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breakup girl
i think this site is pretty damned cool. the comics are great!
(Monday, July 31, 2000)
kate betts (nyt)
a scattered profile that veers between the editor of bazaar and the magazine itself. interesting, though. i think bazaar is a lot more interesting now than it was before.
(Monday, July 31, 2000)
changes in dotcom recruiting (nyt)
"Over time, there may be a decline in what pure plays can afford to pay," he said. "But for now, it's still a race to pay whatever we can, especially to the top people."
If the emphasis continues to be placed on salary -- and bricks-and-mortar pedigree -- instead of equity, Mr. Chen said, "we might have to spend more to hire better people, but then just not hire as many people to do all the work."
two words that every dot com employee needs to keep in mind: burn rate. a company that is successful in making frugality a part of its culture (cisco strongly emphasizes it) will have a better chance to survive in the long term.
(Monday, July 31, 2000)
gnutella.com
this is pretty good. it's nice to see someone trying to revive allegory for commenting on current events.
(Sunday, July 30, 2000)
gentrification speeds up (nyt)
"When people moved into SoHo they had 15 or 20 years when the rents were stable, before they started going up and pushing out the artists," Mr. Nathanson said. "But nowadays as soon as the artists move in, they are priced out."
No to mention the rest of the people who were living in the neighborhood before the artists showed up. It's the same cycle as before, but sped up to internet time.
(Sunday, July 30, 2000)
buying art online (nyt)
"Collecting is famously addictive, and before long I saw how my modest
beginnings as an eBay art collector could lead to a more ambitious enterprise. One
recent Saturday, I was making the rounds of the Manhattan galleries when I
paused before a contemporary photograph, admired it and, to my surprise,
inquired into the price."
When I started buying paintings, I had no idea I would eventually run out of wall space. But that's exactly what's about to happen. I'll have to start rotating things in and out, I suppose. And I still need to frame some of my own work. Gah.
(Sunday, July 30, 2000)
fun! (simon doonan @ observer)
"7. Fun is squeezing a lemon on the cat and shouting "sour-puss!""
(Saturday, July 29, 2000)
"end of web design"
This essay made me unsubscribe from Jakob Nielsen's mailing list. It is short-sighted, pessimistic, and ultimately defeatist. I am consistently amazed that many companies pay this man a lot of money to essentially tell them that they should just do what everyone else is doing.
A web where everything looks the same would be like living in the early days of Levittown. Which leads back to my comments on the parallels between advertising in the '50s and the web of the '90s: when everyone is doing the same thing, there is a great opportunity for someone to come in and shake up the entire industry by doing something different that makes sense.
I'm currently trying to get one of my clients to greatly simplify their site. We'll see how successful I am at it.
(Saturday, July 29, 2000)
consultants v. dotcoms (fortune)
"It's an ugly fight that's sure to provide plenty of
mud-wrestling entertainment. What's scary and
educational, though, is how frequently the
relationship between Web executives and
consultants breaks down. Routinely, dot-coms
come to consultants hoping that the agency will
more or less build their business. The consultants
make blockbuster promises and charge
handsomely for them. It all seems to work fine
until it's time for the site to launch -- and it turns
out that it stinks."
(Saturday, July 29, 2000)
cross-browser development tricks (webtechniques)
I learned some good things from this. Which means everyone else can, too.
(Friday, July 28, 2000)
the return of the suit (boston globe)
"Gray-haired traditionalists aren't the only ones balking as corporate America leaps onto the casual day bandwagon. Resisters of this trend now encompass a broad cross-section of workers, including younger men and minorities scratching to make their first big marks in their careers. Some complain that their Polo shirts and Gap khakis invite questions about how to fix the copy machine jam or mail an express package."
...
"Some employers and workers say they don't like the way dress-down day has turned into leisure day, affecting not only attire but behavior. They aren't surprised by a national study this year showing that 44 percent of firms that allow casual dress at least one day a week saw an increase in tardiness and absenteeism among staff. Flirtatious behavior went up 30 percent at these firms, according to the study by Jackson Lewis, a New York employment law firm."
(Friday, July 28, 2000)
more about layoffs.com (sfgate)
"According to Leger, the company neglected to reassure the remaining workers, even as they saw colleagues disappear around them. ``They never transmitted to people the message that they shouldn't panic and run,'' he said, noting that a more-experienced organization would have handled the situation better."
Not necessarily.
(Friday, July 28, 2000)
japanese families reconfigure (nyt)
"The fact that more wives' parents tend to live locally in the city makes it more
reasonable for the daughters to bring their husbands into their parents' house,
even though they accept the husbands' name, which is a very twisted
arrangement," Ms. Fujiwara said. "Instead of patrilineal and patrilocal families, we
are quickly moving toward a system that is bilateral. There is no difference
between the status of the husband or wife's family. Often, wealth, property or
social status determine which side wins."
(Thursday, July 27, 2000)
more fuel efficient SUVs? (nyt)
"At least at first, the company does not intend
to pass the extra cost of producing more
fuel-efficient vehicles directly to American customers, two people close to the plan
said. The company is betting instead that improved fuel economy will increase
sales more than enough to offset lower profits on each vehicle. Better gas mileage
and lower operating costs for Ford sport utilities could eventually increase
demand enough to allow the company to sell them with fewer rebates, and
possibly even raise prices."
Keep in mind that SUVs have the highest profit margins of any vehicle. The question of whether those margins should remain intact will not be questioned until people stop buying these monstrosities.
(Thursday, July 27, 2000)
wow!
I kind of expected this, but not really.
(Wednesday, July 26, 2000)
oh, really? oh. oh. really?
the only way this could be cooler is if it was life-size.
(Wednesday, July 26, 2000)
zagat's sf guide
i bought the book; someone recently mentioned that there is a pilot-friendly version, too. and their website, which is mighty handy when people ask me for recommnedations.
(Tuesday, July 25, 2000)
snack attack! (standard)
"We now sign out all snacks. Six pretzels, 18 chocolate-covered raisins, one starlight mint. I tally my selections and check the appropriate boxes. I am nearing my raisin quota, and it's only Wednesday."
(Monday, July 24, 2000)
gun control adopts NRA tactics (nyt)
I think I need to check if Handgun Control Inc. has an affiliate link.
(Monday, July 24, 2000)
net.privacy (nyt)
"Because some are more trusting than others," Mr. Greenwald said via e-mail,
"there should be a segmentable market for things that will attract the more trusting
(online shopping, music via Napster, opening messages that may contain viruses).
"And there is also a market for things that appeal to the less trusting (alarm
systems, unlisted phone numbers, etc.). We have an unattractive name for those
who seem to live in excessive fear of attacks on their person or identity -- paranoid
-- but I don't know of a name for the opposite."
Um, naive?
(Monday, July 24, 2000)
corporations on the move (nyt)
"As labor shortages and competition for workers drives up wages in one city,
companies have shifted work or have expanded in another location, where the
same tasks can be done at lower pay. This movement helps to answer one of the
big questions about the recent economy: How has the United States managed to
achieve its lowest unemployment rate since the 1960's and yet not experience as
much upward pressure on wages as it has during past booms, even when labor
markets were not as tight as they are today?"
Remember: corporations exist to maximize value. Which means they try to get employees to do more for less. Thankfully the internet economy is pretty centralized.
(Monday, July 24, 2000)
engineering humor at its finest
courtesy annalisa.
(Sunday, July 23, 2000)
paypal!
this seems to have become the most popular payment option on ebay. and for voluntary micropayments. so maybe there will be a paypal button on this page at some point: like the links? send me a quarter.
(Sunday, July 23, 2000)
intel helps teachers buy homes in silicon valley (chicago tribune)
This is pretty ingenious. Intel buys a school district bond that pays 4%, and the district then buys a bond that pays 7.5%. The spread, about $350,000 a year, is used to help teachers afford to live in an area where the median home costs $539,870.
I think there will be more of these sorts of programs, in which corporations subsidize community services in indirect ways.
(Sunday, July 23, 2000)
blobitecture (nyt)
"What's missing here is a sense of real, historical time. Cities are still social condensers. Bodies still require bricks and mortar structures. If they don't concentrate on developing new forms in the material city, today's architecture students could end up as low-level technical consultants at Industrial Light and Magic."
The ironies here are that most of the people I studied architecture with in college are now designing websites, video games, and movie effects for ILM; and that given architecture's self-marginalizing nature most students won't end up building anyway. From what I remember of the designs by a fellow student who now writes for Wallpaper*, this is not a bad thing at all.
(Sunday, July 23, 2000)
toaster!
i love this detail. it's such an industrial design joke. ha!
(Saturday, July 22, 2000)
freitag!
these bags are great, and they come in cardboard boxes that turn into prop television sets. you can't get much cooler than that.
(Friday, July 21, 2000)
when you wish upon a star...
now you can satisfy my material desires from the comfort of your armchair.
(Friday, July 21, 2000)
client sues agency over bad design, as if that was something out of the ordinary (inside via standard)
The filing also alleges that
"IAM.com is informed that virtually every aspect of
the site developed by Razorfish fails to meet
IAM.com's needs, or basic levels of workmanship in
the (W)eb development industry."
Actually, this sounds like a desperate move to save some money. Though the home page in question is pretty bad.
(Friday, July 21, 2000)
the NeXT cube, only smaller and prettier
So now I'm thinking that I should just buy one of these, load it up with a forty gig drive and a gig of RAM, and run both Mac and PC software on it. If I added a Linux partition, it would be three! three! three boxes in one!
And it's just gorgeous. What the hell took so long?
(Wednesday, July 19, 2000)
bad napster, bad! (wired)
yet another example of how napster thinks that copyright and intellectual property are meaningless in the age of copy-paste. i thought they'd brought in some adult supervision, but i guess i was wrong.
(Thursday, July 13, 2000)
tiny aliased type
I use this, too (on SFhipster).
(Wednesday, July 12, 2000)
bad aibo, bad!
"The AttackBite() control has a serious vulnerability that allows remote intruders within earshot of AIBO to execute arbitrary code. Scripts are proliferating the Internet with new routines such as PeeOnRug(), ShoeChew(), KillTheCat() and AttackOwnersGenitals(). The latter, classified by CERT as a "Denial of Service" attack, is most vicious, and for this reason CERT encourages immediate patch implementation."
(Wednesday, July 12, 2000)
from 0 to $1.2 million to 0 in a year (msnbc)
"On April 17, the deadline to file his taxes, Mr. Seiff got out of bed and turned on his computer. Everything he had invested in had sunk to lows he didn’t think possible...His net worth had plummeted 78%, and he still owed more than $80,000 in income tax on the Scient options he had exercised."
It's hard to feel sympathy for someone who routinely bragged to his friends about how much his options were worth, especially when he was so late to the party in the first place. I'm not-so-secretly hoping for another shakeout to rid the industry of these fuckers once and for all.
(Tuesday, July 11, 2000)
japanese cutie girl
linked for the tee shirt.
(Monday, July 10, 2000)
are we there yet?
air distances between any two places on earth. it won't tell you the number of frequent flyer miles you'll get, but it's going to be pretty close. this is what the web is really good for.
(Sunday, July 9, 2000)
accessorized (standard)
It's easy to spot a dotcom person in San Francisco: it's that person over there with the great shoes and (expensive) hip glasses, talking on their cell phone.
Those who don't wear glasses usually have some other defining characteristic, such as a love of a bright color (pink, orange), or a propensity for velour shirts.
I mean, if you want to stereotype people.
(Sunday, July 9, 2000)
resistance.org (standard)
"If yuppie scum know their precious cars aren't safe on the streets of this
neighborhood," it continued, "they'll go away and they won't come back – and the
trendoid restaurants, bars and shops that cater to them will go out of business."
And then we can have the boarded-up storefronts, liquor stores, and crack smokers back again. Cool!
(Sunday, July 9, 2000)
growing pains (standard)
A look at what is happening all over the country as the internet economy and a real estate shortage combine to gentrify large swaths of the urban landscape and sprawl over rural areas. City planning is really the most important things a city can do to mitigate the downside of expansion. (There's a
sidebar
on Portland's success in this regard.)
In the end, cities may have to look at Koolhaas' idea of radical congestion and collision, and apply it to the New Urbanist landscapes being built right outside of major metropolitan areas (see link above).
Little mini-Manhattans of towers containing offices, apartments, and commercial uses could be really nice, and alleviate the dependency on the car that dooms today's suburban America.
Maybe towers in the park were the right solution all along. Wouldn't that be funny?
(Sunday, July 9, 2000)
why cities are so wonderful, in a nutshell (nyt)
from the Metropolitan Diary:
"Fran Blazer got two shows for the price of one last month. She was well ahead of
curtain time for her Broadway show and stopped at the corner of 45th where
Broadway crosses Seventh Avenue. It was early evening and in the middle of the
intersection, a man was on one knee, proposing to his girlfriend. That
accomplished, obviously with an acceptance, he placed a ring on her finger and
kissed her. A mounted policeman passing by stopped traffic and another police
officer on foot took the couple's camera and snapped their picture. The happy
couple then went on their way, Ms. Blazer went on to her show, the policeman
trotted off and traffic resumed. The whole thing took place within the space of
minutes."
(Sunday, July 9, 2000)
koolhaas (nyt)
"Koolhaas has manufactured a form for his life that radically rethinks convention to accommodate his requirements. The stress lines are visible. And that sums up both his design for living and his design philosophy."
I still believe that Rem is easily the best architect in the world today. He was the main reason I applied to the GSD in the first place.
(Sunday, July 9, 2000)
flipfloptrunkshow.com
e-commerce must have found every possible niche by now, i think.
(Friday, July 7, 2000)
new guilty pleasure: simon doonan's observer column
one column contains this item:
"If someone is snapping your picture, for God’s sake, say, "Thursday" and not "Cheese." The word "Thursday" puts your lips, tongue and teeth through a miraculous series of animated articulations, all of which are fascinating and camera-friendly.
"This nifty tip was wrongly attributed, by me, to Irving Penn, the greatest photographer of all time. Vogue executive fashion editor and Penn studio veteran Phyllis Posnick assures me that she has never heard Mr. Penn instruct models to say "Thursday." "If a model is spacing out he will snap her out of it by instructing her to ‘See something!’ she said. "But no ‘Thursdays.’"
"Maybe it’s Scavullo? Either way, it works."
(Friday, July 7, 2000)
energy costs going up some more (nyt)
"Closer to winter, rising heating fuel prices are likely to generate political
controversy, much as gasoline prices have done recently. Consumer anger over
gasoline prices especially in the Midwest, has made the cost of energy an issue in
the presidential campaign and led to Congressional hearings and federal inquiries."
But the inquiries are only into pricing, not into alternative energy sources, or convincing Americans (at long last) to conserve energy.
"Energy usage is an important indicator of an economy's health. United States
industry uses prodigious amounts of oil, gas and electricity each year, while
consumers are buying larger houses and cars and other products that demand
more fuel. At the same time, critics of the government charge that a series of
Republican and Democratic administrations has failed to construct a sound energy
policy to take into account shifts in demand and the complexities of the supply of
oil and gas. Now, the Clinton administration and Congress are scrambling to find
ways to undo or slow the increase in fuel prices."
Well, there isn't a sound energy policy because the last President who seemed to care about it was Jimmy Carter, and we know what happened to him. If Congress was serious about this, they could start by considering SUVs cars for emissions purposes, and then add to the gas-guzzler tax.
Then we could start talking about solar, wind, and water power, and tax incentives for passive solar homes. Because people lived without electricity for a long time, and without air conditioning for even longer. And then, maybe, we could talk about changing development patterns so that more people could walk, bicycle, or ride mass transportation around town.
(Wednesday, July 5, 2000)
more mike
i should just start hosting a mirror of his site, i'm linking to him so often.
(Tuesday, July 4, 2000)
the death of small magazines? (ny post)
""Of the 5,200 titles on newsstands now, I'd say 3,000 of them will disappear within a year," says David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which owns the National Enquirer as welll as The Star."
Do magazines with smaller sales deserve to live? Maybe they will have to make do with smaller print runs (thereby continuing to sell the mandated 45% sell-through rate). Or maybe they'll try to move online, though somehow that doesn't seem very likely.
But then again, maybe Modern Ferret's readership would be willing to pay for an online subscription if the print magazine folded.
(Monday, July 3, 2000)
knit your own bikini!
well, i probably won't. but you might. you may not want to go bodysurfing in it, though.
(Sunday, July 2, 2000)
oldest silicon alley veterans tell all! (new york)
"What makes you cool is when you got there. Nineteen ninety-five is cool. Nineteen ninety-six or early 1997 is all right. Anything after that is not. Two thousand makes you a real loser -- a suit, a kid just out of college, a fiftyish businessman looking for one last hurrah and another $100 million. "It means you did not get it," says Jason McCabe Calacanis, editor and CEO of the Silicon Alley Reporter. "You did not believe. You did not have religion."
For the record, I started getting paid to work online in 1995. But I was in Silicon Valley, not New York.
(The link title was the cover headline for this article; I'm bummed that they didn't put the photos online.)
(Sunday, July 2, 2000)
whither amazon? (standard)
"Of course, e-commerce done right is not easy. The threat to Amazon from brick-and-mortar giants like Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart has been overstated before. For now, Amazon sits comfortably on top of the e-commerce world, with a lead over rivals that is arguably larger than ever."
While I'm not positive, I think I'd agree with Henry Blodgett on this one: Amazon is looking a bit like AOL did a few years ago. Whether or not I'll buy any AMZN is undecided.
(Sunday, July 2, 2000)
time discovers dot com layoffs
"The e-commerce struggle has also produced plenty of grizzled, cynical
veterans. Take Janice Crotty, a San Francisco Web consultant. In the
space of a single year, she helped give birth to two online ventures--and
watched both of them pass away. In early 1999 Crotty quit her job and
went without pay for five months to found a Web portal called
http://iAuthentic.com. That failed to attract venture funding, so she joined
health site http://wholepeople.com, which, in turn, was recently rescued
by, and merged with, rival site http://Gaiam.com."
Things wrong with this paragraph:
- Janice is not what I would consider cynical. That's the word for
Mike and I.
- I don't think any web company has ever put "http://" in its name.
- iAuthentic never went online: the demo that I did with Janice was
as far as it got, product-wise.
- WholePeople was certainly not "rescued" by Gaiam.com, a
company which didn't even exist before WholePeople was sold off
by Whole Foods. WholePeople was abandoned by its corporate
owner.
Since this is one error-filled paragraph, I have to take the rest of the article
with a basketball-sized grain of salt. Even if these are 'just details,' it shows
some of the reporting process at work. What we think the gist is might not
fit with the reporter's slant on events.
At least they published a good photo.
(Sunday, July 2, 2000)
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