Whither the wind blows.
—
Op-Ed Contributor - A Plantation to Be Proud Of - NYTimes.com
- Sarah Vowell, whom I wholeheartedly heart
(via rulesformyunbornson)
@my-mother, in case she is able to orient the interwebs machine to this Web.
“But without unpaid contributions like mine, these websites and others like them would not be able to exist, and that would suck, because these are some of my favorite websites. They are just a tiny component of my personal Internet-chimera, which contains plenty of lolcats and junk but also contains plenty that even the snobbiest reader might recognize as original culture.”
So I hate arguments along the lines of “the Internets are destroying ________ and offer nothing to society and we should go into caves because kids these days don’t know the joys of staring at a stone wall and are soft and doughy and don’t read poetry.” Yet, I am somewhat conflicted about advocating people (writers) out of their jobs. I do think that an equillibrium will return. People have been participating in “culture” throughout history and I can’t believe that they’ll stop just cause they can watch 30 Rock for free on hulu. The point: nice smackdown, Emily! Luddites go home.
“Daylight, I’m so absent minded
Nighttime meeting new anxieties
So am I erasing myself?
Hope I’m not erasing myself”
…
“(Physics makes us all its bitches)”
…
Of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? “Gronlandic Edit”
Damn straight. Physics is everyone’s pimp.
Why do I love Google Chrome so much, and want it to come out for mac already? Because instead of making a new version of old technology they tried to rethink the browser at every level.
Obama said that single-payer healthcare would be great if we were starting from scratch, but we’re not starting from scratch; we’ve got a huge and decentralized healthcare system with many interested, powerful, and wealthy parties all along the ideological/evilness spectrum and starting from scratch is simply politically infeasible (i.e., not possible according to the rules of the world in which we live, as cold fusion and perpetual motion).
But whereas reforming healthcare requires incorporating programs and systems that have been in place since Harry S Truman (one instance where I disagree with the CMOS), internet browsers are much less burdened by legacy issues. In particular, while support for previous standards for HTML, JavaScript, etc., most of the front-of-the-house stuff that users actually see and use is constrained only by the habits and tendencies of, as the French deem them, internautes. So Google started from scratch.
Example: A tab is not just a taskbar-button type thing moved from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen. An analogy: looking for a definition of an unknown word, I reach for the dictionary. This is like opening a program, or an instance of a program; I have a question to answer or task to accomplish (i.e., defining a word) and so open something to answer that question or accomplish that task. But if I’m looking for word to express a particular idea, I reach for the thesaurus. Perhaps I find the word right away, but perhaps I go to one entry, follow a cross reference to another, etc. It’s a process of digression from a starting point. This is a tab: a node of a network, connecting to other nodes and leading to a destination that may be far from where I began.
The point: tabs are connected, and should open next to each other. If I want to take one and start exploring off from that starting node, I can drag it off the tab bar and make it a window. I know very little about design, but I know this: form should follow function. For a sculpture, book, etc., form that’s unrelated to function is fine, but design is the art of function.
Tabs not resizing while closing them, so you can rapid-fire kill them; unifying search bar and address bar; plus-button to add tabs on the right; hiding the toolbar behind pull-down buttons; using the critical space normally taken up with the title bar, even though it’s utterly obvious which window is open (I think this is a hold over from pre-task bar days, when you could maximize a Windows 3.11 window and not necessarily know which program was selected; also, one of the few things I think works better in current Windows than Mac OSX). Small things, all of them.
But not really.
— John Patrick Shanley, to graduating class of the College of Mount St. Vincent, via NYT
— Borges
—
(probably NOT) Mark Twain (via San Francisco Quotes)
Forecast in the 50s all week. Mark Twain (or whoever) wasn’t kidding. Then again, he also (apparently) said two other wise things about SF:
“I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union.”
“I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.”
—
Vivek Ranadivé, quoted in the New Yorker article “Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath”, by Malcolm Gladwell.
Another example of the problems I posted about a while back, about the American Airlines website. Every day I deal with this at work. We have data on injury claims and payments from one system that’s used outside of Texas, another set of data for claims and payments inside Texas, and data on hours worked by month for every location from payroll. Each system uses a different architecture, a different format, everything. Then we put all the data together with no small amount of effort and then see some problem, like, why are there payments recorded in Texas in this location after it closed, even though there are no claims? And we aks the company and they’re like…wha? ‘Cause they’ve never put the data together and so could never have seen the problem.
I was for a period a public policy major, and read a number of case studies of situations where big entities - companies, governments, non-profits - fail miserably. All of them involved information that everyone knew about except for the people who needed to know that information. Like the Mars Climate Orbiter, which crashed because Lockheed Martin used Imperial units while NASA used metric units. Everyone at LM knew they used Imperial, and everyone at NASA knew they used metric, but neither of them knew what the other knew.
Flying back from Athens, I flew on US Airways from Atlanta to Philly connecting to SFO. My Atlanta flight was late, and I asked the flight attendant an hour or so we were to land in Philly whether or not my connecting flight would be late too, and I could catch it, and if I was going to miss it was there another flight out that night. Her response: “I have no way of knowing that. We can’t communicate with the ground to get the status.” In my pocket I had a cell phone that could download videos from the other side of the globe, but they can’t radio to the ground to figure out if people will miss there connecting flights.
When I got on the ground, they handed me a boarding pass for the next flight to SFO, as I had apparently missed the connection. I was mildly impressed, given their utter incompetence on the plane. Then, I hear a last-boarding-call for my original flight, which was in fact still on the ground, only 150 feet away.
And that was the last time I fly US Airways if I can help it. I figure, if they don’t know where their planes are on the ground, I’m not too confident that they know where the planes are in the air, and we might just end up in pieces on the side of a mountain.
noun • /ˌän-ə-ˌmat-ə-ˈmā-nē-ə/ • 1) frustration at being unable to think of an appropriate word. 2) an obsession with or extreme love of a particular word.
ORIGIN: Greek ὂνομα, name + μανία, madness
I finally have a diagnosis.
