.ref.mov">
     <param name="AUTOPLAY" value="true">
     <param name="CONTROLLER" value="true">
     <embed src="/presentations/webcast-archive.227.ref.mov" 
      width="480" height="376" autoplay="true" controller="true" 
      pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">
    </object>

    So how can we make Django think that /presentations/webcast-archive.227.ref.mov is an actual file on the server, which in turn contains the correct reference to the rtsp stream coming from the streaming server? In effect, it’s a “view within a view.”

    
    Click for larger version

    Displaying the presentation page is straightforward Django – I won’t get into that here. But here’s how the “view within a view” stuff works. In the object section of the presentation page template there is a reference to:

    <param name="SRC" value="/presentations/webcast-archive.{{object.id}}.ref.mov">

    which resolves to something like:

    <param name="SRC" value="/presentations/webcast-archive.267.ref.mov">

    When the browser hits that line, it requests /presentations/webcast-archive.267.ref.mov from the server, which in turn triggers this entry in urls.py:

    url(r'^presentations/webcast-archive.(?P<pres_id>\d+).ref.mov$',
    'workshops.views.presentation_webcast_archive',
    name='workshops_presentation_webcast_archive'),

    So after the presentation page has been rendered by Django and sent to the browser, a second (very simple) view, presentation_webcast_archive, is called, which is simply:

    def presentation_webcast_archive(request, pres_id):
        """
        Generate a virtual QuickTime reference movie on the fly,
        to be embedded in presentation webcast pages.
        """
    
        pres = get_object_or_404(Presentation,id=pres_id) 
    
        return render_to_response( 'workshops/presentation_webcast_archive.txt',
            {
                'p': pres,
            }, context_instance=RequestContext(request),
        )
    

    That view spits out the same presentation object to a different template, presentation_webcast_archive.txt, which consists of:

    <?xml version="1.0"?>
    <?quicktime type="application/x-quicktime-media-link"?>
    <embed src="rtsp://domain.edu/events/{{p.webcast_path}}/{{p.webcast_filename}}" />

    Where webcast_path and webcast_filename are fields on the model representing the physical location of the QuickTime media on the streaming server (not the web server). After a workshop week is over, staff only need to hint the saved archive files, upload them to a directory and filename on the streaming server, enter those paths in the Django admin, and check the “Has Webcast” box. The rest is automatic.

    In a previous, PHP-based version of this system, we had to prepare an actual reference movie for every archive stream we hosted. By using this “view within a view” technique, Django has let us remove that part of the workflow.

48. Idea for Travel Food Show
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 16 May 2009 | 7:47pm GMT
    

    The best Margarita in Alberta?

    The best sushi in Florence?

    The best Mexican food in Shanghai?

    The best bacon burger in Calcutta?

    Best canolli in Rio?

    Best falafel in Bangkok?

    Take that concept, add one obnoxious anti-social snob and you’ve got yourself a show!

49. Integrating Google Analytics with Content Management
    → Extra! Extra! | 15 May 2009 | 4:56pm GMT
    

    Over the years we have written several applications that integrate with Google components through open APIs.  We’ve used Google maps to show office locations, Google CSE for internal search engines, and even Google Charts to show graphs.  Last month, my favorite Google API was launched.

    Google Analytics announced an API to their popular analytics service.

    The first implementation we are working on ties Google Analytics into a content management system that we are deploying for a client.  For many organizations, the CMS is used daily to make updates to the site while the analytics are viewed less frequently.  This gives all CMS users the ability to analyze the page(s) they are working. 

    CMS users will have the ability to know valuable information about the content they are editing, such as:

    • how people get to the page they are working on  (entrance, visitors, pageviews)
    • and how many leave after viewing it (bounce, abandonment)
    • are people reading this page (time on page)
    • if the copy they are spending so much time on only gets viewed by 1% of the site audience

    Content owners / marketers that are aware of this data will improve overall site performance by being aware of how specific pages impact site goals.

    I’m excited about our first implementation of this new, simple channel for getting analytics data in the hands of the web team. 

    For more information, check out the Google Analytics Developer Docs.

    
50. Overheard on the plaza in Santa Fe
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 17 Apr 2009 | 2:06pm GMT
    

    Down the old Santa Fe trail sits La Fonda Hotel.
    

    Old lady: “Oh, look, it’s Jane Fonda’s hotel.”

    Old man: “Hanoi Jane? I’m not going in there.”

51. GIA - World’s Authority on Diamonds, Colored Stones & Pearls
    → Extra! Extra! | 10 Apr 2009 | 11:25pm GMT
    

    The Gemological Institute of America (GIA), the world’s foremost authority on diamonds, colored stones, and pearls recently worked with Extractable to launch their new website www.GIA.edu. The new website was designed with a coherent navigational structure that promotes critical user paths.

    The site design and information architecture should increase student applications and stone submissions while driving repeat visitors as they have a more positive online experience with the GIA brand.

    If you need a stone evaluated, are interested in a jewelry career, need to buy a ring or learn more about a stone make sure to visit GIA online or visit them in Carlsbad.

    

    
52. Music Re-org
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 31 Mar 2009 | 3:40am GMT
    

    I’m re-organizing my music a little bit. I dropped my “Cowboy of Hope” blog and plan to just drop my tunes here as “Pages”. For now the “Music” tab above gives the playlist with everything. I’ll create a dedicated page for each song with liner notes eventually. Here’s the starter page, for my new song “Mr. Universe“. Again, I’ll add liner notes soon.

53. Link Building Campaigns
    → Extra! Extra! | 27 Mar 2009 | 6:49pm GMT
    

    One of the most important factors search engines use to rank your website for keyword phrases is analyzing the number of websites and how popular (or important) the websites that are linking to you are (note: I’ll refer to these type of links as “backward links” although other SEO professionals might call them inward links, insite links, etc).  Google even patented a link analysis algorithm called Page Rank (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank) which helps Google determine the ranking of your website on keyword phrases.

    Hence, link building should be an integral (and ongoing effort) in any search engine optimization (SEO) program.  Where should you look to increase the number and quality of backward links to your website?

    • Find industry related blogs; and blog!
    • Find and participate in industry related websites and forums.
    • Submit your website to free search engine directories like DMOZ.org.
    • Build relationships with similar website owners and prove value in having them add a link to your website.

    To elaborate on the last point a little more; in Google’s search engine find related websites by using the following search syntax “related:www.yourwebsitehere.com” and identify any websites that might benefit from adding a link to your website.   Don’t email or call the website owner blindly.  You will need to build a relationship and prove value to the other website owner that creating a link to your website is in their best interests. 

    Show value!  For example, if your websites focuses on listing all the Happy Hour events in the city of San Francisco consider contacting websites like MustSeeSanFranisco.com or SFTravel.com.  Who on vacation in San Francisco doesn’t want to have a drink at a local Happy Hour event?

    Lastly, don’t forget to “optimize” the hyperlink by including the primary keyword phrase in the actual link.  Example:  Instead of adding the following text to another website you are getting a link from, “Visit http://www.yourwebsitehere.com/ to see some social events including happy hours in the city” write “Visit our partner to find great happy hours events in San Francisco”

    The direct benefits of getting backward links is A) your website will receive more site traffic from visitors clicking through on that backward link and B) search engines will give your website more “weight” when determining where your website should appear on related keyword searches.

    
54. Sue Schofield
    → Life Less Literary | 24 Mar 2009 | 7:23am GMT
    

    To celebrate Ada Lovelace day, and the importance of women in technology, I’d like to introduce you to Sue Schofield. Sue is a journalist and author who was writing about hooking computers up to telephone lines when I was still in short trousers. You could, perhaps, call her the mother of the UK Internet (in fact, I just did).
    
    In 1994 she wrote “The UK Internet Book”. And, yes, it was: The UK Internet book. Until then, all our Internet advice had come from Americans who had a rather different Internet infrastructure from the UK (and no need for BT-approved modems). In those days, we had very few ISPs (in fact, there was only one real UK ISP - the fledgeling Demon Internet - although other “online service providers” such as CompuServe offered small windows onto the Internet). Sue’s book was exhaustive, informative (although the section on gopher was wasted on me) and, unlike the books coming out of the USA, it had a wry English sense of humour.

    It also came with a voucher offering a month’s free membership of Demon Internet. So I abandoned my CompuServe training wheels and set off into the world of ftp, nntp, smtp, archie and, yes, gopher. Without Sue Schofield, it would have taken me another year or two to get to grips with the Internet. And so she bears some responsibility for the fact that, in 1995, I started working for one of the UK’s fledgeling web agencies, starting a thrilling and eventful career which has led up to my current work on the iPlayer.

    By 2002, when I’d all but forgotten the name Sue Schofield, my friend Phil Franks introduced me to “the girl who left those wacky entries on my guestbook about me being Elton John’s dad”. The name on the email headers looked familiar and… it can’t be… it was! I found myself bantering with the very same Sue Schofield who had hooked me up at 14,000 baud all those years earlier. And thus started a three-way email conversation which lasted several years. (In real life and in private emails, Sue’s peculiar brand of gonzo-tech-journalism is even wittier and more beautiful than in print).

    So here’s to Sue, tech journalist extraordinaire, 30 years in the industry and still going strong. It’s highly appropriate that she’s writing for The Guardian today, on the subject of women in technology.

    While we’re on the subject of women in technology, I’d like to extend the high-fives to two of my colleagues at the BBC who have made, and continue to make, huge contributions to the iPlayer project: Gemma Garmeson and Marina Kalkanis.

55. Hans Aarsman
    → Life Less Literary | 23 Mar 2009 | 9:13pm GMT
    

    A few weeks ago I went to the Photographers’ Gallery for a lecture by the Dutch photographer Hans Aarsman. I’d never heard of Aarsman before, but the description piqued my interest, particularly the line "if, and how, artistic ambitions, aesthetics and useful photography can coincide". I’m so glad I went! Aarsman described his journey through photography, and I found strong echoes with my own feelings and development as a photographer.
    
    He started by talking about his early influences which, like so many aspiring photographers, came mainly from Magnum images. He showed some of his own photos from this period, I guess around the late 60s. He explained how, like the best Magnum photos and indeed all of photojournalism, they relied on conflict. Even a charming photo of girls and boys was mainly interesting because of the contrast between the girls and the boys.

    And so, after a few years, he grew tired of this type of photography. He discovered the work of Garry Winogrand and described it as "an alien’s view of the world". He explored a similar aesthetic, using unexpected angles on otherwise-uninteresting subjects to provoke fresh ways of seeing. But this style was too unfettered for him. He imposed limits on it by buying a large view camera, which needed a tripod and a good deal of preparation. He drove around the Netherlands in a van, photographing chunks of the modern landscape, and finding ways to obscure the dreadful clarity and sharpness produced by a large format camera. But eventually, once again, he tired of this. He started to see echoes of centuries-old landscape painting in some of his compositions, at the same time as "art photography" was elevating faux-painterliness as its highest virtue (something I’ve written about before in relation to Tom Hunter). He realised that there was no way of taking a photo without his many years of visual training imposing themselves on the resultant image.

    Disheartened, he gave up photography. For many years he didn’t own a camera.

    This changed when he had to move into a smaller apartment, not long after his mother died. He had to get rid of many belongings, including little dolls which his mother had made for him while she was in terminal decline. He couldn’t justify keeping them, but felt that by throwing them away, he would be betraying his mother’s memory. So he bought a small point-and-shoot camera, and photographed every single thing he got rid of.

    This led to a realisation: many things are important to us only because of the memories they evoke. And a photograph is a storage space for memories. Suddenly, getting rid of things became easy. He went even further with the declutter, rejoicing in the ease with which he could simplify his possessions. He even used this approach on potential new purchases: photographing things in the shop so he would never have to buy them (he showed us a photograph of a locked-down Powerbook in a shop, then pointed at the laptop which he was using to give the presentation: "I managed to delay buying this computer for 12 months because of this photograph").

    Suddenly he became interested in photographs again. But not art photographs: rather, everyday photographs, photographs with a practical use. He would collect pictures of meat from the promotional supermarket leaflets which came through his door. He began to trawl EBay for interesting pictures, eventually settling on photographs of ashtrays (of which, he says, there are 8,000 new ones per week on EBay). He realised that many photographs have a backstory, and for him this is the most interesting aspect. Over three weeks, he realised (by comparing backdrops and wallpaper) that three of his ashtray photos came from the same person; he began to wonder why this person was selling different hotel ashtrays, and why one per week rather than all in one go.

    He started a blog, analysing photographs, and through this he was offered a monthly column in a Dutch Newspaper doing the same thing. He ended the talk by giving a detailed analysis of a photograph of Iranian uranium enrichment, which he analysed for the newspaper. The photograph was originally printed alongside an article stating that Iranians were ramping up their nuclear capability, but by careful analysis of this photograph and others from the same source he was able to demonstrate that this was not the real story. What was actually happening was the Iranians were trying to demonstrate to the West that they were ramping up their nuclear capability. Numerous clues pointed to this conclusion, from the huge number of men needed to wheel a one-man trolley, to the dozen-or-so photographers in the background of what seemed ostensibly to be a hastily-snatched photo smuggled secretively out of the country, to the (meticulously researched) conclusion that one of the men in the photograph had dashed out of the toilet in time to be included into the picture.

    Aarsman’s final slide was a quote from Garry Winogrand which he said now defines his relationship to photography. However, unlike virtually every other Winogrand quote I’ve ever read, this one didn’t quite ring true for me. Or at least, I think, it was badly worded. The quote, if I remember rightly, was "beauty is a fact explicitly described". But for me (and I think, if he’s honest about it, for Hans Aarsman), it’s not the explicit description which makes a photograph beautiful. It’s the information which leaks between the gaps; the backstory; the space left for the imagination; the painstaking detective work. Those are the things which, for me, bring a photograph to life and make it dance in the mind.

56. Film Peeve
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 14 Mar 2009 | 5:49pm GMT
    

    Here’s a new one:

    Character is in a situation that triggers a memory. Now we go with that character into the memory for a while, a minute, two 30 seconds, whatever, but it’s long enough to shift context and follow a sub-narrative. Then we return to the original context, the present, with character’s face absorbed in the memory. Another character then has to jog the first character’s attention. “Joe? Joe” Where were you?” And the first character then has to come back, pretend it’s nothing and resume the first nbarrative thread.

    That whole jogging of the first character’s attention is completely unnecessary. It’s stupid to pretend that just because we in the audience experienced a time shift with the second thread that the characters in the first context also experienced it. The whole thing could have taken place in a split second for them. I don’t mind the actual context shift itself, I just hate the way they transition back. It’s so rote, total cliche, and they do it in the finest of dramas and films. Just skip it completely.

57. Refuse to run to catch a train…
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 3 Mar 2009 | 4:36pm GMT
    

    Refuse to run to catch a train.

58. Watching Mardi Gras parades at…
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 22 Feb 2009 | 7:03pm GMT
    

    Watching Mardi Gras parades at nola.com. Not the same.

59. King cake acquired: http://is….
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 19 Feb 2009 | 3:14am GMT
    

    King cake acquired: http://is.gd/k3bX

60. Soup day. I love soup day.
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 15 Feb 2009 | 9:48pm GMT
    

    Soup day. I love soup day.

61. one bourbon, one scotch, one b…
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 14 Feb 2009 | 1:08am GMT
    

    one bourbon, one scotch, one beer

62. CFCU Launches Redesign Website
    → Extra! Extra! | 6 Feb 2009 | 11:48pm GMT
    

    Congratulations to Campus Federal Credit Union (CFCU) based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the new website launch!

    During the website redesign, Extractable worked with CFCU to make sure the new web experience on the CFCU website was as professional as larger financial institutions in the areas but also directly addressed the students, faculty and affiliates associated with Louisiana State University (LSU) that make up a large percentage of their member base.  The website was designed for ease of use and to enable members to have a positive online banking experience.

    Before the website was launched benchmark figures were calculated in order to show a positive ROI on the project over the next several years.  Figures and base costs originating from the website were calculated for the member call center, average products/services per member and on the total membership of the credit union.

    If you live in Louisiana or are affiliated with LSU please consider using CFCU as your primary financial institution because sometimes the “perfect bank for you, isn’t a bank at all”.

    

    
63. I’m Qyper of the week!
    → Life Less Literary | 22 Jan 2009 | 5:56pm GMT
    

    A while ago, I signed up to review site Qype, but it was only last week that I really started using it. So it was a really nice surprise when today I got their weekly email newsletter (which, I have to admit, I normally kinda ignore) and saw that I’d been made Qyper of the week.

    Here’s what they had to say about me:
    

    Northern lad Dansumption likes the finer things in life: good beer, good food and the odd bit of culture.

    According to the man himself, Dan has "eaten in most of the restaurants in and around Sheffield city centre", which means he knows where local MP’s choose to "entertain world leaders", where you’ll pay premium prices for a supermarket-bought faux-baguette, and where to head for if you have an absinthe craving.

    And if you’re after a bit of steel city art (and you don’t mind maneuvering around some dustbins to get to it) then Dan’ can point you in the right direction.

    I’ll be posting more reviews to Qype soon.

64. ITV gave me my BBC Micro
    → Life Less Literary | 21 Jan 2009 | 6:57am GMT
    

    Last night, I was reminiscing with a BBC colleague about the UK micro-computer boom of the early 80s, and it struck me: like many programmers of my age, I cut my programming teeth on the BBC Micro (and also the ZX81). But unlike many, I got my BBC from the ITV.

    

    BBC Micro

    
    
    In about 1982 (and for most of his working life), my Dad worked at Thames TV, and was a member of the computer club there. Dad and his fellow club-members foresaw the increasing importance of computers in the workplace, and petitioned the management to provide subsidised computers for their staff to take home and learn on (I remember being kept regularly updated on the progress of these negotiations, excited at the prospect of swapping my rather worn 16k Sinclair computer for a spiffy new 32k BBC Model B). Eventually the management were persuaded, and Thames staff were offered a free three-year loan of a BBC Micro.

    I played games on it, of course, many of them (I still remember the first night after we got it: Pacman was so burnt into my visual cortex that he continued to chase around my brain all night). But I also wrote games: typing in code from magazines and inventing small programs of my own. I even, along with my schoolfriend David Swaddle, set up a software company DSoft (which took its name from our shared initials). That never went very far (although bunking off school to hawk vapourware to all the local computer shops was kind of fun), but it was a start to something.

    At around the age of 16, I started to lose interest in computers. There were too many other things in life to grab my attention. But when I came to write my university dissertation five years later, my dad had just got a new PC, so I laid claim to the old BBC (which had been sold on to us by Thames for a nominal amount once the three-year loan was up) and used it for essays and revision notes.

    It took a few more years to rediscover programming: in fact, I was working for Olivetti, writing letters to debtors, when one day I looked at the computer I was typing on and thought “hey, I used to program these things when I was a kid. It was a lot more fun than this, and I bet I could get paid more money for doing it”. I went back to college to study C & C++, and never looked back.

    So eventually I’ve pitched up working at the BBC, and I guess (like many in BBC “Future Media & Technology”) you could say it was the BBC Micro which got me here. But, unlike many, it was an ITV company which had the foresight to give me that micro, and plant a seed which continues to bear fruit. I can’t imagine many companies being quite so forward-thinking nowadays, especially as in the intervening years all companies, private and public, have been “rationalised” to the extent where such costs are impossible to justify to shareholders/tax-payers. And I think that’s a very sad thing.

65. 2008: Life
    → Life Less Literary | 19 Jan 2009 | 1:17am GMT
    

    In part one of my “2008 and thereabouts” retrospective, I talked about what I’d been up to work-wise. Now I’m going to focus on my personal and family life. I find this side of things a little harder to talk about, and recall, if only because for most of the year, I spent five days per week at work (usually in London, away from my family) and the other two days recuperating. But here goes…
    
    Of my immediate family, Rowan (now thirteen) completed her first year of secondary school, and Lola (a few weeks shy of eight) entered juniors. For Rowan the summer holidays of 2007, between primary and secondary, were some sort of chrysalis phase. Within a few weeks of starting King Edward’s she was a different person: not only in character, taste and habits (a new taste for fashion and music, a stand-offish muteness towards her parents and, for a short while, a boyfriend), but also physically: she seemed to grow about six inches in her first year (or should that be Y7 – I still can’t quite get to grips with our new American-style system) and very soon developed from a big girl into a young woman. Watching her become rapidly more independent has been wonderful, though sometimes painful. At times she can be incredibly argumentative and hurtful – like most teenagers I guess – but on those odd occasions when she lets me into her confidence, or tries unsuccessfully to hide her excitement about something, it melts my heart. I’m also immensely proud of the fact that she writes and draws keenly, and is showing real talent in both areas (she just won a Waterstone’s writing “supernatural love story” competition with a lengthy and very original tale of a girl who falls in love with a boy nobody else can see, only to find out that he’s a ghost).

    Lola hasn’t yet reached that troublesome age (although she can be troublesome in her own, usually much cuter, way). She is every inch the daddy’s girl, eager to please; but as she gets older she is becoming cleverer at using this to her advantage, turning on the cuteness tap when she knows it will get her what she wants. She excels at school (like her big sister before her), and seems to have an incredible quality for peace-brokering, whether this be bringing calm to a rowdy classroom or helping two friends to resolve a dispute. Teachers and other parents love her because she can (usually) be relied upon to be sensible and helpful, although I worry that as she gets older the sensible part may slip. She has also recently started piano lessons, and is learning incredibly quickly. Every week when I’m at home, she shows me her piano practice, and I have a go two, which is wonderful as it means I’m also getting to learn to play, and to read music.

    Gill too has been finding more outlets for her creative side. For a while she was working at a vintage clothes shop in Sheffield, but at the same time she was discovering eBay, buying and selling at first old nighties but increasingly a range of weird and wonderful items, retro and new, including dresses, handbags, purses, badges and jewellery. You can often find her abusing my eBay account. Recently, she has started to customise and combine items, so she may sew a 60s cloth doll’s face onto a 40s handbag, or make a brooch out of some tiny dollies attached to circles of Victorian lace. I bought her O’Reilly’s Fashioning Technology book for Christmas, so hopefully we’ll soon have antique accessories combined with flashing LEDs and intelligent textiles.

    The two of us have continued fostering with FCA, although obviously with me out of town most of the time, 99% of the work and responsibility has fallen on Gill. We are currently without a placement (and taking a bit of a break from it all – although we do have Gill’s cousin’s daughter Zoe staying with us, and her boyfriend Tyler, which is at times not too different from a foster placement). But for most of 2007 and 2008 we fostered two of our longest placements: N___, a Somali girl who was with us from the age of 15 to 17, and A___, an English boy who lived here from 16 to 17. With kids that age, for the most part you just let them get on with it. The biggest problem is getting them home on time: we have to set them curfews and, under strict foster agency/social services instructions, have to phone the police and report them missing if they’re not back by midnight. As you can imagine, this results in phone calls to missing persons on average about 3 times per week. Then we have to wait for the police to turn up, which they’re duty-bound to do, and which usually happens around 3am. Couple that with the odd petty crime and misdemeanour that kids in care tend to get themselves into, and we soon became pretty familiar with most of the local force (in fact, we were already fairly well known to them after we had a panic button installed when a previous placement, a young Muslim girl, heard that her family were threatening to burn her alive after hearing rumours that she’s been seen out with men).

    Which kinda brings me on to the subject of challenging situations. We’ve had a few: alongside the panic button incident, having most of our electrical goods stolen (a Powerbook laptop, several digital cameras, a mobile phone, iPod…) was one of the more minor incidents. Other stuff, I wouldn’t ever want to go into on this blog, but it makes you thankful for who you are and the fact that you come from a stable, supportive background. While appalled at some of the things human beings do to one another, and saddened at the things people do to children, I’ve felt myself growing as a person as a result of my ability to deal with some of these crises, and support Gill as she deals with them. But it doesn’t half make it difficult reading the newspapers, which make me alternately despair all over again at some peoples’ cruelty, and despair even more at the cluelessness of some newspapers’ leader and comment-writers, wittering on in the most judgemental terms on subjects they truly know nothing about.

    And me? Where have I been throughout all of this? Well, as I mentioned I’ve mainly been at work, travelling backwards and forwards to London. And my personal development hasn’t been solely related to fostering incidents: freelancing has taught me lessons which would have passed me by had I stayed closeted-up in my office. Most of all, I’ve learned to embrace the new, to constantly experiment and re-invent. Part of the problem with my previous long stretch at home was that I was never exposed to new influences, and so I became more and more stuck in the same groove, the same way of doing things. I don’t think that will ever happen to me again: I now know that, in order to stay alive, stay fresh, I need to seek out adventure and learning wherever I can find it.

    The only downside of this year of discovery has been that my photography career, which was really starting to blossom over 2007, has had to take a back seat. Although I’ve done some half-dozen weddings this year, and early in the year I was hired to cover some amazing events like the Creative Sheffield launch and the Vivienne Westwood exhibition VIP party, I haven’t had the time I’d like to edit photos, or to push my career forwards. Towards the end of the year, I’ve photographed a few private views in London galleries, but my rate of photography has gone right down, and as a result I’ve got a bit rusty (photography, like sport, is something you need to practice almost daily in order to stay on top of your game).

    I did manage to produce a wonderful little Working Nights photobook in June this year but my (slightly unexpected) BBC iPlayer career swept me off my feet so fast that, to date, I’ve only managed to hawk it round a few shops, and haven’t found time to send it out to all of the magazines, galleries and, indeed, friends who I had intended. My New Year’s resolution for 2009: get some books in the post!

66. Friday nights at the Washington
    → Life Less Literary | 18 Jan 2009 | 12:22pm GMT
    

    Since working full-time in London, I get precious little time to spend out-and-about in Sheffield. As you may know, for the last few years I’ve been a regular fixture on Sheffield’s social scene, out with my camera documenting the night-life. I really miss this, and I miss Sheffield’s wonderful people.

    Thank goodness for Friday nights, and London-Sheffield trains which arrive at the perfect time, around 10.30pm. And thank goodness for The Washington, around halfway between the station and my house, and usually throbbing on a Friday night, especially when there’s a good DJ night like the Record Hop, Plan B, El Jackster or Banksy’s Fragrant Garden. Here’s a few photos from last Friday night at the Record Hop.

    

67. How to Get Credit for the Offline Sale, Online
    → Extra! Extra! | 16 Jan 2009 | 10:51pm GMT
    

    One of the most frustrating situations for any online marketer is not getting credit for sales that take place in the companies’ brick-and-mortar stores when the initial lead was generated online.  This often occurs when running a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign which attracts customers to the companies’ website (where they can purchase the product online) but who still choose to purchase the product at the companies brick-and-mortar store.

    Here’s a trick on how to setup one of your Pay-Per-Click campaigns so you can get credit for the sale and receive the allocades of your coworkers you know you deserve!

    Setup one of your Pay-Per-Campaigns so the ads only display in a major city where your company has most of their brick-and-mortar stores.

    Example: If your company focuses on selling competitive priced jewelry, setup a PPC campaign to only display ads in New York (assuming that’s where a majority of your stores are located) and bid on keywords like “discount jewelry, jewelry distributor, diamond wholesaler”.

    Next, write all your ads to lead with the city abbreviation “NY” (an obvious abbreviation for anyone living in New York) and then include some of the keyword phrases that you are bidding on (eg. NY Diamond Wholesaler).  Use the second line of the ad to explain what your company sells (eg. necklaces, bracelets, rings etc) and use the last line of the ad to “hook” your customer (eg. advertise free shipping and a coupon for 10-20% off any purchase).

    Keeping best practices in mind, create a specific landing page for this campaign.  Include (and better yet bold) the keywords you are bidding on, pictures of your products, etc.  Most importantly include a 10-20% coupon that can be used online upon checkout or printed out for in-store purchases.

    If you’re a PPC rockstar you’ll probably already realize that setting up a geographic targeted PPC campaign with targeted ads that include the city name and take customers to a custom landing pages will result in:

    1.    Higher clickthrough rates (don’t be surprised if you get close to 10%)!
    2.    Higher online conversions (who doesn’t like a good 10-20% discount on a product they are already interested in?)
    3.    Higher total sales (since you’ll get credit for offline sales generated online).

    Have you figured out how number 3 happens?

    The coupon code!  By setting up your campaign this way, you’ll have customers print off and use the coupon in-store (in order to get the 10-20% discount)!  Since, this coupon is only on your PPC landing page you’ll get credit for the sale!

    
68. Working Nights photobook
    → Life Less Literary | 10 Jan 2009 | 8:08am GMT
    

    Six months ago, I published a book of my photos. Then I got caught up in a whirl of job-change-commute-business, and for six months most of the books remained in boxes in my hallway.

    Well, I finally got around to putting up a web-page where people can order copies of the book. Please buy Working Nights here.

    

69. Link-poetry
    → Life Less Literary | 7 Jan 2009 | 5:45am GMT
    

    I love that whenever I write London on this blog, SEO Smart Links auto-links it to one of my favourite little blog posts. London.

70. Credit Union ONE Launches Online Member Center
    → Extra! Extra! | 15 Oct 2008 | 7:41pm GMT
    

    Congratulations to Credit Union ONE for launching an enhanced website which provides members additional features and benefits.

    CU ONE approached Extractable to help design a website that would “provide exceptional value to CU ONE members by delivering outstanding products and services anytime, anywhere.”  By having the website function as a 24 hour online member center (by empowering members to do more of their financial tasks online and by organizing information on the website more clearly) the website is poised to be a success!

    Some great CU ONE site features include:

    • Secure loan and mortgage applications
    • Ability to open and fund an account online
    • Wide array of financial calculators
    • Numerous online forms
    • Detailed online map
    • Numerous online forms
    • Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions
    • Print and send-to-friend features
    • Online help demos
    • Online chat support

    In the next month CUONE will be working to implement RSS feeds on their website and dynamically pull in rates into specific webpages in order to ensure their members have the latest rate information possibly available.

    If you live in Michigan (or surrounding states) and are looking for a stable financial institution that still feels “personal” please make sure to visit Credit Union ONE.

    
71. “QA-ing” Your Analytic and SEO Strategy
    → Extra! Extra! | 11 Oct 2008 | 3:29pm GMT
    

    When developing a new website, most companies (or web development agencies if the project is not being done in-house) go through an exhaustive “Test Plan” or “QA Checklist” before the site is launched. This document tends to focus on checking for broken links, spell checking site copy, testing site features like search or online forms, verifying the presence of 301 redirects (on the old website), making sure the site is free of (CSS, JS, etc) errors, ensuring the navigation is consistent, checking cross browser compatibility and so on goes the list.

    When of the areas that I believe that is most often overlooked when “QAing” a website before it is launched is verifying that the sites analytic and search engine strategies are in place.

    Have you created a new profile and added your analytic code to the new site? Have you setup goals and funnels based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your website? (If not, how will you be able to prove to your boss the redesign was worth all the time and money the company spent on it?) Has analytic code been added to any 3rd party applications you are using? If not, are you at least tracking the traffic that is clicking over to your 3rd party applications/sites? Have you submitted your XML site map (http://www.sitemapdoc.com/) to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer so search engines can more effectively index your website? Have you also submitted your website to free directories like dmoz.org (which Google has a relationship with)? Have you thought through your meta-tag strategy? Search solutions that you use on your website and public search engines like Google evaluate meta tags when returning results and often use the page title tag and sometimes the description in the search engine results pages that your site visitors will need to understand.

    So just because your QA team believes the website is free of errors and ready to be launched don’t forget to verify your analytic strategy has been addressed and you’ve taken the necessary steps to make it easy for search engines to find and understand your new website.

    
72. 2nd visit – Oh, you’re back!
    → Extra! Extra! | 30 Sep 2008 | 9:14pm GMT
    

    Extractable’s clients use their sites to accomplish a broad set of goals (Lead Generation, Online/Offline Revenues, Reach/Awareness, Customer Loyalty).  One key to discovering which variables influence conversion of visitors is knowing whether or not visitors convert in 1 visit, 2 visits, 3 visits, etc. Whether filling out a lead form, purchasing an upgrade, or entering some product feedback, we typically see that the most valuable actions from visitors are on the 2^nd+ plus visit.  So why is it that most sites look the exact same each time a visitors comes back?

    The first time visitors see Amazon.com, the visitors can be impressed with the sites wide selection of products, the wealth of information about every product, and the ease of purchasing.  But the most impressive aspect of Amazon is what happens on the 2^nd visit, 3^rd visit, 4^th Visit, etc.    The site keeps track of what you looked at (whether you made a purchase or not).  The site makes personalized recommendations based on what you viewed and how many items you viewed.   Sites like LinkedIn and Facebook are personalizing navigation and recommendations based on past navigation patterns.  BannaRepublic is customizing product recommendations based on the products that you looked at most recently. 

    With a lot of the sites that we view, the first visit is an introduction.  The visitor is looking at high level product and organizational information – they are browsing around at wide breadth of content.  The first time visitor is validating the site/product as a viable option.  On the second visit, their navigation is much more focused.  When a user comes back, they tend to be a little more focused in their clicks/searches. 

    Knowing what content/products a customer has looked at makes a big impact on what they view on their second visit.  Most sites should follow Amazon’s example.  It doesn’t take a significant about of planning and programming to think about how to make that 2^nd visit a little easier and ideally, get a better conversion rate.  We’ve had great success with clients websites by simply placing quick links to previously viewed promotions on the homepage.

    
73. FREE Search Engine Optimization Tools
    → Extra! Extra! | 23 Sep 2008 | 6:51pm GMT
    

    I am cheap.  No, I am not trying to ask my boss indirectly for a raise (although with gas prices and my long commute I wouldn’t mind one) its just that I have just been using the Internet since Al Gore invented it (jk) and am accustomed to getting cool services for free on the Internet - news, language translation tools, playing in a fantasy league,etc.   I have even found some great FREE search engine optimization tools (that can be used as plug-ins with Firefox) that I would highly recommend:

    • SEO Quake - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3036
    • Search Status - www.quirk.biz/searchstatus
    • SEO Book - http://tools.seobook.com

    The tools above capture and display a lot of valuable information that you will need when optimizing your website for search engines - Google Page Rank, backlinks, internal/external links, Alexa ranking, cached site pages, IP address, whois info, robots file, sitemap, compete rank, keyword density, etc.

    The SEO Quake and Search Status tools can be used when viewing a particular website while SEO Book shows much of the same vital SEO information from search engine results pages.  Happy optimizing!

    
74. 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
    
75. 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!
76. 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.
77. 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
78. 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
79. 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
80. 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.
81. 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.
82. 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]
83. 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]
84. 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]
85. 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]
86. 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]
87. 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]
88. 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]
89. 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!]
90. '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]
91. 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]
92. Navigation
    → Mediajunkie | 23 Feb 2006 | 6:08pm GMT
    

    Authors

    Clients

    Publishing Platform

    Latest Posts

    Portfolio

93. 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.

94. 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.
    
95. 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.

96. 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?

97. 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.

98. 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.

99. 
    → Mediajunkie | 23 Jun 2005 | 12:33am GMT
    

    View image
    

100. 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!
     

101. 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.

102. 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.

103. 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.
     
104. 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.