Archives

Consolidation without Representation

FCC Chairman PowellA major defeat for democracy is imminent at the FCC, which is just three weeks away from voting on significant changes to the rules that govern media ownership. FCC Chairman Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has not only withheld information on these changes to the agency’s five commissioners, but he has also refused to make documentation on them available to the public. In all likelihood, they will relax these rules, allowing even greater consolidation of media control among the huge corporations that already dominate television and radio.

Continue Reading …

+

Yesterday’s Tomorrow

Douglas Englebart 1968Several years ago, I came across a link to these video clips of a seminal 1968 presentation by Douglas Englebart. This was before I began blogging, so I lost the link somewhere in Outlook, but today I happily rediscovered it while browsing Ramana Rao’s “Information Flow Newsletter.” In the presentation, Englebart, who led a group of researchers at the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, CA., was demonstrating an ‘online’ system, an information console that was designed to be ‘perfectly responsive.’ This occasion was not only the public debut of the computer mouse, but it also showcased several key concepts, now commonplace and familiar: hypertext, object addressing, dynamic file addressing and remote collaboration.

Continue Reading …

+

Stuck on Stickies

StickiesI’ve been looking for a good replacement for Stickies, the free Post-it Note-like application that’s been a part of the Macintosh for years. I use it to capture random bits of information, from URL’s and serial numbers to code snippets and lorem ipsum text, but I also need search-ability across notes, which Stickies does not offer, and, less urgently, the ability to assign meta-tags to each note. There’s no shortage of software in this all-purpose information organizer category, but I’ve yet to find the perfect application.

Continue Reading …

+

Cuts Like a Knife

Congress is set to approve the third-largest tax cut in history … yet another political victory for the Legion of Doom that is the Bush administration and its collaborators in Congress. Everything that was bad about the second-largest tax cut in history, also engineered by this administration just two years ago, still applies to this one: deficit spending, disproportionate benefits for the rich, deferral of fiscal responsibility to the next generation of tax payers, and a general absence of plausible logic.

Continue Reading …

+

Hat Trick

Customized Baseball CapMy girlfriend is due back from her ~3-month backpacking tour of Asia tomorrow evening. She was away for her birthday on 25 Apr, and in spite of the extra few weeks of present-shopping time, I still hadn’t bought anything for her until this afternoon. At Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street, I passed this kid with a card-table full of cheap baseball caps. He was customizing them in a graffiti style with paint pens, charging customers on a kind of sliding scale of decorative typography: simple tags for five dollars, block letters for ten, and shading and filling for fifteen.

Continue Reading …

+

The Man without a Face

Behavior is located on West 27th Street, just north of Chelsea and the Flatiron District. It’s not generally considered a dangerous neighborhood, as evidenced by the several luxury high-rise apartment buildings that have been built here recently. And yet, we were made aware today that there have been two very recent rapes within five minutes walk from our offices, both thought to have been committed by the same suspect, and one of them happening on 27th Street itself. (As reported by The New York Times here.)

Continue Reading …

+

Long and Drawn Out

Sketch DetailAs hard as it is to believe, I used to draw. A lot. This thought struck me today while I was doodling in a notepad during a meeting; I wondered why those doodles weren’t being penned into my sketchbook, rather than on some random piece of paper that would get lost in a day or two.

Continue Reading …

+