October 2011
1 post
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
1 post
August 2010
1 post
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Spock, rationality and reasons for Truth →
Spock’s emotional state is always set to “calm”, even when wildly inappropriate. He often gives many significant digits for probabilities that are grossly uncalibrated. (E.g: “Captain, if you steer the Enterprise directly into that black hole, our probability of surviving is only 2.234%” Yet nine times out of ten the Enterprise is not destroyed. What kind of tragic fool gives four...
July 2010
2 posts
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Which loads faster?
I’m pleased as punch to announce whichloadsfaster.com, an open-source web performance tool where pages compete head-to-head in your browser to see who’s fastest!
It started as an off-hand remark by my buddy, Ricardo: “You should make a tool that can load two web pages side by side so you can see which one loads faster.” I backpedaled a little at first, the way an...
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May 2010
4 posts
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Homemade iPad Case
A few days ago I popped into the Pasadena Apple Store to look at iPad cases. I had thought that my requirements were fairly simple: a landscape slipcase with easy iPad insertion/removal that can itself be easily moved in and out of my bag. Everything at the store, however, seemed bulky, expensive and inelegant.
His spidey sense tingling at my obvious indecision (or perhaps just tickled by his...
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Steam Cars
A couple Saturdays ago, @kriskowal and I found ourselves at a meeting of the Southern California chapter of the Steam Automobile Club of America of which Kris’s father is president. It’s been a long while since I’ve seen these steam cars in action. Getting to ride on these gentle and majestic contraptions was a real treat:
Kris’s father brought the Dampf ‘Bil,...
April 2010
10 posts
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“A window pops up. You read the message to decide whether to hit OK or Cancel....”
– UX insight by Esther Nam
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The Adobe - Apple Flame War →
I’ve been talking with a number of you about Adobe and Apple’s platform fight. The latest monday note by Jean-Louis Gassée (who founded BeOS after leaving Apple) makes an excellent jumping-off point, explaining some of the history and elucidating (as always) the underlying strategies of the players. Whereas Adobe is trying to commoditize it’s compliments, Apple must hold onto...
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Easter Dinner
Lamb by yours truly. Potatoes by @ErikDreyer and Diana. Salad by @jasonyo and SJ. Asparagus by steam pot.
The salad contained spinach, pears, medium-boiled eggs and from-scratch candied walnuts! It was quite a hit. The potatoes had tons of garlic, and complimented the lamb very nicely.
The lamb is from an epicurious recipie that I followed pretty closely. We started with two lamb legs from...
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First Camera, Then Fork →
Vi sent me this NY Times article to let me know I’m not the only one who takes pictures of food. I wasn’t really aware of being part of this emerging food-photoblogging phenomenon, but I’m not surprised, given the upward trend in the US gastronomic awareness and the fact that food is just so darned pretty!
The photoblogging foodies in the article had a variety of motivations....
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WatchMy wife’s collection of sun-powered bobbling things. To the left is the Flip Flop plant from thinkgeek. To the right are her Sunshine Buddies. :D
March 2010
4 posts
Social graph map of the US →
DjangoLA people: a link to the Pete Warden article we talked about last night.
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“
When by thy scorne, O murdresse, I am dead,
And that thou thinkst thee free
...”
– — John Donne, The Apparition
(so emocore)
February 2010
3 posts
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January 2010
1 post
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October 2009
1 post
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September 2009
2 posts
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James and the giant swindle
One of the readings in church today was from the epistle of James. It didn’t get any comments from the pulpit, but seems to me to fit the current mood of reflecting on the tremors and scandals running through our financial system (emphasis mine):
Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you. Your riches have rotted, and your clothes are moth-eaten....
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August 2009
1 post
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July 2009
7 posts
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Write a title for my trance song: The Contest™
...
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You Work for Google (but Google works for you,...
Here’s a wonderful and accessible guest article by my longtime friend Erik Dreyer that presents the internet as a (part) human computer. It was originally published a couple weeks ago in Volume 1, Issue 1 of The Outpost, a print newspaper whimsically launched by Erik and some friends in Anchorage, Alaska. The paper featured coverage of local and national issues, as well as essays and art...
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WatchFantastic presentation that I attended at #velocityconf given by Nichole Sullivan on modular CSS design and how it effects (yes, that’s right, i said effects) performance.
First posted by estherbester.
The Fast And The Fabulous
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A song version of The Ant
Made on the built-in...
June 2009
10 posts
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The Ant
How resolute the ant.
When traveling, she firmly plants
Her feet upon the ground. She must,
For, if you were to let a gust
Of breath escape your lips,
Poor ant would sail away like ships
Borne hapless by the gale.
But, though she spin and flail,
She would land aright again,
Undaunted and begin
Whatever task she left before
With firm her feet upon the floor.
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FINRA Fund Analyzer →
Compares the performance of mutual funds and index funds. Regardless what you think of FINRA, this tool has been incredibly useful in helping me reason about funds by summarizing and comparing their vital stats.
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SpriteMe →
Another Steve Souders tool that looks through your site design and groups images together that are easily spriteable. Coming soon (according to Steve): integration with smush.it and css sprite generator.
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ShareThis links on your tumblog
Those nifty buttons are a great way to make your blog a better place for your readers. ShareThis has worked pretty hard at making them easy to integrate into your site. When you sign up, you get some button code that you can plop down inside your post (like I did earlier in this paragraph), or better yet, inside your post template next to the comment button.
This is fine for a single post, but...
WatchiPhone video of the Jonathan Denmark concert from last Thurs. “This is what Rap music looks like now. They changed it. We changed it.”
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blog upgrade!
The first things to go were all my tweets that were cluttering these pages (death by a thousand pecks?). Now my twitter status is relegated to the sidebar where it belongs.
With the everyday tweets out of the way, I kept the most insightful and interesting content (from my own perspective, of course), moved twitpic images right onto the blog, and turned the witty tweets into quotes.
For more...
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Help our friends in Iran →
If you know your way around linux and have hardware (or better yet, vms), please help.
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“Science is making rules from effects. Engineering is making effects from rules.”
May 2009
3 posts
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