Archive for November, 2008
November 30, 2008
The Post Office has become the department of print spam, an agency that delivers trash for us to recycle. I pay most of my bills online, and do most of my reading digitally (computer, iPhone or Kindle); I subscribe to fewer and fewer print magazines and have no use for catalogs. So it’s great when the mail includes something I want to read. Last week, that was the 200-page issue No. 7 of N+1, entitled “Correction.”
A few years ago, Tony Scott wrote an essay about the earnest young New York writers who started N+1. On a whim, I bought a lifetime subscription. (They still sell them for $200.) It seemed like a good deal, even for a journal with an uncertain publication schedule, now described as twice a year. The cover price is $11.95 per issue, so I have yet to break even. (The founders went on to write first novels — both enjoyable but slight — or become literary fixtures, and they have tangled with the gossip blogs now and then).
N+1 feels right in print. Despite the promise of “Web only” content once or twice a week, I rarely visit its Web site, which is odd behavior for me, given that most of my news is filtered through blogs or social media like Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed and Delicious. (There is some good stuff there, like this article about being a student of David Foster Wallace).
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Posted in New York, Paper & Ink | 3 Comments »
Tags: A.O. Scott, Adderall, Benjamin Kunkel, fiction, Frederick Seidel, hedge funds, junk mail, Keith Gessen, Mad Men, mail, Molly Young, movies, Mystery, N+1, Neil Strauss, NYC, Poetry, Postal Service, seduction, The Game, Wesley Yang
November 28, 2008
Here’s my weekly roundup of podcasts from selected geeks, nerds, kooks, freaks, comedians, self-styled tech gurus and other denizens of the audio Web, in the order I listened this week:
- “Extra Life Radio, #202, #203, and #204” “Geek tested, nerd approved!” A likable group of geeks and nerds, Scott Johnson and his friends are Web comics artists who talk about films, TV, gaming and comics, among other topics of a certain type. The first episode (“Vacillating Two Oh Two”) encapsulated what I value in a podcast — a deep and serious discussion that makes me care about a niche interest, in this case, Web comics. The next episode (#203 “Spinimal!”) was a wide-ranging discussion of movies. The Thanksgiving episode (#204, “Choot the Turkey”) was the least compelling, more movie talk and a long, easily skipped conversation about soccer parents (they often take a good 15 to 20 minutes to warm up). This podcast was the winner in the general category of the mostly meaningless 2008 Podcast Awards, sponsored by the marketing company Podcast Connect Inc. The contest bases the awards on how many fans repeatedly click on an unscientific online survey, as Mr. Johnson, to his credit, notes. He and his co-hosts also won for a “World of Warcraft” gaming podcast, The Instance. Length: Ranging from 1 hour, 7 minutes to 1 hour, 32 minutes. Released: Nov. 12, Nov. 17 and Nov. 25.
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Posted in Podcast Zeitgeist | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Alex Albrecht, Andy Ihnatko, Brian Stelter, brocabulary, Daisy Whitney, Diggnation, Extra Life Radio, I Want Sandy, iPhone Apps, iTunes, Jonathan Larroquette, Leo Laporte, MacBreak Weekly, macs, misogynists, movies, Podcast Awards, Podcast Zeitgeist, Seth Romatelli, Stikkit, The Bugle, This Week in Media, This Week in Tech, Uhh Yeah Dude, Uli's Talking Moose, Vomitus Prime, Web comics, You Look Nice Today
November 27, 2008
My quest for the God shot, as a fellow WordPress blogger put it, continues. I didn’t get down to Porto Rico Importing Co. on Bleecker Street again yet, so it’s back to my regular supplier in Chelsea.
I bought some more Heartbreaker, and decided to try this bag of beans from Ethiopia too.
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Posted in Coffee! | 6 Comments »
Tags: Café Grumpy, Coffee!, drinks, espresso, Ethiopia, Flor Azul, Heartbreaker, NYC
November 24, 2008
Name of iTunes Playlist: Emerging Favorites
Rules: Rating is ***** (5 stars). Last played is in the last 2 months. Play count is in the range 3 to 5. Date added is in the last 12 months. Skip count is less than 4. [See all lists.]
Top 10 From the List
1. “Boy With a Coin” by Iron & Wine (“The Shepherd’s Dog,” 2007.) Play count: 6. Sample lyric: “A boy with a coin he found in the weeds, with bullets and pages of trade magazines.”
2. “Fake Empire,” by The National (“Boxer,” 2007.) Play count: 6. Lyric: “It’s hard to keep track of you falling through the sky, we’re half-awake in a fake empire.”
3. “Candy Jail,” by The Silver Jews (“Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea,” 2008). Play count: 5. Lyric: “Pain works on a sliding scale.”
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Posted in Smart Playlists | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Airborne Toxic Event, Calexico, Ella Fitzgerald, Islands, iTunes, music, Smart Playlists, The Cat Empire, The National, The Silver Jews, Verve Remixed, Willy Mason, YouTube
November 22, 2008
{Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009.]
For 99 cents I downloaded Ocarina, an app from Smule that turns an iPhone into a version of that ancient flute-like instrument. You press glowing “finger holes” on the touchscreen and blow into the microphone to play [Video].
That’s fun, but Ocarina does more than that. The app also uses the location software and a Google-Earth style globe to let you rotate the earth and listen to others play on their phones around the world. As they play one by one, visual images of the notes stream upward, as you watch from space. Around the globe, patches of glowing white show what are apparently concentrations of signals, particularly on the coasts of the United States and in Europe. One soloist sent a lonely tune up from an island of Hawaii.
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Posted in iPhone Apps | 2 Comments »
Tags: Apple, computers, GPS, iphone, iPhone Apps, iPods, macs, music, musicians, Ocarina, Smart Playlists, Smule, software, technology
November 22, 2008
O.K., I ground the “Heartbreaker” and drank it all up, so I decided to try something different in my quest for the perfect cup of home-brewed coffee. Now I am blogging about this so I will remember the next time. Why are you reading it? That is your business. Oh, Internet. You’re such a mix of exhibitionism, voyeurism, the trivial and the ineffable.
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Posted in Coffee! | 6 Comments »
Tags: Café Grumpy, Coffee!, Creamy Approachable Melon, drinks, espresso, Flor Azul, Heartbreaker, Jura-Capresso Impressa F9 Espresso Machine, NYC, Porto Rico Importing Co.
November 22, 2008
{Update! New List! New Post! See the new list of iPhone applications I actually still use in this post, from September 2009.]
I’ve updated the post on “third-party iPhone apps I actually use,” which is inexplicably the most popular post on the blog. The much-improved Google mobile app, with voice-activated search, has moved to the top of the list. (To get it, you have to manually force an update at the iTunes store; it wasn’t happening automatically.) I download new free and cheap apps often, so if any of the new ones catch on, I will add them there.
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Posted in iPhone Apps | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Apple, Google Maps, Google Mobile App, Google Streetview, iphone 2.2 firmware, iPhone Apps, iPhones, software, technology, voice activation
November 20, 2008
I recently skimmed a galley proof of “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis. The book, available from HarperCollins in January, is structured as a series of rules or aphorisms about how Google does business, with some anecdotes from Jarvis about things he has observed in his groundbreaking work as a blogger and media consultant.
The book reads like an expanded version of a PowerPoint presentation on the conventional wisdom of Web 2.0. Transparency. Learning from your customers. Simplicity in design. Always being in beta. The importance of links and search engine optimization. The information wants to be free business model. The let-it-all-hang-out-in-public lifestyle of Twitter and Facebook and blogs. (Jarvis gave an overview of his thesis in the Guardian on Monday.)
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Posted in Paper & Ink, Social Media | Leave a Comment »
Tags: Blogs, Books, computers, data, Facebook, Google, Jeff Jarvis, macs, SEO, technology, Twitter, Web 2.0
November 20, 2008
In a continuation of my peculiar hobby, here they are, in the order I listened this week, reports on a few of the podcasts of the geeks, nerds, freaks and boy-men of the Interweb:
Posted in Podcast Zeitgeist | Leave a Comment »
Tags: brocabulary, Google Mobile App, iPhones, Jimmy Pardo, Jonathan Larroquette, Kevin Smith, Leo Laporte, MacBreak Weekly, Michael Jackson, Podcast Zeitgeist, podcasts, Seth Romatelli, This Week in Tech, Uhh Yeah Dude, Vomitus Prime, Yahoo
November 18, 2008
(Photo Courtesy PDPhoto.org)
When my daughter was 2, she loved
the moon. She still loves the moon. “Luna!” she used to call it,
after the character on “Bear in the Big Blue House.” I helped her to love the moon, by talking about it and playing music about it and buying her certain books and reading them over and over. She used to love
Margaret Wise Brown’s “Goodnight Moon” and
Eric Carle’s “Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me” in which a little girl’s daddy uses a very long ladder to climb into the sky to bring the moon down to earth. (Later she moved on to
Tintin and his moon explorations, drawn by Hergé long before the real moonshots.)
We live in New York City, so it is often hard to see the moon. There are a lot of lights and a lot of buildings in the way, and while some people keep their toddlers up late in this city we used to put ours to bed before the sun even went down. But one day back in 2002 my wife was pushing her in the stroller to the library and our daughter was craning her neck at the sky and pointing, very excited. It was broad daylight. My wife looked up. The moon was out. Weird. But not so weird. It happens all the time. My daughter, who is now 8, still spots Luna, peeking around the side of a skyscraper, when I’m looking at the traffic or the sidewalk.
There’s something magical about the moon. We humans have always felt an affinity for it, that light in the sky. It has kept us company for centuries on lonely dark nights. Maybe we don’t think about it so much anymore in this country, now that we have electric lights and good roofs over our heads most of the time. But when I was a kid, it seemed like people talked about the moon all the time.
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Posted in Paper & Ink | 7 Comments »
Tags: Apollo Space Program, Eric Carle, Eugene Cernan, Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown, moon, NYC, Richard M. Nixon, space travel, Tintin, Tracy Cernan
The Post Office has become the department of print spam, an agency that delivers trash for us to recycle. I pay most of my bills online, and do most of my reading digitally (computer, iPhone or Kindle); I subscribe to fewer and fewer print magazines and have no use for catalogs. So it’s great when the mail includes something I want to read. Last week, that was the 200-page issue No. 7 of N+1, entitled “Correction.”
