Month: August 2011
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Prying Light Bulbs Out of Cold, Dead Hands
Wired did a cover story on the light bulb, which is fascinating to me, for many of the same reasons two freight trains containing rocket fuel and napalm colliding at full speed is fascinating to most people. Wired never has more than four god damned things a year even worth reading, unless you’re always in…
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Small Fish Big Pond
I was listening to Mark Maron’s podcast the other day – specifically, an interview with Aubrey Plaza – and they started talking about how they both used to live in Queens. But then Maron said where he lived, which was at 37th Street and 30th Avenue, and it completely blew my mind, because I lived…
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Review: Lost in America by Colby Buzzell
It appears that someone over at HarperCollins saw my previous review of Colby Buzzell’s first book, My War, that I wrote last March, because they sent me an advance copy of his latest, Lost in America: A Dead-End Journey, which is coming out in September. I remember looking for more info on him after reading…
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The Death of Palm
In a serious WTF move yesterday, HP announced they were ditching their hardware manufacturing business, and abandoning their work on WebOS devices. HP just bought Palm a little over a year ago for 1.2 billion dollars. Their big splash was the iPad killer tablet, the HP TouchPad, which sold roughly as well as the Edsel…
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Thoughts on a random picture: the N
This is the N: I took this picture just over ten years ago. I was on the way home from my second date with Kelly. We went to Jackson Heights, and then to Target. It doesn’t sound that exciting, but when you live in New York in 2001 and you spent a good chunk of…
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No patience for technical support
I had to go to Target at 8:30 last night and buy a new wireless router. Okay, “had” is a strong word, but I got to the end of my patience, and was fortunate enough to recognize that and throw this stupid Netgear piece of shit I just bought a few months ago into the…
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The Busses of Perception
When I first visited New York in 1998, one of the things that struck me, an odd connection to the past, were the city busses. I don’t even remember if I rode on one – I never really figured out the schedule, and it was usually easier to walk to a subway stop – but…
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On Mix-tapes, floppy disks, and gopher
When we were out for dinner last night, I was talking about the AT&T “you will” ad campaign. It seems like this happened ten minutes ago, but it was twenty years ago. I don’t entirely know why I remember these ads, since I didn’t have a TV at the time, and downloading a ten-second 320×200…
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It has been a decade since I’ve seen a sector not found error
Someone recently posted a sort of call-to-arms for people to dig up their old floppy disks and back them up immediately, because it would only be a matter of moments before the magnetic media would flake away and vanish forever. I remember hearing scare stories way back when, that after some huge amount of time…
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All That is Golden
Simms had a hard-on for Kubrick. I’m suddenly reminded of this because of an excellent documentary on the making of The Shining, as filmed by Stanley’s daughter Vivian. Go watch this immediately. This is required. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4745727919325920852 Simms had these insane theories that Kubrick was obsessed with the Golden ratio. I’d never heard of the concept, that…