Where I’m @

20030729

History is Circular
Seen on Todd Dominey’s sidebar, a short BBC article on security firms and their tracing of file sharers. Most of the article is a ho-hum (what, you didn’t know that on the internet, anyone can find your doghouse?), but toward the end there is an interesting little statement:

"As well as making money, Mr Ishikawa’s vision for BayTSP is to become a hi-tech version of Pinkerton, the legendary detective agency that protected presidents like Abraham Lincoln and hunted outlaws like Jesse James.“

To give Ishikawa the benefit of the doubt, we’ll assume that he just is unaware of the full story of the Pinkerton Detective Agency. In addition to doing perfectly fine things like protecting presidents and doing para-police work like chasing Jesse James, the Pinkerton’s were notorious for providing and protecting strikebreakers during some of the high-profile strikes of the late 19th and early 20th century. As with the current situation, the Pinkerton Agency’s motivation was partly sheer monetary and partly a thinly or not-so-thinly veiled distaste for average citizens or social progress. Law had very little to do with it.

20030724

KISS
Tim Bray has a good post up about ways of thinking about the current state of the browserverse. Clearly, we’ve been ineluctably silent during the most recent flap and series of DNR invocations by browser manufacturers, and there’s not a lot to say that hasn’t been said. So we just have a small point.

Everyone seems to agree that the Browser Wars were a Bad Thing(tm). Yet some in the standards camp^* seem to want to bring them back, implying that disgust with the cutthroat competition was not about its existence but rather its apparent outcome. To avoid this perception (or even this fact) when proceeding with Bray’s concept of informing IE-using visitors that the site would look and perform better with another browser, the focus must be on the site’s looking and performing better in any other browser that implements standards better. For the end-user, if the browserverse is a choice among eight different browsers, one of which is IE, our suspicion is that that end-user will stick with IE. But if the choice is binary, between IE and anything else, the choice is easier to make.

It’s a rule of usability that a user should not have to think about the actions being carried out, and it’s a good practice in software design to reduce problems to their simplest components and build from there, so it would seem to be a good tactic to present the end-user with as simple a choice as possible: We would prefer you use any of these three (or four or what have you) browsers over IE.^** Doesn’t matter which of the three (or four or what have you), but any of them would be better.

^*We count ourself as a card-carrying member of this camp, so there.

^*Then, of course, there is the political gambit of making it appear that there is no difference between the choices, but that is a strategy better discussed another time.

20030723

Roundup

For the Type Geeks

Unleash your rage on bad type and the Great Redmond Behemoth at the same time by using Helvetica to squash Arial. found at Typographica

Spoof and Source

Some time ago, we posted about the cool-o Honda ad making the web rounds, and now we can see both how things moved forward and whence they came. found at Clagnut

Memento Mori

Despite the overly precious title (a sin of which we are guilty many times over), this is an interesting essay about a building complex in Tokyo and its meanings for urbanism, Japanese-ness, and a sense of place in the modern world. The tone is nicely betwixt and between the rarefied discourse of contemporary architectural writings and the simplistic words of mainstream publishing. found via wandering around the web

20030715

Ketchup
My, how time flies. We haven’t gone this long between posts in over a year, as we see it.

Inter alia, we have been insanely busy (for us) with an enormous project at work, have had plans for every weekend for a month, and have taken a vacation to Rome (Italia, that is). So the past 40 or so days looks a little bit like this: work work WORK work work weekend plans work work WORK work work weekend plans work work WORK work work weekend plans work work WORK work work wedding work car bus tiny plane big plane Paris small train taxi lunch appointment dinner appointment medium plane Rome meet eat car eat see walk bus walk sun sun sun eat bus wedding eat car reception (eat eat meet dance) car bus walk walk see eat buy buy eat eat walk medium plane Atlanta small plane Newark bus cab home work work rest rest work.

The extended remix would be more like : work work WORK work work weekend plans work work WORK work work weekend plans work work WORK work work weekend plans work work WORK work work SO’s friend’s wedding and visit to our dad work fly to Boston fly to Paris on Air France with good food have lunch with friends in Paris realize that we’ve been awake for over 24 hours and collapse for 30 minutes dinner with family friend of SO bed down at midnight (since in Paris in the summer you eat at 9pm) fly to Rome in the morning meet family the SO was an au pair for 8 years ago eat fabulous Italian food hair-raising car ride to a funk/r’n’b concert hair-raising car ride home sleep tourist day (eat food eat ice cream see ruins get too much sun) sleep three busses to Roman wedding eat fabulous Italian food at restaurant sleep hair-raising car ride in the country to wedding reception eat fabulous Italian food drink ordinary but excellent Italian wine dance dance dance less hair-raising car ride back sleep tourist day (more food more ice cream more ruins more sun) sleep shopping for friends and family and selves day pack endless flight on Delta to Atlanta with inedible food easy flight to NYC on Delta bus to Manhattan cab to Brooklyn four disorienting days pick up SO at airport.

Some notes for future posts: Franco Battiato, Daniele Silvestri, Giovanotte, Ligabue; leftist Italians and French are as disappointed in their countries and ours as we are in ours and theirs; Italian soccer team stores win hands-down over New York baseball team stores; the Colosseum charges too much; small sausage and cheese shops still show their prices in Lire; American Express in Paris is great, but in Rome it fails its members; as mentioned before, if you are flying to Europe, take Alitalia or Air France (we can’t speak for other countries’ airlines) and maybe pay more rather than suffer in an American company’s planes.