cringely on itv

interesting.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060922.html

the day's linkage

On my I'd-like-to-read-this-but-don't-have-time list for today:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/fashion/17diary.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092106J.shtml
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092106R.shtml
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/092006J.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/business/20hedge.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/business/20gore.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/03/travel/03frugalbx.html

chair-man of the dotcom board

Here's a pretty hilarious article in this month's New York magazine about Bill Stumpf, the designer of Herman Miller's legendary aeron chair, who recently passed away.

Remembering the Dot-Com Throne [nymag]

My most poignant aeron chair memory would have to be when ArsDigita moved offices and I was helping to unload dozens of these beauties from the 30' moving truck (which I had only moments earlier gotten wedged on the steep incline of Le Conte Ave.) and it seemed like half of them had broken during the move. We were just chucking aside these damanged $1000-dollar chairs into a big pile in the corner. oh, those were the days.

May he rest in peace on the big aeron in the sky -- his lumbar fully supported and seat-area well ventilated. Programmers everywhere salute you.

mean MUGgin

I really liked today's MUG:
Media: Detonation Nation

... I even liked the joe's nyc picture ... which i almost never do:
West 29th St, 9/19/2006

And this story about this Nancy Grace woman is crazy ... I always seem to catch her show while watching TV on JetBlue ... and its always nauseating.

gearing up for winter

... and loving the new APC stuff:
http://www.apc.fr/us/en/homme.php?camp=6

how now chow chow

wow, I'm somehow just finding out about this now. Big news. Chowhound acquired by cnet. Finally some decent software running the site. Hopefully at no sacrifice to the quality.

info on the chowhound faq

NYTimes.com covers the story (archived)

and probably most informative of all, professor salt interviews founder Jim Leff

bush today

El Pres on Today with Matt Lauer, looking totally nuts.

[Update: link fixed. Thanks James!]

pure potential project

Love this idea:

Jonathan Safran Foer collected emtpy sheets of paper from a group of writers, building "a museum of pure potential".

Love kottke.

Love all around.
(not so much love for JSF actually, but whatever -- still a good idea)

today's nytimes roundup

interesting interview with Richard L. Berke, Assistant Managing Editor of the NY Times
... about the role of editors in journalism, etc.

an article about a book about the army and the draft. its by a conservative guy who at least claims to be attempting to have an honest, apolitical discussion about a very controversial issue:
What if They Gave a War and No One Showed Up?

"Living Design" ... From Aeron to Airstream, Things That Work
I'm kind of sick of all this talk about design this, design that, design your life so everything will be sleek and modern and Ikea-looking ... bla bla bla
but this looks interesting.

more shit to make you want to go party:
all about MisShapes

annd, a little real news,
Judge Says Hussein Was No Dictator
The whole trial of Saddam is so bizarre. How can you put a political leader on trial? Sadam is on trial for killing 50,000 Kurds? That is an awful heinus crime, but what about Darfur? There is a real genocide no one seems to care about. And what about the 20,000+ people that have died as a result of George Bush's war? Were all those lives worth it to settle some score about 50,000 Kurds? It is such a joke.

lonely world no longer

All about lonelygirl15.

So everyone knows this was a fraud now ... but I still find the whole thing so compeltely fascinating. This is like the birth of a new medium. Kind of like how people say reality TV was born with MTV's Real World experiment (the first season of which I really liked actually) ... the difference here though is that its just dramatically reducing overheard and barriers to entry to distribution for content creators. ... I'm looking forward to this new era of totally distributed content creation.

Virginia Hefernan's nytimes.com blog pretty much covers the story, with a collection of good links.

Also, wikipedia has a pretty thorough explanation with alot of background more links.

So now you know.

diebold voting machine hack demonstration

from OVC:

As you may know -- reported on CNN last month -- we have a Diebold TS paperless Direct Record Electronic (DRE) voting machine. We learned today that a group at Princeton has the same make and model. They have produced an elegant hack showing how votes could be stolen on such a system.

They developed working demonstrations of attacks that could be introduced and spread without detection. This is devastating news to die-hard supporters of Diebold paperless systems. Watch the video here. It's great!

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/

But such a hack requires some insider help. Officials always dismiss the threat of insider attacks. OVC founding member and contributor, Charlie Strauss, passed along this information today:

... the same [Department of Justice] Report noted that a total of
1,213 public officials had been federally charged with corruption
in 2004, that 1,020 of them had been convicted of corruption, and
that 419 cases remained pending. In other words, according to
the DOJ's own findings, the problem of corruption among public
officials is at the very least ten times worse than the problem of
citizens cheating in elections.

So when they say "trust us," remember that the machines they're talking about have proven untrustworthy and government officials are freqently untrustworthy too.

Read the rest here:
http://www.votetrustusa.org/index.php

more on electronic voting

NOW segment on PBS about electronic voting (in)security:
http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/236/index.html

Real Suri Pics!!@!@

you guys have got to check this out:
http://www.biopark.org/peru/iquitos3a.html

Suri looks really apetizing! [PDF]

buggin out

James sent me this "warm and fuzzy" birthday greeting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeNggIGSKH8

... which reminded me of this cheesy video I made a few weeks ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHKiyfc0jTs

... which, after re-watching, I realized was somewhat of a Steve Irwin parody. To which I now say: RIP, Crocodile Hunter. Fitting that you were stabbed to death in the heart by one of the creatures you loved so much.