Damien Weighill doesn’t believe real people read blogs, so to prove him wrong, you can send him a picture of yourself and he will draw a picture of you and post it on his blog, your face. Someone other than me do this so we can see if it actually works.

Via Drawn!

Yesterday I attended an interesting event with k7, mcd, and Jill: a live conversation between author, journalist, and professor Michael Pollan, and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods. Pollan has criticized Whole Foods for failing to adhere to the pastoral, humane, and environmentally sound image they tout in their marketing, but over the past year he and Mackey have been engaging in a public dialogue on the issues (which I still have to read). Last night was another, more public step in that dialogue.

Anyway, I think many of us are interested in food (most of us, I think, eat it), so maybe we can use this space to register thoughts, answer questions, and try and validate some of the assertions made. Editors, feel free to add stuff to the body of this post if you don’t think content belongs in a comment.

Continue reading ‘Pollan & Mackey: Thoughts and Fact Check’

Hey y’all… my sources tell me that SB 113 made it out of the last California Legislative committee yesterday. It will be on the governator’s desk by the end of the week. In case you’re not an election geek like me, SB 113 would change the presidential primary in California to the “first Tuesday in February in any year evenly divisible by the number 4.” The primary used to be in June, at the same time as state primaries and local elections.

So, what does this mean for you? It means that California will have more of a voice in presidential elections. However, some states are going to be jealous of the attention our large population will get during primary campaigning. To be sure, the schedule of when presidential primary elections are “allowed” to happen is tightly constrained by political parties.

What does this mean for election officials? Lots and lots and lots of stress. This will mean they’ll have four elections in one year (November 2007, February 2008, June 2008 and November 2008). Election officials and their staff typically work 12-hour days, weeks on end, without days off to prepare for elections. Sigh. We reap what we sow yo.

Ok, a little moronic and a little late, but the inventor of the electric slide is claiming and attempting to enforce copyright over his dance (which, by the way, is “for professional dancers only”). He’s also trying to use the DMCA to go after videos of the dance. Being unfamiliar with and nominally averse to the bizarre practice of “dancing” you hu-mons seem to relish so, losing the electric slide to the clutches of copyright does not concern me greatly. If Ignignokt tried to copyright flipping the bird, however, things might be different.

Also, fantastic (but copyrighted) diagrams of the electric slide can be found in this book.

Via NPR

“damnit anna”
by
the morning benders

via stereogum

woo!

This is a pretty cool idea: map all the instances of “X is the new Y” in a set of documents and see how things interrelate. No mention of what the documents were, or what the arrow lengths mean, but it’s still fun to look at, and would be cool to replicate, esp. on a corpus of blog posts, marketing blurbs, or product reviews.

Via VisualComplexity

Flickr is almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world. Show off your favorite photos to the world, securely and privately show photos to your friends and family, or blog the photos you take with a cameraphone.

Today I was bookmarking all the sites I have accounts for in an attempt to better organize and understand who and where all of my personal information is stored (which is an enlightening endeavor to say the least). I have a flickr account, and love their service, in fact I probably love it a bit too much.

Lately, though, I’ve noticed two self-promotion attempts by flickr that leave me questioning their humility. I’m sure that these are intended to be taken as tongue-in-cheek, though like Eminem once aptly stated “I joke when I say I’m the best, but a lot of truth is said in jest”.

The first advert is the quote at the beginning of the article which, at least in Firefox, gets entered automatically into your bookmark’s description field. The second is the image above, from the back cover of issue #7 in JPG magazine. Now, while I do think flickr is the best online photo manager in the world, I also think there are a lot of interface and interaction issues they have yet to solve. I guess I wouldn’t mind them being a tad more humble in their adverts, and not necessarily assume that all of my needs, desires and ambitions revolve around online photo sharing.

Oh what the hell, boast away guys, flickr rocks (just work on some of the interface issues! or hire someone from iSchool to?).

“in my country we have problem, and that problem is transport”

The president is pushing for us to get off our oil addiction. To this end, he is pushing for an increased reliance on ethanol.

But that’s neither here nor there.

Are we really, fundamentally, re-thinking the way we move atoms across space? Or are we simply paying lip-service to something trendy? A friend of mine who works in an automotive R&D group scoffs at the hype that hybrid cars are getting. They are certainly not an end solution to the greenhouse problem, he says. It’s commonplace to overhear someone saying that “they’re doing their part for the earth” by driving a Prius. But my gut reaction is that we need to keep moving in our efforts to move more efficiently.

So another friend notified me that we bay area folks can pre-order the Smart Car.
http://www.retrothing.com/2006/06/why_the_smart_c.html

Other friends are finding some vintage two-seaters to drive efficiently.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/k7lim/316278934/

Is there a way we can rethink the conduits too?
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html

i sense that most of us here in oaf-town aren’t content to get around the web in a plain-jane vanilla browser.

so, imagine you have to install a browser from scratch. what are the first modifications you make to your browsing experience?

what are the handiest tweaks, scripts or add-ons that you find yourself evangelizing about?

i personally can’t live without typeaheadfind, undo close and session saving (all of which are available, but disabled by default, in Firefox 2)

typeaheadfind has been available in every mozilla-based browser i’ve seen. if you type about:config into the URL bar, you will be brought to list of editable configuration settings.

if you find accessibility.typeaheadfind and set it to true (or create this variable and initialize it to true), you enable a quick way to get around a web page. once you’re on a page, you can simply type and the browser will find and highlight the first instance of the string you’ve typed in. if you happen to highlight a linkified word, simply pressing enter will cause the browser to follow that link.

most of the time, i’m looking for key information on a given page. and i’m shocked at how often people will scroll and hunt using their visual search strategies, when an unambigious match is 4-5 keystrokes away.

following links with keyboard is quick and preferable to relying on mousing and clicking, especially when you’re as bad with a touchpad as i am.

undo close simply solves the “crap i didn’t mean to close that” frustration that tabmongers like me face. if you right click on the tab bar in firefox 2, you will be presented with an “Undo Close Tab” option, which does exactly as you expect. i use an extension (keyconfig) to remap this function to control-Z, to preserve the “undo” convention across yet another app.

finally, session saving is another great feature that’s built right into Firefox 2, but is left off by default. To try it out, simply go to the preferences window, and in the main tab, set the “When Firefox starts” field to “Show my windows and tabs from last time.” It’s always nice to be able to pick up where you leave off, if circumstances necessitate closing a browser.

these tips are very basic. and there are many other tweaks, both great and small, that can improve your web traversals. go ahead, show your arsenal.

and stay tuned for part two of our series on “gettin’ around.”

BBC’s radio feature “Culture Shock” wonders if Cash is on the rise. They point to a (mostly anecdotal) trend of desperate housewives of New York using wads of cash, instead of plastic, to buy stuff. The reason: avoid marital confrontation and painful explanation of the spending trail. Also credit cards have kind of become a great leveler. Everybody (except poor) could get a credit card and pulling out a wad of $100 bills is different (Yeah, yeah, Credit companies have Silver, Gold and Platinum. But its still plastic gold and plastic platinum; Not even close to GREEN).

I was thinking what if we are given the ability to lump all our ‘anonymous’ purchases thru plastic under a “Misc” category? It might be okay if the sum total of category is decent, but there is a good possibility for misc to be the largest chunk (For something totally different, DST for 8 months and ‘Normal’ time for 4 months ?). Anyways, are you using more cash than you used to? I am definitely not.