September 2008
38 posts
“We’re living in an age when a vast excess of capital sloshes around the world...”
– David Brooks, Revolt of the Nihilists
Palin Brushing Up On Foreign Policy At Epcot →
The Onion: “According to Palin, the trip—her first past Frontierland—will include speaking engagements at Norway’s famous Viking ride, sausages at Germany’s Kaufhaus, and, time permitting, a fact-finding mission to Future World.” [via]
“Knowledge that is seen to be controlled from the outside is acquired with...”
– Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Chapter 6, “The Flow of Thought”
Tear Down These Walls →
“One Architecture Critic’s Candidates for Demolition in New York City ,” with included image gallery [via]
“The real problem is we, as a society, only reward success, and never prevention...”
– Anonymous Apple engineer, linked to by Dan Lyons (the original was pulled, see reproduction in comments) [via]
“…The cost of food — of producing and procuring it — is...”
– David Chang, What the 21st Century Will Taste Like [via]
Is Wine a Smart Investment? - Wine Funds →
Article on Wine Investment Funds, which “offer would-be investors a way to buy into a collection of hundreds or even thousands of cases of wine,” mostly Bordeaux. As for profits, some funds “offer investors a choice between cash and wine.” [via]
Museum Day 2008 →
Free museum admission on Saturday, September 27, 2008 [via]
Subway arrival info behind schedule →
NY Daily News: “The project, featuring electronic message boards posted above subway platforms, was originally expected to be completed in 2006.
“NYC Transit has pushed back that date several times over the years, citing software development problems, technical glitches and other problems. Earlier this week, officials pushed the date back again, this time to 2011.” [via]
“If 10% or less of the year’s [Harvard MBA] class take market-sensitive...”
– 2007 Harvard MBA Stock Indicator [PDF] [via]
“Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public...”
– Daniel Davies, quoted by Paul Krugman [via]
Google Transit Supports the NYC Subway
For trips like this one, Google Transit will show what subway route to take. [via]
Amazon Ends Post-Order Price Guarantee →
“As of September 1, 2008 we are no longer offering discounts if prices change on our website after you make a purchase.” I’ve actually used this a couple of times in the past to get a few dollars (or cents) back. [via]
Top Broker: NYC Real Estate in Big Decline →
“Manhattan’s finest co-op apartments may have already lost a fourth of their value as a result of the financial crisis, and the worst is yet to come, says leading New York estate broker …”
DNS Prefetching in Google Chrome →
“Google Chrome automatically scans the content of each rendered page looking for links, extracting the domain name from each link, and resolving each domain to an IP address. All this work is done in parallel with the user’s reading of the page, hardly using any CPU power. When a user clicks on any of these pre-resolved names to visit a new domain, they will save an average of over...
Street View and walking directions come to Google... →
Some nice improvements. I think it is only a matter of time before we see similar improvements in the iPhone maps application.
“If we get elected, it will be the most train-friendly administration ever.”
– Joe Biden, Biden on the train [via]
iPhone 2.1: Little Things
Here are a couple of things that struck me when reading First Look: iPhone 2.1 [via]:
Triple-clicking the clicker on the earbud cord will go back to the previous track.
There is a new option to wipe all data on the iPhone if the passcode is entered wrong 10 times (in a row, I hope)
Under Parental Controls, there is a new option to disable use of the camera in all apps. A friend of mine has...
The Glass Stampede →
New York magazines’s architecture critic on the current “great building boom” in NYC, with dozens of great before and after photos showing the city as it was compared to new construction. [via]
Third-Party Podcast App Rejected from iTunes App... →
It appears that someone wrote a podcatcher app which allows direct downloading of podcasts to an iPhone/iPod Touch without requiring syncing to iTunes, something I’ve been desiring for a while. Users can them play the podcast inside the app.
Unfortunately, Apple will not be allowing the app. They claim it duplicates existing iTunes functionality. Details from the author, official site....
Summer Pro Special at Flickr →
“If you upgrade or renew before September 30th, you’ll get a gift code for 3 months free for yourself or a friend. Go to the Pro upgrade page for more information.”
Help Station X: The National Museum of Computing... →
PGP & IBM: “Join us in supporting the ‘birthplace of modern computing’.” Donated. [via]
NYPD Cracking Down On Drivers Who Block The Box →
“…drivers who stop too far into the intersection are more likely to get a ticket, now that the city has made it easier for officers to enforce laws meant to keep traffic flowing…. Agents have been given handheld devices, which scan registration stickers and print tickets.” [via]
Congress questions high cost of texting →
“The price of text messaging has doubled industry-wide in the last three years, and Congress wants to know why.” [via]
“Elvis didn’t invent rock and roll. Ford didn’t invent the automobile or the...”
– Max Kanat-Alexander, Success Comes From Execution, not Innovation
“Marketing is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”
– Unknown, quoted by Merlin Mann in Four Years
“…he was clearly a member of that segment of the population for whom...”
– Duncan “Atrios” Black, The Presidency
“Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra...”
– Todd Hoff, Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it (stats like these remind me of James Gleick’s Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything)
“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual...”
– Clive Thompson “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy”
“Upper Americans live in a world in which things work. The packages arrive...”
– David Frum, “The Vanishing Republican Voter”
“If you just want to look insightful yourself, then you’ll want to ape...”
– Robin Hanson, Aping Insight [via]
“Malamud thinks it will take him another three years to establish that no one can...”
– He’s giving you access, one document at a time [via]
Steve Wozniak an advocate of iPhone hacking →
Woz has apparently jailbroken his iPhone
Google Chrome, Google's Browser Project →
Based on Webkit, with its own written-from-scratch JVM