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End Of An Era

By Brian Filed in Blogs Tagged with , , , , , August 31st, 2011 @ 11:32 am

One of the earliest and best-known original blogs, Jim Romanesko’s “Obscure Store And Reading Room”, is being retired at the end of this week after thirteen years. Romanesko is also giving up his gig blogging for the professional journalism industry website Poynter.org (which *will* remain running). He isn’t giving up blogging, he’s consolidating into a single new site, but the end of Obscure Store is genuinely a milestone in the world of blogging.

I have been a regular reader of the site since the fall of 2000, not long after I launched this website and realized I needed to find some sources if I was going to find things to post with any regularity. From the outset, Romanesko was tuned into enough newspapers and news organizations to have plenty of links to weird news stories, when most of us were still figuring out the whole idea of using the Internet to get and share news. As my blog evolved, I found plenty of other places to find stuff and didn’t very often use his links, but I read it virtually every day. In the olden days, he also had an extremely eclectic blogroll, linking to online zines, other blogs, and unusual websites. A lot of those sites are long since gone and completely forgotten, but it is via Obscure Store that I first came upon MetaFilter, which was also only about a year old in the fall of 2000. Eleven years later, that site remains one of the premiere community sites on the web and is one of my main hangouts online. I believe I also “discovered” FARK through Obscure Store, and the very-much-missed Grow-a-brain.

I’ll be very interested to see how Jim Romanesko’s new site develops, but I will unquestionably miss one of the real legends of the Golden Age of Blogs.

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Can’t Brain, I’ve Got The Old

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc, Tech Tagged with , , , , , , July 11th, 2011 @ 11:47 am

So, I was sucked in by the headline on this Boston.com story about “Digital Dinosaurs”. I spend a lot of time helping elderly people with their computers and it has been a very educational and enlightening experience seeing how they do and do not interact with technology. But the “geezers” in this article are 40-somethings! MILFy suburban soccer moms! I’m trying to decide how the young-vs-old meme shifted this far south, especially since the population skews older and older every day, much to the delight of FOX News and the Tea Party. What happened to “60 is the new 40″? Having said that, my personal indignation notwithstanding, I realized that the notion that there are so many people in my own age group who are still very clueless about technology and the online world is actually pretty remarkable. I just don’t like the “too old to use Twitter” angle; it’s not about old at all, it’s about smart.

Then there was this blog post by a UX designer about an encounter he had with a 60-something man who had somehow never really used a computer, and what insights it gave the designer about how badly computer interfaces are designed. I found it via this MetaFilter post, which has an awful lot of “ha-ha old people and computers” comments, but I think a lot of those people missed the point of the article that the guy’s age wasn’t the factor in his difficulty, it was his lack of experience and no grasp of the context of 25 years of software development. He actually demonstrates a basic problem-solving ability that proves he has the smarts, he’s just presented with a totally foreign scenario. Even somebody much younger would have to scramble to develop a working process to accomplish a task in a totally unknown environment.

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Where Seldom..Often Is Heard A Discouraging Word

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc, News Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , May 26th, 2011 @ 11:37 am

Twenty-eight percent of American homes are “underwater” in value, according to real estate website Zillow.com.

Even the crap they make in China isn’t going to be cheap for much longer as wages for Chinese workers begin to rise. How long before the capitalists abandon China and move all their factories to Africa?

One of the most evocative explanations of wealth inequality I have ever read:

Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.

The hypocrisy of Western foreign policy: Libya 2010 vs Libya 2011

Congress has authorized the President to go to war against anyone, anywhere, for any reason forever. Dennis Kucinich is one of the few members of Congress who opposes the measure. Oh, and the Senate is slated to re-authorize the PATRIOT Act today, with the only voice of opposition being Teabagger Rand Paul.

It’s not your imagination: Facebook is deliberately designed for morons.

Niemoller revisited:

First, they came for the manufacturing workers, but I didn’t speak out for them, cos jeez, I was, what, three years old at the time? Something to do with Reagan I heard, and those guys were unionised bums anyway, making America un-competitive, they deserved to lose their jobs.

Then they came for the call centre jobs, but I didn’t speak out for them because, hey, I was in high school, and sure it was irritating for my Mom and Dad when they were trying to get something done over the phone and the guy was following some jackass script, but hey – lower premiums!

Then they came for the service jobs, but I didn’t speak out for them because I was in college, I was studying hard and anyway it was pretty neat to be ab le to order at the drive-in around the corner from Yale and have my order taken by some guy in Buttfuck, Idaho who used to be a farmer or a machinist or some shit like that.

Then, they came for the software and publishing and insurance and project management jobs and I didn’t speak out because man, I’m so glad I went for a really high-value career like law, I mean, can you imagine if I’d done a liberal arts degree? These loans will be worth it in the end when all those sociology and English grads are serving me lattes.

Finally, they came for the law jobs and they used software and they moved everybody to Omaha to save on rent, and nobody spoke for me, because, y’know, everybody just wants to keep their jobs man, who’s going to cry for an Ivy League guy who can’t get a job?

— MetaFilter contributor “HappyDave”

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The Occasional Food Post

By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , December 20th, 2010 @ 11:11 am

If It’s Not Scots, It’s CRAP!! — Scottish food importer Great Scot International recently announced plans to begin selling haggis-flavored potato chips here in the U.S. The chips are made by a British ice cream maker looking to expand into the snack category by launching a handful of “Scottish flavors” including Scotch Bonnet Chili Pepper (hmm…), and Aberdeen Angus (beef flavor). Apparently it’s the number one selling potato chip in Scotland, but that was to be expected in the first place.

Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection recently pointed to this TED Talk video featuring Dutch agricultural specialist Marcel Dicke, who explains why Westerners should learn to eat more insects as a source of protein. The ultimate reason is a no brainer:

The main reason that we should eat insects is that “we will have to.”

Okay, but if they come in haggis flavor, I might have to think twice about it.

Serious Eats editor and chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt offered a counter-argument to the widespread belief that the production of foie gras is cruel with this piece about a tour he took of one of the three farms in the U.S. that produce foie gras. It’s generated a lot of controversy as both sides of the debate have used it as a touchstone for their arguments; I thought MetaFilter’s thread about the piece did a very good job of highlighting the arguments, as well as both the strengths and weaknesses of Lopez-Alt’s article.

As a sidebar to that, just to give you a sense of the inherent cruelty in all industrialized meat processing, and to highlight how wrong things can go, please read this Atlantic.com food blog post about reported animal abuse at Smithfield Foods pork processing facilities.

Looking backward for a moment, John Ptak dug up an old advert for Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire Sauce that inspired him to consider the evolution of the humble hamburger in the pantheon of American cuisine. The ad, which he dates to 1956, comes from a time, he says, when the hamburger was not yet quite the icon of food that it would become, but even now it holds on to its origins as inexpensive, everyday fare.

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Random Linkage

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , , , August 5th, 2010 @ 1:32 pm

Here’s a handful of things I wanted to share with you that didn’t seem to fit into posts of their own:

Everybody’s linking to Christopher Hitchens’ article in the newest issue of Vanity Fair wherein he talks a little bit about his recent diagnosis of esophageal cancer. I think it’s pretty impossible not to have a love-hate thing about Christopher Hitchens, because he manages to hold extremely contrasting opinions on a variety of subjects and argues his case so vehemently regardless of the side he’s on, but anytime someone has to come to terms with the suddenness of their own mortality and can do so in such an honest and unflinching way, it deserves to be appreciated. Additionally, you might want to read Hitchens’ Slate piece about confronting his lifelong issues with alcohol that came out just before he learned that he had cancer.

In a similar vein, I liked this interview with Penn Jillette in the June Vanity Fair. No, there’s nothing wrong with Jillette, but he’s cut from the same iconoclastic cloth as Hitchens and is equally able to hold his own passionately on sometimes diametrically opposing ideas.

Here’s a good article from Esquire by writer Chris Jones about a fellow named Terry Kniess, who appeared as a contestant on “The Price Is Right” in 2008 and was the first person since 1972 to guess the price of his showcase exactly correct down to the last dollar. Even as it was happening, the show’s producers were sure Kniess was cheating, but they couldn’t prove it right away. Eventually they came up with some clues…but you need to read the story to get the whole thing. Additionally, I recommend this MetaFilter post from the time when the episode aired, which includes a lot of discussion and some other related links that help flesh out the whole affair.

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How To Be A Ho

By Brian Filed in Blogs Tagged with , , , , , March 13th, 2008 @ 1:53 pm

No, this has nothing to do with Eliot Spitzer and “Kristen”, it’s about that other kind of whore: bloggers.

The other day, Mark at Going Like Sixty clued me in to this list of “The 50 Most Powerful Blogs” that appeared in the Manchester Observer (the Sunday companion paper to The Guardian) last weekend. Unsurprisingly, it also turned up yesterday for the requisite dose of snark and derision at MetaFilter.

Mark said that he only reads one of those fifty on a regular basis; I count six of them on my daily blogcrawl (and, yes, one of them IS “I Can Has Cheezburger”, thank you for asking) and another one that is a frequent-but-not-daily stop (Huffington Post). But I have close to 150 feeds in my RSS reader, so it’s fair to say that my net casts out far and wide beyond the biggest fish.

The MetaFilter crowd was a bit huffy about not making that list, even though lists like these should in now way be confused with reality, but I don’t know if this is a list anyone wants to be on. Are we really supposed to believe that “I Can Has Cheezburger” is 1) powerful and b) more powerful than “The Drudge Report”, which almost brought down Bill Clinton’s presidency? And if online gossip websites like PerezHilton and TMZ are “powerful”, then maybe I’ve been underestimating just how doomed civilization really is. It doesn’t help that the article doesn’t tell you what it means by powerful; do they mean these sites have the most visitors, that they generate the most revenue for their advertisers, or that they sway public discourse in some important way? Again, if that third one is true, it means that silly cat pictures with bad spelling and grammar have become the Bible and the Communist Manifesto for the 21st Century. Let that sink in for a moment.

People have been ranking and rating blogs in a myriad of ways for almost as long as we old-timers have been blogging. So this particular article is decidedly old hash warmed through and shouldn’t affect anyone’s reading anymore than the Bloggie Awards or the circle-jerk they call SXSW. On Boing Boing (#2 on this list), Cory Doctorow, the Busiest Man On The Internet, was egotistical kind enough to link to his own article at Information Week wherein he pontificates on how you, too, can be as elite, famous, and good-looking as he is. (Hint to all those SEO bloggers out there, it has NOTHING to do with you)

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