There are some specialized sites on the web I just love. One are interior decor site (yes, there are many, including alot featuring bookshelves) and the other is food sites. There are lots of great ones out there. I like in particular this one, gourmande in the kitchen, which is just getting started. I hope it continues. It’s well designed, has good content, and really good photographs, like this one: 
It looks better on that site. Go visit and feast your eyes.
Then check out this tumblr site and follow the instructions here: Never said about restaurant websites – How to make a less horrible restaurant website. The site itself has mockingly compliments restaurants sites, very likely born out of suffering through existing sites.
It boils down to keeping it simple.
Thanks to @adamschwabe on twitter for pointing this site out.
Reading this, Inaction and Delays by New York as Storm Bore Down – NYTimes.com, the one thing that no one brings up is that of the cost of having workers work at that time of year. Cities have a “snow” budget that they want to stretch over the entire winter, and if possible, you want to not spend it all at once. I wonder if that didn’t enter into the calculations of the city. That, and not wanting to call people in at Christmas are two reasons why New York failed to deal with things as well as they should have.
To monitor the situation there and to help move the cameras off of him and on to the people of Sudan in an attempt to prevent more atrocities from occurring. For more information, turn to George Clooney in Sudan – Photo Essays – TIME – StumbleUpon, and other sources.
Can be found in this good article: Behind-the-scene of Inception: Movie Locations – Associated Content from Yahoo! – associatedcontent.com
No doubt making it an expensive film to film!
Bruce Sterling was asked his thoughts on Wikileaks and he wrote a very strong piece on it, published here: The Blast Shack. While it is very intelligent and well written, it is also very neat. Too neat, I thought; almost fictional in how it is written. Gabriella Coleman has written a very good response to it here: Hacker Culture: A Response to Bruce Sterling on WikiLeaks – Gabriella Coleman – Technology – The Atlantic. If you read Sterling, I strongly recommend you read Coleman to give you a better perspective.
Made from a few basic electronic parts:
An abstract christmas tree made out of LEDs on Flickr. And here’s the schematic:
From the Flickr photostream of Omer Kilic
is this: Home Alone With Zombies
Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip, but I think I will stick with The Nightmare Before Christmas
There was a good article in the New York Times about the decline in web based email, but this chart from the blog Contrarian sums it up well:
It’s quite astounding to me. I can recall the affects and the switch to email in the mid 90s when more people started getting email at work and from services provided by ISPs. Then web based email came along from sites like Yahoo! Gmail itself only came out in 2004. During that time mail carriers suffered in adjusting to the loss of personal mail. I would have thought that email would have lasted at least another decade. But looking at this chart, I’d be surprised if it too was around in 5 years.
Most of the time, stores still trot out the usual suspects when it comes to gifts for men. These gifts from the blog A CUP OF JO are so much better. Here are two:
Perfect for Dad (and uncles).
Here’s a great one for any man with a desk:
Check out the blog post for more.
If you are North American, you might think, “Oprah”. Well she is on the list, as is J K Rowling, but most of the list is made up of Chinese billionaires, as you can see:
From: Richest women: The great wealth of China | The Economist
The Economist has a great article on how for many people, the age of 46 is a big turning point in terms of well being:
As this graph and the accompanying article illustrate (Age and happiness: The U-bend of life | The Economist) people, regardless of where they live, have a greater sense of well being once they get through the middle of being middle aged. Not only that, but it continues to increase as they get older. There are many theories for that, but the data is strong.
I think everyone should read this article, not just the middle aged, for it can also help younger people and give them a sense of perspective. Obviously you can find individuals that this doesn’t apply to, but as I get older, it feels right to me. Well worth a read.
Is a wine like this one. It consists of colombard, ugni blanc and gros
manseng. I see the first two in a lot of French white. It has 11% alcohol,
which is another thing I like about French and other European wines: they
are not always pushing their wine towards the 14% or in some cases 15%
level.
For London defied the ban on Christmas during the time of Cromwell (according to this and The National Archives (UK)), for in this note, from
Oliver Cromwell from the State Papers refers to a report that people in the City of London and in Westminster have been flouting his ban on celebrating Christmas.
When Cromwell and his Puritan forces took over England, they banned Christmas in an effort to rid the country of decadence. Soldiers were ordered to go round the streets and take food being cooked for a Christmas celebration, by force if necessary. Traditional Christmas decorations like holly were also banned. This move was unpopular with the people of England, many of whom resisted it.
Here’s to them. And here’s to you. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it!
This photo essay/art/baking project has to be seen: Let It Dough! – NYTimes.com
In this blog post, Chinese Confusions – NYTimes.com, Paul Krugman sums up the bind the Chinese are in economically and politically.
But political considerations seem to be ruling out all the reasonable responses. They won’t revalue, because that would hurt politically influential exporters. They’re reluctant to raise interest rates, because that would hurt politically influential real estate developers. They’re trying to impose quantitative limits on credit, but are finding that borrowers have enough influence to circumvent the limits. And now they’re trying price controls — which will inevitably come apart at the seams unless they do something about the underlying pressures.
They can’t revalue, raise interest rates, limit credit, or do price controls. Something will have to give, and when it does, it will set off a series of events that will result in big changes there. China is always interesting to watch; 2011 will be no exception.
Not sure what this is from, but it is superb. Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong do The Blues Are Brewin’
YouTube – Billie Holiday & Louis Armstrong – The Blues Are Brewin
I love this project from Yahoo! How Good Grows: Ripples of Kindness. I hope it is successful: I like not only what it is promoting, but how it goes about doing it. Does that sounds mysterious? Good! Because I think you should go see it for yourself. Being good is smart.
If the answer to this is “yes”, Is Yahoo Shutting Down Del.icio.us? then if you are familiar with CURL, here’s how you can backup your bookmarks (from one of the comments in the post linked to above):
You can do a CURL on the command line: https://{your username}:{your password}@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml to get the bookmarks as bookmarks.xml – then you can put them in a spreadsheet.
is here: Gwynne Dyer: The accusations against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange (Straight.com). Great analysis: just what I have come to expect from Dyer. (Thanks to Doug Saunders for tweeting about this.)
According to this BBC News story,
A man has admitted being involved in a £500,000 fraud in which he used stolen credit card details to buy his own songs on iTunes and Amazon. … They allegedly downloaded the songs 6,000 times in 2008 and 2009. Johnson admitted being responsible for about 2,000… (he) used “compromised credit card details” in order to gain royalties from the sales of the songs he posted on the websites.
It’s a novel form of theft: repeatedly buy something you own the rights to. It’s easier to do in this digital age, and one, I suspect, we will see more of.
Over at the NYTimes.com is a good editorial by David Brooks on the meaning of the work of Hans Rosling and Gapminder. For Brooks, the meaning is that the world is becoming more middle class. Given that Brooks is a small “c” conservative by American standards, this conclusion is not surprising. I also don’t think it is wrong.
What I think would be wrong, however, would be to just read one meaning in the work. I think there are many conclusions one can draw from it. To me, the main one is that the Gaps between rich and poor people in the world is diminishing and overall people are benefiting from human progress.
Don’t believe me? Start with this video
And then go search for Gapminder videos on YouTube or TED.com and draw your own conclusions. I’d be very interested to hear what you think.
The world has still a great many inequalities and too much suffering. But the gaps are closing, and progress is increasing. Be hopeful.
Anyone who is not really computer savvy could use a peak at some of the videos on this site: Teach Parents Tech
I am going to flog this one, because I can’t repeat it enough. Need something to do over the Holidays? Change your $%&* passwords! And Happy Holidays! 😀
YouTube – How to create a strong password
Thanks to Google for this. Well done.
Yes, it is TED commandments, not TEN. But there are ten, and they are for presenters that speak at the famous TED conferences. Now you may not get to speak at TED, but regardless of where you are and whom you are speaking to, try following these rules. I think if you do, your talk will be that much better.
(Found here: swissmiss | The TED Commandments)
The first mail to be carried over the Atlantic originated from St. John’s, Newfoundland. Due to their proximity to Europe, Newfoundland and Cape Breton contributed to a number of firsts in communications in the early part of the 20th century. That part of Canada (I am from Cape Breton) is known for its beauty, its hospitality, and its culture, to name a few attributes. It should also be known for creating technological history as well.
Letters of Note: The first mail to be carried over the Atlantic
WorkFlowy is ingenious . It is so simple, yet so effective. If I were to describe it to you, you might have a hard time appreciating why I am making all the fuss. But trust me, to use it is to love it.
I love it for a number of reasons.
1) It simplifies my todo lists into one massive yet easy to organize list.
2) It is a great way to keep a running log of what you accomplished.
3) It is possible to have a massive list that is still easy to focus on.
4) The ease of the tool allows you to focus on what you are trying to do / think about and not have to fuss with focusing on the tool.
If you like to or want to get or stay organized and simplify your life, check it out.
Can be found here: Verbophobia | The Story Behind the Mastercard and VISA DDoS Attacks
This blog, Polly Want A Crafter?, has a great idea for a gift you can make for the Star Wars fan in your life. Here it is:
I love that! The blog post has a step by step description of how to make it. If you have time (and especially if you are short on cash) this could be a great gift.
Ben Casnocha has been talking on his blog about mastery, with his latest post (linked here) being The 30 Steps to Mastery.
With regards to mastery, I like to think of achievement versus mastery. We all set goals and then we set out to try and achieve them. For example, when I wanted to run my first marathon, I did this:
Note, unlike Ben’s list, there’s no seemingly endless list of going and going. Furthermore, there is no notion of Mastery. I didn’t plan to master the marathon. I went on to run a number of other marathons and I got better and better (those were my future goals), but there was never any idea of Mastery in place.
It’s not always a question of Mastery or Failure (to master the activity in question). Instead you can have a process where you go from accomplishment to accomplishment, always getting better along the way.
By the way, there’s nothing wrong with mastering something, assuming it can be defined in a way that you can say: if I do it in such and such a way, I have mastered it, and then going on to achieving that mastery.
I have been using social media/Web 2.0 tools for some time. What I find amazing about it is the number of interactions I get from people. Most of these are on twitter, though not exclusively. I remember being impressed by the fact that not only could I follow Stephen Fry on twitter, but he was following me! And not long after that I sent a message to Tim O’Reilly and he replied! I thought: wow, this is amazing.
Since then, this has happened more than I can probably count. I’ve received messages from Mark Bittman, Susan Orlean, Tracey Thorn, Doug Saunders, Glenn Greenwald, Josh Marshall, Lucy Waverman and the mayor of Toronto, David Miller, on twitter. I’ve had Billy Strayhorn’s relatives comment on a blog post I wrote about him. I’ve had people from NBC, various wineries and breweries send me emails about things I wrote on their products. Just as important as well known people though are all the smart and funny and charming and wonderful folks I have met serendipitously since then. It’s been great fun to read all there messages and exchange links and jokes and other bit of information and wisdom. I feel like I have stumbled across this great bar with some of the best people you would ever want to meet, and I get to meet them daily.
I’ve learned alot from using social media over the time I have been using it, but what I have particularly enjoyed is connecting with people. It’s quite amazing.
For now, I remain: Bernie Michalik (blm849) on Twitter.
Sadly, for a brief two days, Robert LePage’s latest work, Eonnagata, had a very limited Toronto appearance. According to BlogTo.com:
Robert Lepage’s Eonnagata, which opened last night at the new Sony Centre For The Performing Arts, is a wonderful mishmash of dance, opera and theatre.
I am sorry I missed it. I used to see much of LePage’s work when he was less well known and his performances would roll through Toronto regularly.
If you get a chance to see Eonnagata or anything by him, I highly recommend you seize it.
55 years ago, on December 1st, Rosa Parks sat here:
She was actually not in the area reserved for white people, but was asked to move back when the bus crowded with white people. You can read the rest of the story here and see more of the documentation: An Act of Courage, The Arrest Records of Rosa Parks.
Can be seen in this blog post: The Leak And The Coming Flood – The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan.
Like I said in my earlier post, business is the next target. And the material being sent to Wikileaks appears to be ramping up, much as I suspected. There is even a reference to Napster in this post!
Like I also said, what is the real story here is coming into focus, and it is not about the leaks regarding the U.S. government. It is bigger and wider than that.
This article in the Guardian, WikiLeaks: The revolution has begun – and it will be digitised by Heather Brooke supports some of the ideas in my previous post on Wikileaks. It dives deeper into them, though, and is worth a read.
In reading the arguments that say Wikileaks should not be doing what they are doing, I am sympathetic to the feelings that people have about this, but I find there is weakness in the arguments that I’ve seen so far.
Let’s take one of the first ones: “Julian Assange is a <insert negative description here>”. If this is your argument against what Wikileaks has done, let’s assume that he had resigned at some point and yet the leaks still continue. If you still don’t accept that it is acceptable, then whatever feelings or thoughts you have about Julian Assange are besides the point. If you now think it is acceptable, then it has nothing to do with the leaks themselves, and more than you don’t like Assange. I can see why people don’t like him, but to me, that is beside the point.
The next argument against Wikileaks is that it is treasonous. A related one is that the U.S government should legally stop Wikileaks from publishing the material. The problem with that is that as far as we know, Assange and the rest of the Wikileaks team are not Americans, therefore they cannot be tried for treason, not being citizens of the U.S. As well, Wikileaks (so far) is outside U.S. jurisdiction, making it difficult to stop them legally.
One blogger, Matt Yglesias talked about the Long Term Consequences of Leaked Diplomatic Cables, including the arguments that there will be a a “redoubling of efforts—more phone calls, more compartmentalization,
more expenditure of resources on tracking Julian Assange down—and life
will go on”. Some of this is very unlikely. For one thing, people who work in offices need to document things. This is unavoidable, regardless of where you work. And nowadays, documenting things means storing it in a computer that is accessible via a network. The notion that large diplomatic organizations like that of the United States will limit themselves to phone calls is absurd. Embassy personnel, like personnel everywhere, need to demonstrate that they are working and being effective, and the way to do that is to document it. Preferably in a computer that other people can get access to, so that they too can be effective in their job. This means less phone calls and less compartmentalization, which results in many links in a chain. All you need is one weak link in that chain to end up in a document dump to Wikileaks.
As for tracking Julian Assange down and I assume killing him or stopping him somehow: I will get to that in a minute.
This blog post from Talking Points Memo contains two of the better arguments against Wikileaks:
But what Wikileaks is doing is categorically different. Many readers have written in to say — without knowing quite how to put their finger on it — that the indiscriminate nature of the release, just everything they could get their hands on — seems more like an attack on the US government itself than an effort to inform American citizens about what their government is doing on their behalf. And even though I’m in the business of unearthing and sharing information, my gut says they’re right.
The two arguments are that Wikileaks is indiscriminate and that Wikileaks is attacking the U.S. government. First off, those argument contradict themselves. Wikileaks is indiscriminate: if there is agenda or a vendetta against a particular country or organization, I’d like to see evidence of that. If anything, the motivation of Wikileaks is to take material that is secretive or hidden and expose it as widely as possible, regardless of who it is against. Perhaps over time it will appear that Wikileaks has it out for the U.S. government. I would argue, though, that if Wikileaks received a dump of documents against the Iranian or North Korean government (or any government), that they would publish those as well. I don’t think they have it in particularly for the U.S. government. (Indeed, many of the documents in the recent dump embarrass alot of governments besides that of the United States.)
I would also argue that Wikileaks must aim to be indiscriminate. If anything, if they were to start publishing a portion of what they received, the argument against them would be: what gives you the right to decide what should be released and what should not. By being indiscriminate, they do not judge or decide on the relevance of the material they receive. Furthermore, if they did start to discriminate, it is very likely that someone else would set up infrastructure to publish this material instead. By increasing the chance of publication of the material (which is what they did in their arrangements with various publications like Der Spiegel, the New York Times, etc.) and by not editing the material, they increased their chance of getting the material in the first place.
Years ago Napster burst onto the scene. And while the recording industry has laboured considerably to stop downloading and sharing of music, I think it is safe to say they have been unsuccessful. Even if the recording industry has been successful in stopping some of the initial activity like the work done by Napster, they soon found out it was not about Napster. This was something much bigger. People have created IT systems to overcome the restrictions that prevented file sharing, and they have gone on to share music to a much greater degree. You can argue whether it is right or it is wrong, but you cannot dismiss what has occurred.
Likewise with Wikileaks. Getting back to the notion of tracking Julian Assange down and killing him or stopping him somehow. This result will be no different than stopping Shaun Fanning and Napster, despite the difference in severity. For the cat, so to speak, is out of the bag. If someone can argue convincing how the cat gets back in the bag, I’d like to hear it.
Instead, what is very likely to happen is that Assange and Wikileaks are going to turn and pivot and turn their spotlight on some organization that everyone loves to hate: bankers. And after that, they are going to snare someone else. I beleive they are going to continue to change the conversation as they go forward, if they can. And the arguments above will fall by the side.
Ultimately much of the discussion is focused on the wrong thing. However serious these individual matters are, ultimately it is not about the U.S. government or Wikileaks. It is about the increasing difficulty organizations are going to have protecting their secrets and limiting the access to information that they have. This should be a surprise for no one, but it seems to be. The challenges individuals have in separating the public from the private are the same ones that organizations are going to have. The challenges that media companies have with limiting access to digital representations of what was once scarce media are the same ones organizations are going to have.
This is the world we live in now.
This time using Photoshop and images from World War II and now, such as this:
For more, see The Ghosts of World War II’s Past (20 photos) – My Modern Metropolis
I used to think that the way H&M teamed up with great fashion designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Stella McCartney (and this year, the House of Lanvin) was a great idea. I agreed with Sofia Coppola who recently said (H&M – Fashion press release):
“”it makes it (Lanvin) so accessible to all kinds of young people to be able to afford it and wear it”.
I liked that idea alot: the accessibility of great design and great style — although not great materials — for young people. Why shouldn’t great style be accessible to everyone, I thought? If you are a big fan of the work of Alber Elbaz at Lanvin, or dream of being able to wear something by Lagerfeld, then this is your chance to buy it and wear it, regardless of the fact you are far from rich. Great clothes for everyone, I thought.
Well, as it turns out, the great style of H&M and Lanvin is available to only a few, despite the relatively low price. Doing some searches on Twitter (hash tag #Lanvin), and then looking up articles like this (How to Survive the H&M Lanvin Launch Like a Pro! – Style & Beauty – UsMagazine.com), I can see that what really happens is that there is a very limited number of pieces put out for sale, people line up for hours before the store opens to get them, and then they rush in and buy as much stuff as they can. There are limits (according to UsMagazine, rules such as each customer has a limit of two items of each product. So, no more than two sizes (shoes or garments) or pieces (jewelry or accessories) per customer. But based on what I can see people tweeting, the first ones in are doing a shopping grab and buying as much as they can, somewhat indiscriminately. They shop that way for two reasons: 1) they plan to return it if they don’t like it 2) they plan to sell it for a good profit on eBay (see this page and compare the list retail prices vs the eBay prices (Lanvin for H&M – Women’s Collection | nitrolicious.com)
Now, if you are lucky and smart, you will pop into H&M in the next few day or so and leisurely get something from Lanvin that you love and that was returned by someone who gorged themselves on the stuff today and then decided they no longer wanted it. More likely you won’t get anything at all (save the rather unexceptional and overpriced scarves that still languished on shelves even when everything else had been snatched up).
Who benefits from this? Well, first off, Lanvin and H&M. As this article announcing the teaming shows (Lanvin to Make Clothes for H & M – NYTimes.com):
For Lanvin, the move toward a wider audience signals less a departure from its luxury roots than a further attempt to expand its market with new products and retail outlets. The company recently opened a store on Madison Avenue.
It’s a great coup for Lanvin. They have great buzz, and they are well positioned for moving down market. (H&M received equally a large amount of attention from this arrangement). Plus, because the quantities are limited, they can likely avoid the embarrassment of having their clothes lingering on the 70% off rack. (Indeed, I really believe that the scarcity of the clothes is meant to drive manic purchases and to limit the amount of it going on deep discount sales later.)
It’s also a fantastic deal for H&M. This is the weekend of Black Friday in the U.S., and unofficially the early start of Christmas shopping. It’s a great way to gain attention and get people into the store and spending money, for even if people don’t score any of the Lanvin, they likely will come away with something else (I can tell you this from personal experience. :))
Finally, it’s also a good thing for the rare shopper who managed to get something, especially in women’s wear. The dresses have great flair, both in style and colour. I can’t attest to the quality of them, but for anyone young looking for something to wear that will gain the attention of the room at holiday events, one of the H&M Lanvin dresses will meet the criteria for sure. (As for the men’s wear, I was underwhelmed.)
But for most people, it is neither here nor there. Whatever it is about, it is not about making great clothes accessible to people. (If anything, the work that Isaac Mizrahi did for Target or the lines that Martha Stewart did for K-Mart or Home Depot are about that.) It is more about getting great publicity for H&M and the annual designer chosen to do a line for them.
With the ascendance of ebooks, why buy print books any more? One simple reason could be that the book as an object possesses qualities superior to the digital version. One such example of that is Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book, “Unmakeable”, which as described at swissmiss, is something that:
Book printers said … “could not be made.” Belgian publishing house Die Keure proved them wrong. Jonathan Safran Foer’s book is an interactive paper-sculpture: Foer and his collaborators at Die Keure in Belgium took the pages of another book, Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, and literally carved a brand new story out of them using a die-cut technique.
I have some printed books that are great to read and fascinating objects in themselves. To sell books in the future, more books will need to be made this way.
Smart People I Know 