personal

By Accident : Red Kite Prayer

By Accident : Red Kite Prayer:

I got hit by a car and learned how large my ego had become, learned that, more than anything, I was in my own way, and that the best way to get where I wanted to go, i.e. everywhere, was to let myself be small and let the world be big. I can, if I squint, see the accident again. I’m riding along. A Volvo passes me on the left. Its brake lights blaze purposefully. I back off on the pedals. A turn signal. I brake. Nothing to prove. And then the car turns in front of me. Its shocks make a hiccuping sound as it bounces into the driveway of the grocery store. I glance over my left shoulder and then guide my bike out into the open lane to glide past the Volvo’s bumper.
And then I ride home. Whole and well.

[The world is always ready to humble and caution us. It’s why “no fear” is a mantra for some. But none of us leave this world undefeated. I for one accept the path to smaller in everything I do, even if some parts of me will fight it until my final defeat.]

At Sloth-Like 3.5 MPH, M50 Bus Wins This Year’s Pokey Award

At Sloth-Like 3.5 MPH, M50 Bus Wins This Year’s Pokey Award:

Want to understand why more Manhattanites don’t ride the bus? Look no further than this year’s Pokey awards, given out annually by the Straphangers Campaign. Manhattan buses, as usual, top the list of the year’s slowest service.

The Pokey this year goes to the M50 crosstown bus, which averaged a mere 3.5 miles per hour at noon (imagine it at rush hour!). The 14 slowest lines are all in Manhattan, with the Bronx’s Bx19, which runs down Southern Boulevard and into Harlem, clocking in as the slowest bus in the other boroughs.

[Of course, I had many runs in with the M50 while empty (and I presume going home). The drivers were super aggressive, cutting off other drivers, not letting anyone into the lane. And they make a left hand turn onto 9A/12th from the right hand lane of 49th street. I know the turning radius is large, but there was no communication of their intent. It was always dangerous to watch as time after time unknowing people would pull up on the M50s left assuming that the bus was going to make a right turn… so a big NY raspberry in the direction of the M50.]
Source: StreetsBlog

John Kenney: “We Are the One Per Cent” : The New Yorker

John Kenney: “We Are the One Per Cent” : The New Yorker: Do you know that feeling, upon waking at 4 A.M., heart racing, your mind looking twenty, thirty years down the road, wondering how you are going to make ends meet? Worrying about what would happen if you lost your job, asking yourself how you’re going to pay for your kids’ college or retire? Well, I don’t. But I read a story about it once and remember thinking, I’m so glad that’s not me.

[Sigh.]

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog)

[This is deep in the technical weeds, but the piece is great and this made me laugh, so it is worth noting thinks I. ]

The Social Graph is Neither (Pinboard Blog): Here the Ghost of Abstractions Past materializes in a flurry of angle brackets, and says in a sepulchral whisper:

“How about we let people define arbitrary relationships between nodes…”

(subject,verb,object)
“Maybe even in XML…”

<Person "john">
    <likesToShareRecipesWith "susan" />
</Person>

“Of course, we’ll need namespaces…”

  <ns:Person rdf:about="http://www.example.org/#john">
    <ns:likesToShareRecipesWith 
     rdf:resource="http://www.example.org/#susan" />
  </ns:Person>

And RDF rises lurching out of the grave to infect the brains of another generation of young developers.

Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee « Muddy Dog Roasting Co.

Why the Keurig K-Cup is the beginning of the end for great coffee « Muddy Dog Roasting Co.: Do you think that vision is crazy?  Let’s see.  How easy is it to buy a Walla Walla onion?  Never heard of it?  I’m not surprised.  I grew up with them, but they’re already a thing of the past.  Hundreds of vegetable varieties have already gone extinct, solely due to our desire to homogenize, to have crops that ship well, regardless of how they taste.  Only 5% of US apple varieties that existed just 200 years ago still exist today.   Ninety percent of vegetable varieties have gone extinct over the last 100 years in the UK. The crimson flowered broad bean, the Champion of England Pea, the Bath Cos Lettuce, and the Rowsham Park Hero Onion are just a few examples of vegetables that are lost forever.  Hundreds of heirloom vegetable varieties are on the brink of extinction.  And there are all kinds of other foods that are falling victim to this same phenomenon. Try to buy a really great charcuterie today – Boar’s Head is as close as you’ll get in most places.  A beautiful creme fraiche?   How about Yoplait?  Great cheeses?  We got your Kraft, RIGHT HERE.  Don’t believe me? Go check out Slow Food’s Ark of Taste.  Oh, what’s that, you would like to have a nice meal at a cute bistro?  Sorry, all that’s available now are chain stores like Panera, TGI Friday’s or Appleby’s.  But you can probably score some Jack Daniels chicken wings, or some other ill-advised mess.  I can sum it all up in one word: Monsanto.

[And while Jim of Muddy Dog Roasting Company explains from his perspective. I think this particular paragraph worries me more (I’m not a coffee drinker) in that it is part of a larger problem, which expressed perfectly above. And in case it isn’t obvious the lost biodiversity is not just a loss of taste and experience. That’s bad enough. But it has become entirely clear that eating different foods is healthy for you, and having variations of each food makes that easier (you eat a tomato, but it’s a different tomato). The varying balances of the “ingredients” of a fruit or vegetable is a fundamental goodness. And the craft of growing and preparing food, where the results are not consistent at the “Monsanto” level and don’t try to be is also a fundamental goodness. It’s the same thing that is appealing about anything hand made. Sure, a dreadnaught style guitar has certain fundamental qualities. But each one is different. Hand build a bicycle and each one will have some personality even if you use the same measurements and tube set. That variation is good for us. And we need to be extremely careful that we don’t lose it in a chase to the bottom in the name of efficiency and money.]
Source: Marco Arment

iTunes and iPhoto fail pretty quickly to help me

I’m stating my problem with these apps to help me later. I need to craft a solution to this problem.

My laptop has relatively limited storage space. I want to keep my photos in a single library and my music in a single library. I want to keep the photos I love and music I’m currently loving in front of me as it were, and everything else out of the way. Multiple library’s don’t work… it’s too hard to know where some music or a photo might be, and then I can’t find anything.

So in short a I need a subset of photos and a subset of music that are part of a larger library. New additions (photos taken, or music recorded or purchased) need to be added to the one true library. The one true library does not need to be accessible at all times, it just needs to add new content when it is available.

If any of you have solved this problem, let me know :)

See also JDD’s writing on the photo side of things as well. Here and here.

October snow

It never happens. 4 times in NYC recorded weather history. But it happened this weekend. I have pictures and everything. But it’s gonna have to wait until all the services get turned back on.

Update: It’s now November 2nd and we still have no connectivity. I’m working where I can get a reliable connection and some quiet, and while I do I thought I’d upload some stuff. Here’s a flickr set of a bunch of photos from Sunday after the storm.

IMG_1142

He was also against adding apps to the iPhone

Steve Jobs biography: The new book doesn’t explain what made the Apple CEO tick. – Slate Magazine:

He was also against adding apps to the iPhone.

Some behavior that describes Steve my family and friends would certainly say sounds like me at times (to my regret). And with (ahem) brilliant insight points out that Steve was wrong about certain things (duh). But I really understand that he was against adding apps to the iPhone.

Sure, there’s lots of reasons why allowing apps was a good thing (in retrospect). I’ve certainly benefited from it in the sense that there are apps on my phone that Apple would never have created and that I love for their special use. But for the most part the core apps Phone, Contact, Safari, Camera, Music, etc. are the ones that get the most use. While my phone is more useful with folks creating great native apps, it would not have been significantly less useful as a phone the other way.

There would have been negative side effects—it’s a less interesting device if there isn’t a near constant stream of of “content” in the form of apps. The iPad would not have been nearly as successful, even if the plan was to allow others to write apps for it, because the iPhone app market bootstrapped developer knowledge.

My wife’s recent use of iPhone is teaching me how much “regular” people don’t know about iPhones, iOS, and apps. My parents use of an iPad us kids bought for them teaches me similar lessons. If you ain’t from the world of tech, you ain’t from the world of tech. Even so, everyone muddles through, each in our own way. And hopefully without extensive use of terms like “bozo”.