Ramblings & ephemera
From Operator No. 9’s “That decorating touch” (Interactive Week: 24 April 2000): 100:
Dan Sweeney, general manager of Intel’s Home Networking division, says that when the company showed consumer focus groups the AnyPoint Wireless home networking system …, people became very confused, because there wasn’t a visible antenna. The desktop version of the wireless adapter — [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, technology | No Comments »
photo credit: hans s
From Errol Morris’ “Bamboozling Ourselves (Part 2)” (The New York Times: 28 May 2009):
[Errol Morris:] The Uncanny Valley is a concept developed by the Japanese robot scientist Masahiro Mori. It concerns the design of humanoid robots. Mori’s theory is relatively simple. We tend to reject robots that look too much like [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, business, history, on writing, science, security, tech in changing society, weird | No Comments »
photo credit: 708718
From Annie Karni’s “Gabbing Taxi Drivers Talking on ‘Party Lines’” (The New York Sun: 11 January 2007):
It’s not just wives at home or relatives overseas that keep taxi drivers tied up on their cellular phones during work shifts. Many cabbies say that when they are chatting on duty, it’s often with their [...]
Posted on May 30th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, language & literature, politics, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Rock music itself bores me, usually. The phenomenon of rock interests me, though, because its birth was part of the rise of popular media, which completely changed the ways the U.S. was unified and split. The mass media [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
If you mean a post-industrial, mediated world, it’s inverted one of fiction’s big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of “form.” The interesting thing is [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993):
Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of [...]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature, on writing | No Comments »
From Milton Glaser’s “Ten Things I Have Learned” (Milton Glaser: 22 November 2001):
… the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have [...]
Posted on May 22nd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, politics | No Comments »
From Brian Prince’s “How Terrorism Touches the ‘Cloud’ at RSA” (eWeek: 23 April 2009):
When it comes to the war on terrorism, not all battles, intelligence gathering and recruitment happen in the street. Some of it occurs in the more elusive world of the Internet, where supporters of terrorist networks build social networking sites to recruit and [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, politics, security, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
photo credit: 917press
From Christopher Fahey’s “Who Watches the Watchman?” (GraphPaper: 2 May 2009):
The Detex Newman watchclock was first introduced in 1927 and is still in wide use today.
&hellip What could you possibly do in 1900 to be absolutely sure a night watchman was making his full patrol?
An elegant solution, designed and patented in 1901 [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security | No Comments »
From Rich Gossweiler, Maryam Kamvar, & Shumeet Baluja’s “What’s Up CAPTCHA?: A CAPTCHA Based On Image Orientation” (Google: 20-24 April 2009):
There are several classes of images which can be successfully oriented by computers. Some objects, such as faces, cars, pedestrians, sky, grass etc.
…
Many images, however, are difficult for computers to orient. For example, indoor scenes [...]
Posted on May 19th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, science, security, technology | No Comments »
photo credit: kevindooley
From Jake Vinson’s “Cracking your Fingers” (The Daily WTF: 28 April 2009):
A few days later, Ross stood proudly in the reception area, hands on his hips. A high-tech fingerprint scanner sat at the reception area near the turnstile and register, as the same scanner would be used for each, though the register [...]
Posted on May 15th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, tech in changing society | No Comments »
photo credit: newneonunion
From Roy Kesey’s piece in “Remembering David Foster Wallace” (Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits: 15 September 2008):
The first story of David’s I ever read was that one Brief Interview that he had in the Paris Review maybe ten or eleven years ago. For me it was paradigm-altering, quietly fantabulous, in exactly the way [...]
Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, language & literature | No Comments »
photo credit: Ti.mo
When using Apple Mail, you should be able to search for a term in From, To, Subject, & Entire Message. However, today I could no longer search Entire Message. It was grayed out & completely unavailable.
I found interesting info on the following pages, with the last being the most helpful:
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=6653445#6653445
http://www.bronzefinger.com/archives/2006/04/apple_mail_sear.html
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5934412#5934412
http://forums.macworld.com/message/425508
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20080201111317585
I closed Mail [...]
Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: tech help | No Comments »
photo credit: Cia de Foto
From Gene Weingarten’s “Murphy’s Law” (The Washington Post: 3 May 2009):
[My dog] Murphy has a good life, which is the least we humans can do for a dog, in return for what they give us, which is access to the sort of innocence and trust and absence of guile or [...]
Posted on May 7th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book | No Comments »
photo credit: bobster855
From Andrew Sullivan’s “Who Will “Sister Souljah” Them?” (The Daily Dish: 5 May 2009):
… the GOP is poison to me and many others. Why?
Their abandonment of limited government, their absurd spending under Bush, their contempt for civil liberties, their rigid mindset, their hostility to others, their worship of the executive branch, their [...]
Posted on May 6th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: politics | No Comments »
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
Van Gogh in Arles wrote this about death:
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, history, language & literature, religion | No Comments »
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
What I expect will most probably happen [when I die] is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function, and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. Perhaps I [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book, language & literature, religion, science | No Comments »
From Roger Ebert’s “Go gentle into that good night” (Roger Ebert’s Journal: 2 May 2009):
And there is Shakespeare, who came as close as any man to immortality. In my plans for life after death, I say, again with Whitman:
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again [...]
Posted on May 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, history, language & literature | No Comments »
