31 May 2004
for security reasons
For security reasons, take off your shoes.
Just. Take. Them. Off.
Type
Blowfish is getting ready to publish its first book (not counting the catalogs), and I rather splurged on type from Emigré for it. (Our house standard type faces are Myriad and Minion, both from Adobe, and they’re fine fonts and all that, but you get a bit bored with them after 10 years.)
Along those lines, TypeCon 2004 will be in San Francisco at the end of July, and I’m hoping I can spring the time to get to it.
Retail is Hell
At some point, I really need to start documenting the Stupid Customer Tricks that certain of our loyal Blowfish customers pull on us. Until then, if you want a remarkably good simulation of what it is like at Blowfish, dealing with the public on a day-to-day basis, I would like to recommend The Barnes & Noble Experience.
The Definitive Article on Country Crock Plus
Outside of a technical article in a food industry magazine (those are cool), McSweeney's has published the definitive article on Country Crock Plus Calcium and Vitamins.
On the Future of Aviation
My wife and I just got back from a trip to Kansas City, on Midwest Airlines. The previous times we had to go to KC, we flew America West, and the experience was truly horrible: late departures, equipment problems in Phoenix, etc., etc. Midwest was great: On-time departure, early arrival, comfortable seats (two by two in an MD-80), and pleasant service. They make you buy your meals, but that’s fine with me: I can bring my own food; I can't bring my own seats.
I was even willing to forgive them the detail that their web site doesn’t work with Safari.
The days of the huge hub-and-spoke airlines are coming to an end. The supposed economies of scale in large airlines are proving to be an illusion. We’re moving towards a model in which smaller airlines serve a relatively limited of routes with point-to-point service, and it can’t come a moment too soon.
26 May 2004
for security reasons
For security reasons, do not bring a camera here. That’s not a camera, is it?
11 May 2004
That’s It. This War on Terrorism Has Gotten Far Too Silly.
Via Boing Boing, this item from US News and World Report:
It was the lead item on the government's daily threat matrix one day last April. Don Emilio Fulci described by an FBI tipster as a reclusive but evil millionaire, had formed a terrorist group that was planning chemical attacks against London and Washington, D.C. That day even FBI director Robert Mueller was briefed on the Fulci matter. But as the day went on without incident, a White House staffer had a brainstorm: He Googled Fulci. His findings: Fulci is the crime boss in the popular video game Headhunter. "Stand down," came the order from embarrassed national security types.
Life imitates The Onion.
9 May 2004
A Better Brief
Greg Storey of Airbag (a great blog I just discovered via this link) redesigned a now-infamous White House intelligence brief in a superior, easy-to-follow style.
Would it have a made a difference come 9/11? Impossible to say. But this provides a wonderfully brief (so to speak) and relevant discussion of the importance of good design.
8 May 2004
Public Transit: The Good, The Bad
Nextbus is cool. It’s a service that provides real-time arrival information for selected lines on a variety of public transportation systems, including San Francisco’s. Very straight-forward design, and very handy for deciding if you have time to continue to find that book you wanted to take to work.
To quibble, it should support more bus lines than it does. It focuses on high-frequency lines, but it’s the low-frequency lines where you really need this information . . . if a bus only comes once every 20 minutes during the day, you want to be sure you’re on it. Technology is not perfect, and sometimes a bus will appear that wasn’t on the schedule. But it’s still very useful.
Before I moved to London in 2000, I lived on TransitInfo. The information was cleanly presented and easy to find. The clickable BART schedule map was particularly nifty. No flashy graphics or designer-ego-enhancements, just straight-forward transit information.
By the time I moved back in 2001, it sucked. Layers upon layers of clicks, gratuitous hierarchical menus, pull-downs, and typing. No clickable maps. Lots of dead-end navigation (“this section is under construction” . . . it couldn’t be more 1997 if it had that little yellow men-working sign). This is what happens when a bloated, moribund government institution with turf issues gets ahold of a valuable resource.
Jenna Jameson Gets All Lessig On Us
Now, this is a confluence of interests. The sex business and patent activism, two of my favorite subjects, in one topic!
Jenna Jameson, famous porn star, has lent moral support to the fight against yet another spurious technology patent, this one by one Acacia Research that claims to cover pretty much all streaming media.
(Of course, Jenna is a savvy businesswoman and nobody’s fool . . . her site has plenty of streaming content on it, too.)
As usual, the depth of the patent holders commitment is shown in that they are going after adult industry sites, rather than, say, Apple, Microsoft, or Real, the companies that actually build the technology. Of course, Apple and Microsoft have enormous cash mountains and battalions of lawyers to fight just such absurd suits . . . I detect some traditional playground bully behavior here on the part of Acacia.
Of course, this “bet the company on a highly dubious IP claim” strategy is hardly unique to Acacia. Just like in that case, the hope is that you score easy victories against soft targets who can’t afford a long patent fight, hoping that you can build up enough bad case law and cash so that you can then either go after the big boys, or have enough to retire on when the IP is found to be bogus and the music stops.
What we need is a wholesale revision of intellectual property law. Until then, it’s just going to be one of these stupid cases after another.
Command-Line Food
Way back when we had to bang rocks together to do computation, and I was first learning to do so, one of the programs that the nerds at the Santa Monica High School Computer Lab put together was the “Store Program.” The only place to get snacks that was in walking distance of Samohi way back then was a rather scary liquor store on Pico just, uh, I guess that’s north-east of Lincoln.
Amazingly enough, that liquor store is still there.
The Store Program was pretty cool, in its primitive little Interdata 7/16 BASIC kind of way. It would take everyone’s order (red licorice and Coke for me, thanks!), calculate how much everyone owed (including tax), figure out from how much each person was putting in how much of what kind of change to get (down to the dime, nickel and penny), and (most important!) pick someone at random to walk to the store.
It is good to know that we still have geeks out there who are continuing the fine tradition of the Store Program, and the Xerox PARC burrito utility.
for security reasons
For security reasons, do not inquire too closely as to what “law enforcement activity” means.
7 May 2004
Resign, Rumsfeld
I greatly admire The Economist, even when I strongly disagree with its political stance. Lately, I’ve disagreed more and more, as the position that the war in Iraq was the only viable alternative, and entirely and completely justified, has moved from seeming arguable, but at least principled, to seeming merely stubborn.
Now, the magazine has run a leader calling on Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to resign over the Iraq torture revelations. They’re right. He should.
Torture vs Abuse
On a different blog, I commented that this hair-splitting over whether what US soldiers are accused of doing is “abuse” or “torture” seemed like an attempt to preserve some kind of magical American exceptionalism. ”Well, we may have abused, but America doesn’t torture.”
“The pictures I've seen depict conduct, behaviour that is so brutal and so cruel and so inhumane that anyone engaged in it or involved in it would have to be brought to justice,” Mr Rumsfeld said. (BBC News)
I’d say that pretty much clears that matter up.
All countries, everywhere, are defined by their actions. Reading certain neo-con writing, I sometimes get flashes of the idea that America is a Knoxian “Elect” country, that because America is an inherently good country, anything we do (no matter how it seems) must be good, too. Of course, that’s backwards: If America is to be a good country, it must act that way. Often, we do. This time, we didn’t. The myth that our actions are self-justifying is incredibly dangerous.
Scientology, Scientology, Scientology.
This is a wonderful story about Scientology, and one man’s infiltration of Celebrity Center (which those in the know call “CC” . . . he’s not making up the part about L. Ron’s roped-off office. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. It’s as creepy as hell). Boing Boing already ran it, but I’m linking to it as well, in a low-rent Googlehack to see if this story can become #1 for searches on “Scientology.”
Scientology.
Christophe Sells Out
Because I’m curious about how it works, the bottom of this column has Google AdSense ads on it. Don’t feel an obligation to click on them. Of course, don’t feel an obligation not to, either.
Louisiana Solves All Problems, Moves On to Fashion
The Louisiana legislature, having apparently solved every single major issue confronting that fine state, has moved on to the pressing problem of saggy pants that expose underwear or asses.
“I don't relish the idea of seeing the beginning of people’s pubic hair,” Westwego City Councilman Glenn Green told the House Criminal Justice Committee on Thursday.
“I don't relish seeing the beginning of the crease of people’s buttocks. And I don’t enjoy watching young men letting their sexual organs show through their red or black silk underwear,” Green said.
“Red or black silk underwear”? It might be just me, but does it not seem that Councilman Green has thought about this to quite a high level of detail?
5 May 2004
3 May 2004
R.I.P., Bookpeople
It is very painful that Bookpeople, one of the best independent book distributors, has gone out of business. For Blowfish, it is particularly personal, as they were one of our first vendors, way back when. Some of my fondest memories of the early days of Blowfish were driving over to the Bookpeople warehouse near Oakland airport to scope out the latest arrivals and pick up what we needed.
I’m still in a bit of denial about them really being gone; just as when you lose a long-time friend, it seems as though they are still there. I still almost ask our book buyer, “Hey, does Bookpeople carry that title?“ . . . and then I remember.
Over the years, Bookpeople also provided many friends of mine with jobs when they needed them, and they were the kind of jobs that are getting scarcer and scarcer: Full-time jobs that paid a living wage, with health insurance.
We’ll miss them. Buy something from an independent bookstore, in their memory.
2 May 2004
A Fine Mess
The Financial Times, for those who are not familiar with it, is the City of London’s equivalent of the Wall Street Journal. While the FT’s editorials are not nearly as Neaderthal as those of the Journal, it worships at the shrine of Saint Thatcher . . . in other words, it is just about as far as you can get from a left-wing rag and still be in Europe.
It recently published an editorial, signed by 52 British former embassadors and members of the foreign policy establishment, arguing that Britain’s blind adherence to the Bush administration’s policies in the Middle East have deeply damanged the UK’s interests abroad.
Reading the editorial on-line requires a subscription (which is worth it), but the below-mentioned A Fistful of Euros published a very pithy quote.
Now that the official line out of Washington DC appears to be, “Everything will be fine, it’s just a few extremists, Saddam was worse, la la la la I can’t hear you,” it’s refreshing to remember that people who actual apply reason to situations still exist in the world.
The “Ueberpimp”
Jamais sent me a reference to this wonderful article from A Fistful of Euros, which definitely takes the best blog title this week award. In summary, it appears that the German government may be in the situation of having to offer vocational training to prostitutes. But, really, read the article.
1 May 2004
for security reasons
For security reasons, expect to pay more in the future.