cramming, for the draft (wsj)
"With his college days coming to an end, Kyle Boller knew that a solid record at the University of California, Berkeley, would be spoiled unless he did well on one last test. So he plunked down $6,500 on a prep class. After a couple of months of intensive effort, the cramming worked.

"Mr. Boller's first-round honors should generate a bonus approaching $5 million, based on last year's signing figures. That would amount to nearly 10 times what a middling third-round pick can command, which at the end of his senior season is where many pro scouts had him at best. 'I got the results I was looking for, and more,' Mr. Boller says."

How I can get that kind of return on $6500 in a few months?
(Wednesday, April 30, 2003)

frustrated, more unemployed people drop out (nyt)
"'This is what we see today — job searches that can take 6 to 12 months,' said Charlie Beck, who has directed the support group, Priority Two, for the past 20 years. 'By six months, people really start to doubt themselves, and they start to doubt they're ever going to find anything. They start to doubt everything.'"

When I lost my job at Redleaf I was unemployed for eight months. So far, it's been another seven since I was laid off from ATG. And I've pretty much stopped looking for full-time work, because I haven't had an interview in the past six months.

I am going to have to stop reading about the economy and unemployment: it's just one more depressing thing.
(Saturday, April 26, 2003)

koolhaas commissions get kibboshed (nyt)
On hold: an expansion for the Whitney, an Ian Schrager hotel on Astor Place, a large complex for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Prada 'Epicenter'.

"At the same time, Mr. Koolhaas's 2001 deal to serve as an editorial consultant to Condé Nast magazines has produced more rumors than magazine pages." (Similarly, AMO's consulting on Prada.com has resulted in nothing more than a 'Coming Soon' page.)

Rem, unsurprisingly, is somewhat sour about all of it.
(Friday, April 25, 2003)

tate kuerbis (kicksology)
an interview with the designer of the air jordan xviii.
(Thursday, April 24, 2003)

the cultural significance of the remote control (la times)
"Ever notice, for example, that network series rarely have theme songs like in the old days? Thank the remote. Notice that there are no commercials between the end of one network show and the beginning of the next one? Thank the remote... Notice those endless headlines crawling across the bottom of your screen? Thank the remote. Notice (ladies) that you can tell a lot about a guy's control issues by watching an evening of TV with him? Thank the remote."
(Thursday, April 24, 2003)

Brionvega rereleases classic electronics
The really nice 1960s radios and televisions designed by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper are back. Alas, there is no USA distributor as yet. Moss, perhaps?
(Thursday, April 24, 2003)

salsa verde have mexicans seeing red (az republic)
"A dry spell has caused the price of green tomatoes, the primary ingredient for salsa verde, the green sauce that is standard with many meals in Mexico, to increase fivefold in a week. From lunch counters to household dinner tables, salsa made with less-expensive red tomatoes is replacing the green variety. That is no simple shift in a country where choosing red or green sauce stirs up far more emotion than the old Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests."

(via marketplace.org)
(Wednesday, April 23, 2003)

freelancers feling the pinch in silicon valley (wsj)
"[T]he long tech slump has once again changed the employment landscape, especially in Silicon Valley. Seen as essential three years ago, self-employed contractors are now viewed as 'marginal' workers, used sparingly and then discarded. The tech free-lancers who diligently followed the antiorganization playbook are finding that it has led them to financial hardship."
...
"Contractors 'don't have a background that shows any kind of loyalty or any kind of stability,' says Diana Callahan, a tech recruiter in Portland, Ore., explaining the new attitude of employers."

Not the best news for me, as I embark on another round of freelancing, out of both necessity and choice.
(Wednesday, April 23, 2003)

bourdain on bourdain (egullet)
"But you don't want to hear me gloating about nibbling Iberico ham with Ferran Adria at a table in the back of a little Spanish ham shop, or the feel of tiny Asian feet working my back muscles in some faraway hotel, or the comparative merits of Moroccan keif versus Jamaican bud. You don't really want to hear me moaning about the cheese course at Le Manoir, or how Dale de Groff really does make the best goddamn martini on the planet. You want to picture me crawling across a cold tile floor, coughing stomach lining into something that only the hotel manager could refer to as a toilet, begging for mercy as my brutal overlords arm-twist me into choking down yet another mouthful of 'pork ring,' or submitting me to some new video-friendly humiliation, right? I know I would. Who wants to read about some undeserving mutt having a good time for free when you actually have to work for a living? I wouldn't, believe me."
(Tuesday, April 22, 2003)

airlines look to restrict mileage perks (wsj)
"To pick up the slack, airlines and hotels are finally using their loyalty programs to do what many marketing consultants think they should have done a long time ago: Reward the customers who make them the most money."

Except that by making it impossible to earn rewards by flying discounted fares, the big airlines will mostly be pushing their customers towards Southwest and JetBlue in those markets where they overlap.
(Tuesday, April 22, 2003)

more marc cuban (wsj)
Interesting article about the Mavericks' owner, including how he managed to keep most of his Yahoo! windfall.
(Tuesday, April 22, 2003)

the robo shop
a vending machine as convenience store, in tokyo.
(Tuesday, April 22, 2003)

starck kong chair (retromodern)
the aluminum version of starck's louis ghost chair. so gorgeous. this + hudson chairs = happy seating.

(Tuesday, April 22, 2003)

NYT's new archives
Used to be, if one knew the exact URL one could read older NYT articles for free. Now they've gotten smarter: one is redirected to a 'buy now' page instead. Bummer!
(Monday, April 21, 2003)

hoop dreams (nyt)
"[Agent Reed] Salwen could still picture the small, decrepit gym in St. Petersburg, Russia, where Andrei Kirilenko, the Utah Jazz's long-limbed forward and the first client he signed for Fleisher, learned to play. 'He took a trolley 45 minutes every day and walked in snow knee-high to get there,' Salwen said. 'Let me tell you, for all the talk about how bad things are in urban America, I lived a year and a half in Los Angeles, I've seen Compton. It's still not Russia.'"
(Monday, April 21, 2003)

mike davidson of espn (devedge)
This interview is great stuff. An excellent look at making the business case to support standards-compatible code (decreased bandwidth cost, development time, and codebase).
(Monday, April 21, 2003)

downtowns say, "goodbye, cars" (nyt magazine)
"By 1977, when the British punk band the Jam recorded 'London Traffic' ('No one knows the answer/No one seems to care/Take a look at our city/Take the traffic elsewhere'), the average speed of a car in central London was 12 miles an hour, or a little faster than the top running speed of a domestic pig. At the turn of the millennium, more than two decades later, many Londoners could only look back on those congested years with nostalgia. The average speed had dropped to less than nine miles per hour for the first time in modern record-keeping, meaning that car travel through Britain's capital was generally as slow as by coach a century ago."
(Sunday, April 20, 2003)

moby (mirror project)
Maybe I'm just skeptical, but this photo looks all wrong to me: there are a ton of parallel lines converging in a one-point perspective, and yet Moby seems completely immune to perspectival foreshortening.
(Friday, April 18, 2003)

Wireless HDD? Sweet!
Oh, this is the MP3 server I've been wanting. Would work nicely as a home base server for use with my somewhat outdated ThinkPad, too. Hmmm.
(Friday, April 18, 2003)

merlin mann
he's funny as fuck in person. and a good person. how rare is that?
(Wednesday, April 16, 2003)

money, it's gotta be the ads
Nike presents the classic Mars Blackmon ads directed by Spike Lee. All of them. Thank you, Nike.
(Wednesday, April 16, 2003)

compare baghdad to u.s. cities
"This may be useful if you are trying to envision driving through, searching or invading Baghdad, but you've never actually been there."

Wow, Baghdad is pretty big, though Houston apparently dwarfs it.
(Thursday, April 10, 2003)

get your war on (mojo)
An interview with David Rees, creator of 'Get Your War On'.

"MJ: I was talking to my managing editor about your profanity, and he was saying -- I'm over 30, I shouldn't be finding the word "fuck" this funny, but there's something about the rhythm and the pacing -- do you have a logic for it?"

"DR: It's just what sounds right, and I'm glad you said that. Because for me it's just rhythmic. And think that's why there's so much cussing in rap music, actually. In addition to the emotional impact, it's just a good rhythmic placeholder -- if you need to fill out the meter or the beat of a line you can just throw in this word. I think that a lot of these words are just phonetically very satisfying. You're not really going to change the content of the sentence, you're just going to make it sound better."
(Thursday, April 10, 2003)

south park + norman lear = giant talking taco (nyt)
"This audience was tuned into Comedy Central for the season premiere of 'South Park,' the cartoon whose heroes — four foul-mouthed fourth graders named Kyle, Stan, Kenny and Cartman — were being informed by an alien disguised as a giant talking taco that the Earth was not a planet at all but rather an advanced reality television show that pitted species and races against one another for fun.

"'Asians, bears, ducks, Jews, deers and Hispanics, all trying to live side by side together on the same planet,' said the giant taco, enthusiastically. 'Great TV, right?'"
(Thursday, April 10, 2003)

Shu U (metroplolis, 2001)
"Q: What's great about the layout of the Hans Knoll office is that you reversed the traditional layout of using a desk in front of a chair. There's a table in front of a chair and a cabinet in back."

"FKB: Of course, that was the whole point. The traditional layout was the absolute norm when I started designing offices. They had a big box in the middle of the room. They had a table behind it, and it was always full of stuff. 'That doesn't make sense,' I said. 'We should make the storage behind and make the front a table.' That's how it got started. I was architecturally trained to think logically about space."

An interview with Florence Knoll Bassett, along with selections from her archive. She's one of my design heroes. (I own one of her armless settees.)
(Sunday, April 6, 2003)

LettError's Letter Setter
This is genius: if you only need a few words you can get PDF bezier output. Cheaper than buying the fonts, for sure.
(Saturday, April 5, 2003)

character traits that get in the way of success (fast company)
On Meritocrats: "Life isn't fair. If you never come to terms with that fact, then you'll never figure out how to use your powers of persuasion to make the scale tip in your direction with the right people."
(Thursday, April 3, 2003)

drudge clears $800k/year? (business 2.0)
Business 2.0 estimates that the Drudge Report clears $68,500 a month. That explains the business model dreams of sites like Gizmodo and Gawker. If Romenesko was a subscription service it might come close.
(Thursday, April 3, 2003)

eluding pollen (wsj)
a short sidebar with some good dietary tips for mitigating allergies.
(Wednesday, April 2, 2003)

Pitfall
play pitfall online. shockwave rocks for this sort of thing.
(Tuesday, April 1, 2003)

Spyonit
I just checked the validity of the Spoyonit link that I used to have on these pages. Imagine my surprise to find out that they suspended service nine months ago. Shows you how much I pay attention to those things.
(Tuesday, April 1, 2003)

Study Finds Aging Isn't Reason Why People Are Sleeping Poorly (wsj)
"The research being presented at the sleep conference in Washington this week shows not only that poor health can disrupt sleep, but the other way around: Sleep disorders can cause heart disease and hypertension, or magnify arthritic pain."
(Tuesday, April 1, 2003)