Made Thing

I work out of my basement. My kids all understand that “Daddy is busy working” and they only interrupt me for emergencies. Other adults and visiting family members are a different story. They come into my office and start talking to me when I’m clearly wearing my headset—no matter how many fingers I hold up or which ones. It’s funny that my kids know what’s going on while adults don’t get it, but that’s the trick: get everyone you live with on board with your work-from-home plan. Otherwise, you’re doomed.

A List Apart: Articles: Working From Home: The Readers Respond.

Photo by Flickr user inkywretch

Found these shoes hanging from a powerline on my walk back from the grocery store this morning. Another pair was hanging maybe 20 feet away.

Is throwing your shoes at powerlines a thing now? Or am I correct in assuming that someone had too much to drink last night?

Mac|Life’s Ray Aguilera gives a four-out-of-five star rating to WriteRoom iPhone, my favorite writing and note-taking app:

First off, the design is simple and clean. More importantly, rotating your iPod touch or iPhone 90 degrees brings up a larger, wider landscape keyboard. We found this larger keyboard to be considerably faster to type on, particularly for longer chunks of text.

He’s absolutely right about typing speed in landscape mode. WriteRoom has doubled the amount of time I spend using my iPhone, and made it a viable writing device for the time ever.

Disclosure: I’m a contributing editor at Mac|Life.

Jimmy Morris’s music blog led me to $8 worth of new songs earlier this week, all of them by unfamiliar artists. My favorites:

1. Ra Ra Riot - Dying is Fine
2. Say Hi - Northwestern Girls
3. Blitzen Trapper - Black River Killer
4. Greg Laswell - How the Day Sounds

They’re all good, but that last one is the best.

All of the above are also available from iTunes as iTunes Plus tracks, meaning they’re encoded with a higher bit rate and no icky DRM.

Thanks, Jimmy!

Images of the sun set off a 300-plus-count comment thread debating the existence of God.

For me, the physical hacks so often chronicled here serve not only as models or instructions for more hacking, but morale-boosting and solidarity-building reinforcements for the social and spiritual hacking required of activists living in a society hell-bent on corporo-fascism, self-destruction, and religious war. In a world governed largely by people who believe (or want their citizens to believe) that the world is going to end on schedule by decree of the Creator, it is imperative that mutants arise to the challenge of changing the landscape from under them.

Rushkoff Here

The best of Eleanor Hardwick’s photographs confront innocence with the surreal.

Talk about surreal: Miss Hardwick is only 15 years old.

Linking to recent economic news piecemeal, as I’ve been doing, is useless even to me, to say nothing of my three readers, and I continue to do so out of genuine helplessness, because hitting the publish button gives me some small sense of retaliatory control over the ceaseless prognostications of global economic doom. Brown Monday transformed my feedreader into a moribund squawk box. By mid-afternoon, I genuinely missed the respite of dial-up.

Regardless, I link to this story about today’s worldwide cuts in interest rates because, reading it, I think I finally grasp the basic situation. 

The situation, is this:

1. The federal government’s decision to allow Lehman Brothers to fail was a huge screwup that cut the legs off banks around the world.
2. Banks are no longer lending to anyone, not even each other, because their executives are so petrified of losing even more money.
3. The complete lack of lending prevents many businesses and public institutions from paying their bills, because just like the average American family, businesses and governments are accustomed to operating on credit rather than cash.
4. No one trusts anyone anymore.

I credit this excerpt specifically. For whatever reason, these two graphs connected weeks worth of disparate reports:

The central feature of the acute credit crunch, which began in the United States and is now spreading rapidly in Europe, is the reluctance of banks to lend at any rate because they have taken such heavy losses already and are hoarding cash.

[...]

“The key lesson is when you face a confidence issue where the market participants no longer trust each other, the conventional macroeconomic tools are not as effective,” Olaf Unteroberdoerster, the International Monetary Fund’s representative in Hong Kong, said Wednesday.

The post title is from an episode of Deadwood, by the way.

Update: Another bit related to trust, from an article about the possibility that the government my take partial ownership of some banks:

The core problem is that the smart people are realizing that the banking system is broken,” said Carl B. Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics. “Nobody knows who is holding the tainted assets, how much they have and how it affects their balance sheets. So nobody is willing to believe that anybody else isn’t insolvent, until it’s proven otherwise.

I don’t suppose we could pass a law requiring all the banks to simply fess up and provide accurate balance sheets, could we?

A double bind is a dilemma in which an individual receives conflicting demands with the following additional restrictions:

1. Because the demands occur on different logical levels, the recipient can’t resolve the conflict.
2. The recipient can’t acknowledge or comment on the conflict — not even within his own mind.

The phrase was coined as an environmental explanation for the development of schizophrenia in children.

The current revision of the Wikipedia page is a mess (it’s flagged for contradicting itself, which is pretty funny in an article that’s about contradictions), but on the discussion page user Etcetera offers a neat fictional example of a double bind: HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The programmed dictum of “always process information accurately” combined with the specific order to “keep this [true purpose of the mission] a secret from your fellow crew members” creates a schizophrenic situation.

HAL’s solution, of course, was to murder the crew.

Shot with the iPhone on the bus ride home.

For my friends who haven’t seen it, the swimsuit portion of Sarah Palin’s 1984 Miss Alaska pageant video. 

Courtesy of Andy Baio, who eats takedown notices for breakfast.

A blow-by-blow description of how the collapse of Lehman Brothers became the first domino to fall in a global financial crisis:

… Lehman’s bankruptcy, filed early Monday morning in federal bankruptcy court — case No. 08-13555 — proved far more destabilizing, and spread much further, than many had expected. The bankruptcy immediately wiped out huge investments for Lehman shareholders and bondholders. Among the biggest was Norway’s government pension fund, which invests the country’s surplus oil revenue. As of the end of 2007, the most recent data available, the fund owned more than $800 million worth of Lehman bonds and stock.

Here’s a stupid question from a dude without a savings account: How can governments hope to manage a global financial system that has become too complicated for even economists to fully understand?

Photo by Flickr user Barack Obama

I can’t imagine the pressure of this moment.

Fake Steve’s scathing response to a tech panel:

Was at the EmTech conference at MIT today and suffered through a panel led by Robert Scoble with four geeks (Facebook, Six Apart, Plaxo, Twine) talking about the future of the Web. No prepared remarks, just totally random conversation. Basically they all just spewed whatever came into their heads, at top speed, interrupting each other and oblivious to the fact that an audience was sitting there, glazing over. A few people got up and asked questions and the geeks did manage to (sort of) address one or two but then they forgot about the questioners and just started rambling again, talking to each other and forgetting about the audience. It was like watching five college kids with ADHD and an eight-ball of coke trying to hold a conversation.

Accuracy of observation aside, it’s the last line that interests me. The individual pieces of the comparison aren’t that original — college kids, ADHD, eight-ball of coke — but together they draw a genuine guffaw. I think it’s the specificity of “eight-ball of coke” that really makes it work; it harkens to the “hampster on crack” cliché but freshens it.

Specifying the contents of the eight-ball is important, by the way, because in and of itself, “eight-ball” can be used to refer to an eighth of an ounce of any powdered psychoactive drug. Seriously. I looked it up.

(via Kottke)

Roger Ebert responds to readers who took his recent endorsement of Creationism literally:

These days, there is no room for ambiguity, and few rewards for critical thinking. Now every word of a politician is pumped dry by his opponent, looking for sinister meanings. Many political ads are an insult to the intelligence. Here I am not discussing politics. I am discussing credulity. If you were to see a TV ad charging that a politician supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergarten children, would you (1) believe it, or (2) very much doubt it? The authors of the ad spent big money in a bet on the credulity and unquestioning thinking of the viewership. Ask yourself what such an ad believes about us. No politics, please.

Flickr Photo Download: Untitled

Found in Computer Arts Projects #114: Company info on one side, individual’s first name on the other. 

I need to remember this when it’s time to make some Linebreak cards for me, Ash, and Ashley before the next AWP.

Basics - Putting a Meter on the Computer for Internet Use - NYTimes.com.

Some Internet service providers say they want to end their all-you-can-eat plans because a few customers with immense appetites for Web content are overwhelming the networks and slowing the delivery of news and entertainment for everyone else. Other providers blame pirates, who program their computers to crawl the Internet and suck down complete copies of CDs or DVDs.

Is there any precedent for successfully offering your customers less of a utility once it becomes indispensable? Commodification is supposed to make more of a service less expensive over time, right? Consider cell phone plans: I was afraid to use my first cell phone, the given minutes were so stingy; my current plan includes thousands more rollover minutes than I’ll ever use. And I’d give up my cell phone way before I gave up broadband.

H. L. Mencken : Memorial Service.

My favorite curmudgeon asks: “Where is the grave-yard of dead gods?” A fantastic exercise in perspective that I occasionally like to revisit.