end halcyon, start paxil
"'There was a point when a doghouse could have been rented in SoMa,' said Mark Bollozos, director of research for BT Commercial Real Estate. 'But as fast as it went up in 2000, it's coming down even faster in 2001.'

"In the first quarter of this year, SoMa rents fell more than a third from their 2000 heights, while the vacancy rate hit 15 percent. This quarter, that rate is estimated to be up to at least 22 percent. That's more than 3 million square feet sitting unused.

"All that emptiness of course has had a spillover effect. Ecco, a trendy SoMa restaurant that catered to the dot-com crowd, has closed, and many others are hanging by a bread stick."

Of course, Ecco closed because its landlord wanted to raise its rent by a large amount, not because of a lack of business.
(Thursday, May 31, 2001)

star fucker
we're each really a star fucker at heart.
(Thursday, May 31, 2001)

designer airsick bags
A good idea, though most of these are pretty uninspired. Tsuyoshi Nakazako's design is easily the standout of this bunch. It's the only one that really tackles this as a design problem on an aircraft. Most of the other entries are pretty juvenile.
(Wednesday, May 30, 2001)

jakob does it again.
"A survey of 1,078 user experience professionals finds that usability specialists make more money than designers and writers in the same field."

This self-selecting survey would never make it past peer review. The survey sample consists of people who attended "the User Experience World Tour," and who might therefore be a bit more likely to put down their occupation as "usability specialist" or something similar.

Jakob writes, "Because we surveyed people at a high-end professional conference, the data probably reflects the salaries of good user experience professionals; less accomplished staff is less likely to get approval to attend such events." This is wrong on two counts. In many cases good personnel are not allowed to go to conferences by bad managers, or due to constrained budgets. Also, Jakob forgets that his audience likely skews towards usability specialists; the good designers likely stayed home.

Of course, to check his data I'd have to shell out $28 for the detailed report, and I don't care that much. But beware of bad data reporting. Especially when it serves to justify ludicrous daily speaking rates. (Remember, a day with Jakob costs $30,000. That's one-third of what the average usability whatever in his survey makes in a year.)
(Tuesday, May 29, 2001)

un: 95 to 5 pro-us (nyt op-ed)
"So I have an idea: Let's quit the U.N. That's right, let's just walk. ... No? You don't want to leave the U.N. to the Europeans and Russians? Then let's stop bellyaching about the U.N., and manipulating our dues, and start taking it seriously for what it is — a global forum that spends 95 percent of its energy endorsing the wars and peacekeeping missions that the U.S. wants endorsed, or taking on the thankless humanitarian missions that the U.S. would like done but doesn't want to do itself."
(Tuesday, May 29, 2001)

shifting into neutral (nyt)
"The dominance of automatic transmissions is an American phenomenon, Mr. Kester of General Motors said. They have captured only 12 percent of the European market. Europeans drive cars. Americans eat, drink and live in them during ever-longer commutes. They also talk, and the impossibility of shifting, steering and dialing a cell phone has further imperiled the stick.

"'The European mind-set,' Mr. Kester, 'is A, you can't get good mileage with an automatic, and B, only weenies drive them.'"

couldn't have put it better myself.
(Sunday, May 27, 2001)

jordan and caras (nyt)
"Caras could also be tested in other ways, like the time he sat in the corner of a pool hall in Millville, N.J., waiting for the proprietor, a longtime friend. A jaunty youth came by. 'Hey, mister, wanna play nine-ball?' he said to Caras. 'Buck a game. I'm the best in town, but I'll take it easy on you.'

"After repeated urgings, Caras complied. He began dropping balls as quickly and as casually as a productive hen plops eggs. The kid, disbelieving, said, 'One more game' and one more. Caras beat the kid 18 straight games, then gave the money back. When told who Caras was, the kid said, 'Who?'

"'Why did you pick on me?' Caras asked.

"'Well,' the kid replied, 'you just looked like a sucker.'
(Saturday, May 26, 2001)

fuck pud (sfgate)
"Now a cyberlebrity for the dot-doom generation, Kaplan has become an outspoken advocate of small business online. 'Hiring a lot of people is a big mistake,' he shouted at me over the booming industrial music playing in his office. 'The point is, making Web sites is easy. You don't need $20 million and a staff of hundreds to build something that a kid could do for free.' Kaplan believes that the future of Internet business lies with small-scale entrepreneurs. 'I'm looking forward to all the dot-coms dying and the Internet turning into small businesses,' he said. 'Internet companies should be like family-run pizza places, handed down from generation to generation.'"

God, Pud comes off as just a different flavor of asshole, doesn't he? By his rationale, nobody should be coming to him for help in building their websites. Some executive's assistant's teenager should be able to do just as good a job as Pud.

Actually, judging by the looks of and problems with FuckedCompany.com, they probably could. Oops.
(Saturday, June 16, 2001)

bridget berlin (simon says)
In Switzerland, Teen Brigid launched into an addiction-fueled rebellion, and the results were so much more impressive than anything Robert Downey Jr. has come up with. "My roommate and I decided to get drunk. I got so fucking wasted I was doing Indian dances. I woke up the next day, and there was shit on the floor next to my bed. One of the mademoiselles entered the room and demanded, ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça?’ I said, ‘C’est le chien,’" blaming it on the dog. "She said ‘C’est trop grand!’ Then they wrote home to my parents and told them I was using my bedroom as a toilet."
(Saturday, June 16, 2001)

sir charles! (nyt)
You know, those Nike commercials a few years ago with Barkley as a talk show host were pretty much the best shoe commercials they made. That includes Spike Lee's Mars Blackman ads, too. It's just great to see Sir Charles basically living out the ad on TNT. Makes me wish I had cable.
(Saturday, June 16, 2001)

building a cloud ain't easy (nyt)
a visit with diller + scofidio onsite.
(Wednesday, May 23, 2001)

inside amzn (nyt)
"'We are committed to universal selection,' Mr. Risher said. 'But if we can't sell something profitably, we'll find someone who can.'"

I am hoping that Amazon can become profitable. It's too good a site to go away. And I own shares in it.
(Sunday, May 20, 2001)

changes in the air (nyt)
"The pollen resulted from a cool early spring followed by a blast of premature summer; the trees reacted to the heat wave with a reflexive spasm of procreation. But new research has also shown that pollen production may be linked in a perverse way to climate change because higher levels of carbon dioxide — a primary greenhouse gas blamed for planetary warming — encourage trees to produce more pollen."

Great. I can look forward to more headaches and sneezing over the next few years once Cheney's joke of an energy plan is passed. Great.
(Sunday, May 20, 2001)

paul krugman on cheney's energy jokes (nyt op-ed)
"Strange, isn't it? If you're a low- paid worker, or an energy consumer, the free market is sacrosanct — it would be a terrible thing if government provided you with any assistance. But energy producers apparently need special encouragement to do their regular job."

Pointing out this administration's standard Republican load of hypocrisy. The right always talks about 'free markets,' but what they mean by that is the freedom for corporations to fuck over the average citizen.
(Sunday, May 20, 2001)

mu1tip1esx1
i got an invitation to this conference in the mail. i can't make heads or tails of it. at least the website isn't trying to be clever in its formatting, but the text is incomprehensible.
(Saturday, May 19, 2001)

heaven or las vegas (nyt)
"In Nevada, these experts say, a long legacy of low-tax, libertarian government, rural isolation and a steely tradition of self-reliance have combined with a population growth of more than 60 percent in the last decade that has left little sense of community to create a huge range of challenges to the state's mental and physical health."
(Saturday, May 19, 2001)

the falling economy hits temporary workers on the head (nyt)
"Tech Data, a computer company in nearby Clearwater, said in March that it would lay off all of its temporary workers but none of its permanent workers. Instead, it would ask the permanent employees to cut costs by reducing travel and taking the free pens and paper when they stayed in hotels, as The St. Petersburg Times first reported."
(Saturday, May 19, 2001)

g.beato on post-its
"Fry made prototypes, then shared them with his officemates. The response he got was favorable, but a few weeks later, when he asked if anyone wanted more, no one had used up their initial allotment. Perhaps if Fry had worked in a library, demand for his invention would have been greater. In an office setting, there were apparently only so many books that needed marking."
(Thursday, May 17, 2001)

online gambling (nyt)
The NYT's daily headline summary had this as its lead.

"'You can literally wake up in the morning, log on and start losing all your money.'
- SENATOR JON KYL, Republican of Arizona, who opposes Internet gambling."

All I could think of was that he ought to look into online brokages next.
(Thursday, May 17, 2001)

sounds like traffic, a little (washington post)
"Houston Chronicle reporter Bennett Roth, at Fleischer's daily briefing, asked: 'Ari, the president talked about parental involvement today. How much has he talked to his own daughters about both drugs and drinking? And given the fact that his own daughter was cited for underage drinking, isn't that a sign that there's only so much effect that a parent can have on their children's behavior?'

"Fleischer responded brusquely: 'No, I think, frankly, there are some issues where I think it's very important for you all in the press corps to recognize that he is the president of the United States; he's also a father. And the press corps has been very respectful in the past of treating family matters with privacy, and I'm certain that you're going to do so again. I hope so.'"

Oh yes, calling the president on his public hypocrisy is not allowed in Washington these days. And I think the Clintons might take issue with the statement that the press leaves family matters private.
(Tuesday, May 15, 2001)

krugman on conservation (nyt op-ed)
"Here's what happened: In the wake of the energy crisis in the 1970's, ordinary people in the United States began conserving energy — not as a 'sign of personal virtue,' as Mr. Cheney sneeringly puts it, but because they wanted to save money."

Another reason to adore Paul Krugman.
(Wednesday, May 9, 2001)

they knew that 736-5000 just did not have the ring of the "Pennsylvania 6-5000" (nyt)
yet another resource in need of conservation. sigh.
(Monday, May 7, 2001)

shelter magazines = porn for yuppies (nyt)
"David Brooks, the author of 'Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There' (Simon & Schuster, 2000), said the shelter magazines are about the American yearning for utopia.

"'They are about the desire to build a perfect world,' he said. 'They are totally unrelated to the lives anybody leads. No one is that neat. And no one has that much carefully arranged bric-a-brac.'"
(Monday, May 7, 2001)

neither snow, nor sleet, shall keep the pneumatic tubes from their duty (nyt)
This is interesting, but it's really lazy reporting; every fact is accompanied by a "Mr. Stark said." Can't Times reporters do some fact-checking of their own any more?
(Monday, May 7, 2001)

layoffs = spring break? (nyt)
um, yeah. note that the oldest person interviewed for this article is 28.
(Sunday, May 6, 2001)

cheney: who needs conservation? (nyt)
"'The aim here is efficiency, not austerity,' [Cheney] said. 'Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.'"

In the meantime, the administration is cutting funding for R&D relating to renewable energy sources, focusing entirely on the supply-side (sounds like their tax plan, doesn't it?) while denigrating the environmental effects of their plans. Cheney said in his speech in Toronto that nuclear power "is, as a matter of record, a safe, clean and very plentiful energy source," conveniently ignoring the effects of uranium mining, spent fuel storage, and a few large accidents at reactors worldwide.

"In a report to be released later this week, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that raising the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks by what it calls a modest amount could do far more to reduce reliance on imported oil than drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

Here's a start: raise gas prices so people use less of it. Mandate more fuel-efficiency in light trucks and SUVs. Raise the gas guzzler tax, and provide tax incentives for people to buy solar panels and low-energy appliances, and tax credits for corporations who upgrade their older computers to energy-star compliant ones. This would help resusitate a chunk of the techology sector while we're at it.

Someday America may realize that a sustainable economy is better than not. I hope I'm still young enough to enjoy the effects.
(Wednesday, May 2, 2001)

staggering
this joke is still funny.
(Wednesday, May 2, 2001)

same as he ever was (nyt magazine)
"David Byrne carries everything he needs in a big red knapsack. He is self-contained. Like a strangely merry refugee, he wears the pack wherever he goes, his world on his back. 'It weighs me down a bit,' he says, 'but I'm kinda married to it. I feel naked without it now. I like bein' portable.' To prove its utility, he rifles through the miniature household: 'Got my passport here, just in case. Once in a while you get to the airport and you don't have the passport. Makes life easier. Here, got a toothbrush. And my Swiss Army knife. Flashlight. Hey, look -- a sewing kit.'"
(Wednesday, May 2, 2001)