The excitement lately is the small kind, an offer tendered (so we’ll wait and see), an external monitor (no hunching!), Cory, Iyengar (and Maria for leading me to Cory). Finding balance in a new professional space (sometime lately I stopped feeling like I was faking it at being a grown up). Beans. Absolutely fascinating, [...]

Okay: so I can play DVDs now, but they’re choppy. Meanwhile, Ubuntu’s System Monitor shows 2.9 GiB of available memory, though I ought to have 4. The bios shows 4. What gives?

Okay, lazyweb: Why can’t I play DVDs and why, when I have installed in my computer two RAM modules of 2GiB each, does my computer have 2.9 GiB of the RAMS? Why? On the DVD end, I have installed one million things and gotten from an error in Totem (”no uri handler implemented for dvd”) [...]

It is a tradition, in these parts, to congregate at the home of one Frances Pauline for black eyed peas, collard greens and corn bread on New Years Day. Luck, it is supposed to bring you. I won’t be around these parts though. I’ll be Out West. In San Francisco. So I’m going to make do, [...]

Serizawa and, or It’s Not You, It’s Me.

Sharding, scons, mercurial. Sinatra (which is a framework). Simulation (model; replica), simulacrum (an image; faint trace or semblance). You should have come with me. Because you would have learned about the World’s Biggest Mall. You might also be interested in guarantees. Also, I am famous now. Lady Smugness. Whatever. I like my bike. We’re all [...]

Via dkg, whose excellent essay Technical Architecture Shapes Social Structure you all already read when we first published The Organic Internet, comes an academic variation on that theme: Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems affect teaching. Normally I’d bookmark and move on, but this is extra interesting (and I haven’t even read it yet.)

Our latest (and last, for now) news game, Switch, is live. It is no Energyville but we think it is pretty awesome. Not only is it live, the source code and installation instructions are already available. With gadgets guzzling evermore energy, New York City faces a looming energy gap. New Yorkers will have to cut [...]

Street fairs, potholes, vinyl siding, cemetery, service road, Unisphere, Queens Botanical Garden, cement factory, College Point, event bath, salty plum tea, ice sauna, custard pies, Corona, tacos, Jackson Heights, loitering, nuts, Nanking, chai, Bushwick, bed. In that order. Something people often don’t know: you don’t have to be a 501c3 to get an EIN.

I haven’t been following the Google Books lawsuit and settlement proposal too closely because I don’t often think of myself as a book author. Not in the sense that Google Books or the settlement will impact my livelihood. It hadn’t actually occurred to me that the settlement might impact my freedom. But a press [...]

Cross posted from the Idealab. When he’s not toasting escapism, our tireless editor Mark Glaser has been asking why reporting costs so much. I can’t tell you much about investigative reporting (a $400,000 product of which started the conversation), except to say that six figure salaries do add up. But I can tell you that when [...]