More from Apple photoblog event
Me with my hand up. (I asked Laura how people respond when they catch her taking pictures of them.) Kottke's coverage. (Note that Jason's commenters have started a good dialogue about photoblogging, covering some of the same questions discussed last night.) After all the talk of the squares that Laura and clarson use, it's refreshing to see Rachelle go in a different direction.Random iPod 2
The next 15 shuffled songs on my iPod: Midnight Blues, Detroit Cobras Harlem Love Theme, J. J. Johnson and His Orchestra Midnight Jam, Joe Strummer Depot Depot, Tom Waits 99 Problems, Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse Bunch of Lonesome Heroes, Leonard Cohen The Caretaker, Johnny Cash The Northeast Corridor, Ted Leo Mondo Bongo, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros Till the End of the Day, The Kinks Readymade FM, Pizzicato Five Little Sunflower, Tito Puente Putty (In Your Hands), Detroit Cobras Unhappy, OutKast Evolution, Cat PowerMoblogging the photobloggers
Lauren moblogs Anil Dash moblogging the photobloggers. I love living in the future. The photography was excellent, but alas, I got no cookies. I did get to chat briefly with Jake and Mike, though, and that was cool.New York Architecture, at NYU
New York City Architecture: A Field Study Two snarky points about the Course Info page: First, you can bring two subway tokens to each class, but they won't do you much good. Second, the Tauranac book might provide detailed bus and subway maps, but the book is dated 1979, and so they'll be only a little more helpful than the subway tokens. Snark aside, any of these walks would make for a great spring Saturday, I think, and the reading list looks excellent. [via thingsmagazine]LibraryLookup
Jon Udell offers a nifty web tool. Install one of his bookmarklets for your local public library. If you're browsing a book site, say at Amazon.com or All Consuming, you can click the bookmarklet and a window will pop-up displaying the book's availability at your local library. Note that not only U.S. libraries are supported. [via muxway]To hell with Orkut
I've been invited to join Orkut, and I've tried to register a username, but every attempt I make craps out. I enter a username and jump through the first couple of screens, and then I get an error screen that the server's acting up, so I quit and come back in a few minutes. I try the username I've just used, and it says that one's registered already, but when I try to log in with that one, I can't get in. I have now blown through nearly every username that I normally try: mdietsch, mtdietsch, dietsch, michaeldietsch, michaeltdietsch, sodietschy. What an annoying, useless piece of shit. It might be alpha software, but it's hard for me to believe that anyone would willfully publish alpha software THIS buggy. And this is from Google people?Art deco bookbindings, on display at NYPL
Opening this Friday at the NYPL is an exhibit of art deco bookbindings from Paris, in the early twentieth century. From the press release:
French bookbinders led the world in their craft in the earlier part of the 20th century — especially from the 1920s to the 50s — and fostered the designer-bookbinder movement that took firm root in several other countries. The most influential of these were Legrain and Adler, who between them created some 525 bindings for the French bibliophile, couturier, collector, and philanthropist Jacques Doucet.
The exhibit has aEven some journalists got a little lost
In his piece "Even Some Subway Riders Who Got the Word Got a Little Lost," Michael Luo writes of subway riders contending with this week's service changes. About midway through the piece, he notes:Confessing complete befuddlement, Ivan Parmar, 21, a real estate agent from Borough Park, Brooklyn, stood at the downtown B and N platform at Herald Square yesterday morning, next to a Metropolitan Transportation Authority poster that read in part, "Sometimes you have to go backward to go forward."
Indeed. I haven't fully explored Herald Square since the change, but when I rode through that station on the downtown B train yesterday, it pulled in on the 6th Avenue platforms. (That is, it pulled in on the same platforms as the F, V, and D trains.) The N, Q, and R use the Broadway platforms. I can't imagine why there would be a B and N platform anywhere in that station. [article via Subway Web News; snide comments entirely my own]Subway conversation
This morning, while waiting on the uptown B/D platform at Broadway-Lafayette, a woman approached me and pointed to the empty B/D tracks. "Good morning! Can you tell me, does this train go to 14th?" "No," I said. "It skips 14th. The F and the V stop at 14th." She rolled her eyes, tightened her mouth, and said, "What?" "The B and D are express trains. They skip 14th and 23rd." "I want the 6!" As the D began to enter the station, I replied, "You can get a downtown 6 upstairs, but you can't get an uptown 6 here." The D slowed to a stop. The woman watched the cars move past, scanning the windows for a conductor. "Oh, never mind!" she said, as I entered the train.Random iPod
Cribbed from blueplaidshirt and Robot Johnny, here are the first 15 songs, at random, from my iPod: Big Exit, P. J. Harvey Beetlebum [Live], Blur Lonely, Tom Waits Streets of Sorrow / Birmingham Six, The Pogues Huff All Night, The Donnas Lullaby of London, The Pogues Sulk, Billy Bragg Television, The Playwrights Let It Bleed, The Rolling Stones Killer Joe, Tito Puente [None], Ted Leo Venom, Hybe I Saw Your Shoes, Cowboy Junkies Will You Love Me Tomorrow, Carole King Redemption Song, Joe Strummer I'm probably going to figure out a way to list 15 random songs in the sidebar to the right, rather than list two CDs I've just bought. I buy music so infrequently that new discs just sit in that sidebar and crust over.Rail planning and the Manhattan Bridge
All four tracks on the Manhattan Bridge return to service this weekend, after nearly 20 years of bridge renovations, carrying an array of new subway routes and schedules. As Michael Luo writes in the Times, deciding on those routes presented the MTA with a challenge, and some intriguing patterns have emerged that point to the many changes in the city since 1986, when renovations began on the Manhattan Bridge. Subway planners looked at MetroCard data to determine ridership numbers and origin and destination patterns; they also consulted demographic data and computer models. Luo writes:Among the broad trends they tried to incorporate in their plan: once problem-plagued areas like Union Square and Times Square have become weekend destinations needing more service; an artist enclave known as SoHo turned into a retail hub; growth in Midtown far outpaces that of Lower Manhattan; growth in scattered neighborhoods like Astoria, Prospect Park and Bay Ridge has altered subway demands.
Planners admit, however, the new routes are the result of art as much as science, and they'll be looking to new ridership patterns to gauge whether they've succeeded.Photobloggers at SoHo Apple
The Apple store is hosting several NYC-based photobloggers next Thursday (Feb. 26). They'll be discussing and exhibiting their work. Also presenting will be representatives of Six Apart and fotolog.net. Six Apart is the company behind Movable Type and Type Pad, and SA's people will no doubt discuss their nifty photoblogging and moblogging tools. I'm looking at you, Lauren Martin.Cops seize Chinatown buses
The NYPD checked 100 buses on Tuesday and yanked a dozen from streets to address safety concerns and curb bus war.Activist fights for west-side rail cuts
A Manhattan reading teacher appeared before Community Board 4 to advocate the preservation of a railcut through Manhattan's West Side. The railcuts, which now serve Amtrak's Empire line, were originally built as part of a freight network connecting Lower Manhattan to Upstate New York. The lower end of this network, nicknamed the High Line, is elevated; the High Line also has advocates seeking its preservation. [article via Subway Web News; OldNYC on the High Line and the rail cut]Teen Titans, NASCAR, and Black Cinema: Unsuitable for deaf audiences
Television Captioining Censorship "The National Association of the Deaf (NAD) urged President Bush to overturn a recent decision by the U.S. Department of Education to declare almost 200 television shows inappropriate for captioning by the Department’s Technology and Media Services for Individuals with Disabilities program, effective October 1, 2003. According to NAD President, Andrew J. Lange, the Department's action is government censorship and contradicts President Bush’s promotion of family values and parental accountability." [More and still more; via Boing Boing and Neil Gaiman]
The B, which used to be the Q diamond, which used to be the D--whu?
It's not as confusing as it all sounds, and I'm geeky enough that I'm actually excited: ABC's of subway swapMedical privacy
Charlie Suisman of Manhattan User's Guide editorializes this morning on medical privacy. Check it out. Not only is Charlie funny, but he's exactly right.In the light of evolution
"Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." -- Theodosius Dobzhansky. "The distinguished American philosopher Daniel Dennett has credited Darwin with the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind. This was natural selection, the survival of the fittest, of course, and I would include sexual selection as part of the same idea. But Darwin was not only a deep thinker, he was a naturalist of encyclopaedic knowledge and (which by no means necessarily follows) the ability to hold it in his head and deploy it in constructive directions." -- Richard Dawkins.February 12, 1809
Happy birthday to you
You live in a zoo.
You descended from a monkey,
And you smell like one too.