nail clippers confiscated? buy them back on ebay (sfgate)
California is selling confiscated items on eBay as CaliforniaGold2000. Some people are none too pleased about it.

"'They don't own it. They took it away -- that doesn't mean you relinquish ownership,' [one man] said. 'I don't want to use the word 'theft,' but it starts smelling like it.'"
(Friday, February 28, 2003)

the blender lamp
"[M]aking your own lamps is easier than you'd think, requiring a rather small amount of hardware, the kinds of tools that are most likely somewhere in your toolbox already and a wee bit of creativity. Nearly anything can be made into a housing unit for a lightbulb, including a wide variety of household appliances. But out of everything in my kitchen, nothing I've tried makes a better lamp than a blender."

I thought about keeping my burned-out Waring blender aroiund as a lamp, but decided against it since my storage container was already full. Now I wish I'd kept it.
(Friday, February 28, 2003)

the week in craig
"Craig's List is an online free bulletin board featuring helpful ads for things like housing, jobs, items for sale, personals and, most entertainingly, Missed Connections and Casual Encounters. These last two, despite their ostensibly practical purposes, have devolved into a free-for-all where rumors are spread, bad poetry is written, battles are won and lost, and hearts are broken, all for our entertainment. The Week In Craig is your guide to the most fascinating accidental literary magazine on the web."
(Friday, February 28, 2003)

albert speer speaks, from the dead (guardian books)
"Great things could have been done with the technology of TV projection, but that did not exist then. The problem was never solved and Dome was never built. Speer's most successful piece of architectural theatre was the brilliant feat of announcing the Führer at Nürnberg by training hundreds of searchlight beams up into the sky, like Doric columns of light. It was a magnificent conception which, 60 years later, would be plagiarised by the Americans to mark the disappearance of the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001. No credit was given to Speer, who was dead by then."
(Friday, February 28, 2003)

duct tape fashions (wsj [!!!])
"Kaitlin Thompson's senior prom is more than a year away, and she's already thinking about what she's going to wear. The 16-year-old from Crowley, Texas, knows the competition will be stiff. Very stiff. Like hundreds of teenagers around the country, she's going to be wearing a full-length gown fashioned entirely of duct tape, that polyethylene-and-cotton adhesive tape more commonly associated with household -- and now homeland -- emergencies than with evening wear. She'll also make a matching duct tux for her date."
(Friday, February 28, 2003)

google=web search of record? (globe)
"Because we know Google will be able to meet whatever our informational need may be at whatever moment we need it, it has, in many ways, made us all a little lighter. 'Rather than having to carry the factual baggage around in your head, you have this electronic prosthesis,' says Sven Birkerts, a noted author who has written about the intersection of technology and society. 'You can get it anytime, and the doors don't lock.'

"But as we lean so heavily on the prosthesis, will part of us atrophy? Jonathan Zittrain, co-director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, recalls a story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. 'There's a massive library of all knowledge, but somebody messed up the card catalog, and it might as well not exist, because you have no idea where anything is,' he says. 'Likewise, if it's not in Google, there's an important way in which it might not exist.'"

Much as many believe that if it wasn't covered in the NYT it didn't happen.
(Friday, February 28, 2003)

liked the show, loved the afterparty (nyt)
"'I was in a group show at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, and the woman from the Whitney heard about it,' [McGinley] said, referring to Sylvia Wolf, the Whitney's photography curator. 'Sylvia called me up and said, "Do you want to do a show at the Whitney? I'll give you a day to think about it." And I was like, "Uh, I don't need a day."' He leaned forward and widened his eyes big for emphasis."

ryan mcginley's photos are exuberant. i like them.
(Thursday, February 27, 2003)

ny post = gay (sf chron)
"But honestly, as a friend, I have to advise the Post to realize that just because it is in denial does not mean that the problem is going to go away. Checking out gay men. Obsessing over their life. Trying to get them to admit that they are gay. These are the first steps toward taking the big step: Examining one's own feelings."
(Thursday, February 27, 2003)

multitasking = dumbing down (wsj)
"A growing body of scientific research shows one of jugglers' favorite time-saving techniques, multitasking, can actually make you less efficient and, well, stupider. Trying to do two or three things at once or in quick succession can take longer overall than doing them one at a time, and may leave you with reduced brainpower to perform each task."

So maybe walking and chewing gum at the same time isn't such a great idea after all.
(Thursday, February 27, 2003)

this one time, at dj camp... (wsj)
"Most pint-size DJs never get beyond doing gigs in their basement or for their friend's birthday party. But a few have managed to land gigs at clubs where they are otherwise too young to get past the velvet rope. Jonathan 'DJ Shrifty' Shriftman, who lives in Ponte Vedra, Fla., bought his first set of turntables from eBay when he was 11 -- and played his first club gig at 13. Recently the 15-year-old DJed the New Year's Eve party at the Paramount hotel in New York, which gave him and his mom hotel rooms and paid Jonathan $1,500, which went straight into his college fund. The next morning he caught an early flight back to school for a 9:30 a.m. algebra test. 'It's like a double life. It is crazy,' he says."

A somewhat schizophrenic article, but definitely off the beaten track for the Journal.
(Thursday, February 27, 2003)

liberation, a-z
ted rall does it again. too funny.
(Thursday, February 27, 2003)

ready.gov
in the upper reaches of the unintentional comedy scale.
(Wednesday, February 26, 2003)

how much is your time really worth? (wsj)
"'The household is a little firm,' says Daniel Hamermesh, an economics professor the University of Texas. 'It employs labor, it buys technology, it makes decisions about what services to outsource.'

"But it is a firm that could use some management consultants. Americans often make drastic miscalculations about the value of their time, taking a do-it-yourself approach to tasks that might be less costly in time and money to hire out."
(Wednesday, February 26, 2003)

financial therapy (wsj)
"Proponents say it's particularly important right now because many clients are immobilized by fear due to the long-running bear market and job insecurity. Counselors aren't replacing planners, but instead are teaming up with them to provide what are essentially mental-health services geared toward money. Instead of digging through the wallet, they wade through the psyche to help clients recognize the issues that prevent them from saving money or compel them to spend foolishly."

I needed this a couple of years ago. I probably will need it again when I start making tall dollars again.
(Wednesday, February 26, 2003)

tiny is beautiful (nyt)
Alejandro Aguilar is a designer in New York specializing in small apartments. His own is a mere 184 square feet. Amazing.

Derek pointed this out to me, because I mentioned that I'm designing built-ins for a 50sf room in the apartment I've been staying in. I'm hoping to rent it. Ha.
(Wednesday, February 26, 2003)

committee doesn't recommend Libeskind WTC plan (nyt)
This is unbelievable. Libeskind's plan is ludicrously better than the twin tower thing recommended by this steering committee. I wonder what the politics are; "We don't expect anyone to overrule us," a committee member told the NYT. Which is weird, because supposedly Bloomberg and Pataki both prefer the Libeskind plan. Does it have anything to do with Herbert Muschamp's preference for the Think plan?
(Wednesday, February 26, 2003)

sippey's nice chicago landscape
this reminds me that liz phair song:

I was flying into Chicago at night
...
The earth looked like it was lit from within
Like a poorly assembled electrical ball as we moved
Out of the farmlands into the grid
The plan of the city was all that you saw
And all of these people sitting totally still
As the ground raced beneath them thirty thousand feet down

espn motion
this is just way too cool. for ie on windows only. ha!

"ESPN Motion is revolutionary in that it provides users with crystal-clear instant-on video right inside the ESPN.com front page. This is made possible by the fact that we aren't really "streaming" any video to you at all. Every time new ESPN Motion video is published out to our servers, the ESPN Motion component on your computer will automatically go out and fetch the newest video and store it in a temporary location on your hard drive... this all happens in the background and you shouldn't even notice anything going on. When a new video has been downloaded and is ready to view, you should see a blue 'E' icon in the right side of your Windows taskbar (your "system tray"). Either click on this icon, or just visit the front page of ESPN.com and your ESPN Motion video will start playing automatically. ESPN Motion always keeps the most recently downloaded videos on your machine so you may view them any time, and as frequently as you want. As new videos come in, your old ones will be automatically deleted."
(Tuesday, February 25, 2003)

clango cyclotron's diary
first strip: a brilliant meshing of diesel sweeties and bridget jones' diary. v nice.
(Tuesday, February 25, 2003)

the cult of mike tyson (espn)
"If a T-Rex was on our ass, what could we do about it? If an attacker, a villian, a Lecter, a Beast, a Grendel, a Liston, a Foreman, a Tyson, had us cornered, what could we do about it? Well, maybe we -- more likely our proxy -- could outbox him. That reflection of our Ego, in the form of the Master Boxer, is what made the Sugar Rays and the Peps and Tunneys and Alis great. To be really great, they needed a foil, that KO puncher, that Beast, to overcome, and the more villianous, the more anti-social he seemed, the better."
(Tuesday, February 25, 2003)

the airlines look to cut back in the face of huge losses (wsj)
"Labor costs are their single largest expense, however, and represent the best opportunity for change. Simply cutting pay won't be enough. The key is stamping out archaic work rules. These limit the big airlines' flexibility to use cheaper subcontractors to do some jobs, build more-efficient flight schedules and make employees perform multiple tasks."

This graphic pretty much says it all. Note that the carriers in or near bankruptcy have the highest payrolls as a percentage of revenue.

(Tuesday, February 25, 2003)

nba refs (espn)
Ric Bucher points out that we don't know the half of what referees have to do.
(Tuesday, February 25, 2003)

how to fix the nba luxury tax (espn)
Five simple suggestions for fixing the NBA's luxury tax, which thus far has resulted in a lot of trades based solely on economics instead of basketball.
(Monday, February 24, 2003)

Social Mobiles
IDEO and Crispin Jones prototype five new types of mobile phones, meant to reduce their intrusiveness on others.

Remember, silence (i.e. vibrate mode) is golden.
(Friday, February 21, 2003)

how much pollution does your car generate?
The EPA lists the gas mileage and pollution stats for every car made this year. Someplace on their site they also have stats for previous model years.

The car that suprised me the most was the BMW 325i, the CA/MA/NY version of which garnered the same pollution rating as the Honda Civic and the Toyota Prius.
(Thursday, February 20, 2003)

LV + Takashi Murakami = goodness
This new Vuitton collection is super cute. This is the kind of thing I always hope Sanrio will do, but never will because of the price point. An LV/TM messenger bag would be pretty fab.
(Thursday, February 20, 2003)

dwell's prefab house competition (chron)
"Dwell magazine's idea for prefabricated modern structures is similar to that of Arts and Architecture [which sponsored the Case Study House program], but it has a better chance of succeeding. Home- building technologies have improved considerably, and it is possible to find well-designed modular parts not available 50 years ago. Additionally, because Dwell is an international magazine, it can draw on a larger pool of ideas. But the options for prefab are not well known, and with the Dwell Home, the magazine hopes to shine a spotlight on what's possible."

This is pretty exciting, as is the fact that Mike Bell is one of the architects.
(Wednesday, February 19, 2003)

airline timetables for your palm
GoldenWare's app has a much nicer interface than, say, Delta's Palm timetable: you can enter a departure airport and find every destination available for that airline. So if you want to know where Air Canada flies to from Boston, you can easily find out.
(Sunday, February 16, 2003)

"give me that architect look" (nyt)
"Determined to strike a sober note, a few [architects] fall back on glasses with a look that, sadly, verges on cliché. 'They rationalize their glasses as being some sort of minimalist style statement,' Mr. Rus said, 'but they end up looking like something from an avant-garde German performance troupe.'"

Information architects seem to have adopted some of this spectacle obsession, with a twist: those who go in for glasses seem to own seven or eight pairs.

(Currently I own two pairs that I wear often, and am looking for a third while I still have vision coverage.)
(Sunday, February 9, 2003)