Noise Between Stations

Month: August 2000

  • The Favorite Poem Project. A wonderful idea, to record Americans reading their favorite poems.


    Lately I’ve been reading Pablo Neruda’s beautiful Memoirs and also thinking about how web sites might be different if we looked to writers, to poets, to provide the beauty instead of visual designers.


    I’m grateful to my cable modem, flickering away, bringing me video tape of people expressing the stuff of their lives and the words that touch them.

  • Flag Education & Etiquette…an example of early branding guidelines?

  • The ultimate in exhibitionism? The Icepick House has cameras and sensors and stuff everywhere tied into the web site. The data is fascinating (though I don’t think I would make it all public).


    I particularly like the Cattracker where you get to watch the cats eat. Interestingly enough the bar chart tracking eating events by hour parallels the toilet flushing chart. Coincidence?

  • World’s First Armed Roboguard:
    “The robot is equipped with a camera and sensors that track movement and heat. It is armed with a pistol that can be programmed to shoot automatically or wait for a fire order delivered with a password from anywhere through the Internet”


    Skeptics say, “The apparent goal here is to make remote firepower available on-the-spot from around the Internet, which means insecure clients everywhere. How long will it take for one of these passwords to be leaked via a keyboard capture, or a browser bug? Slowly, we’re bringing the risks of online banking to projectile weaponry.”


    Somehow I’m not surprised this is coming out of Thailand.

  • Great mission, published papers, and work from SustainAbility, who strives to:


    …help create a more sustainable world by encouraging the evolution and widespread adoption of thinking and practices which are socially responsible, environmentally sound, and economically viable – satisfying the ‘triple-bottom line of sustainable development’.

    I love the triple-bottom line idea, and I’m working it into a business plan I’m preparing.

  • Just ordered a pair of custom made sneakers, designed by me, at Customatix. Maybe I’ll write an epinion once they arrive, but the process was pretty cool. As is the custom with hipster sites, the browser requirements are high and download time is just above acceptable over a cable modem. Pros:

  • I’m psyched that they have a proactive stance toward their Asian labor force
  • They donate some profits to charity
  • Money saved by cutting out retailers is said to be invested in better materials
  • There were about 16 different configurable options on the pair of sneakers I ordered, way more than I expected.

  • Interesting story on Intuition. Highlights:

  • “Experienced decision makers see a different world than novices do,” concludes Klein. “And what they see tells them what they should do. Ultimately, intuition is all about perception. The formal rules of decision making are almost incidental.”
  • “We used to think that experts carefully deliberate the merits of each course of action, whereas novices impulsively jump at the first option,” says Klein. But his team concluded that the reverse is true. “It’s the novices who must compare different approaches to solving a problem. Experts come up with a plan and then rapidly assess whether it will work. They move fast because they do less.”
  • The best decision makers that Klein has seen are wildland firefighters, who are force-fed a constant diet of forest fires…and rapidly build a base of experience. And they are relentless about learning from experience. After every major fire, the command team runs a feedback session, reviews its performance, and then seeks out new lessons.
  • “We sometimes think that experts are weighed down by information, by facts, by memories — that they make decisions slowly because they must search through so much data. But in fact, we’ve got it backward. The accumulation of experience does not weigh people down — it lightens them up. It makes them fast.”

  • Seems like one of the biggest invasions of privacy is the white pages in the phone book. Let me see if I get this straight: I buy a service from the phone company and this allows them to publish my address and phone number and distribute it to everyone in the county, and if I don’t want my name listed I have to pay an extra fee. Imagine if Internet service providers did this???

  • One of the authors of the Gnutella report below writes back: “…In the Napster case, users lie about their bandwidth rates to deter users from
    connecting to them    …” Very sneaky, and kinda stupid too. What kind of machine/connection are you sitting on that you don’t mind using as a Napster client but don’t want to use as the occasional server?

  • A Xerox study finds that gnutella users are taking more than they’re giving. I think there may be a usability lesson to be learned here. Personally I’m still not sure if Napster/Macster/Gnutella has to be running for others to download files from my computer, or if there are extensions or whatever that do that in the background (on reflection I realize that’s probably not the case, but I have an IT background, so I’m assuming most people have no idea). In the report, “the researchers…thought they had surveyed a substantial portion of the network.” So what they reported what based on statistics, not user behavior, though the conclusion that people “are not sharing” sounds like an accusation against people’s behavior.


    Incidentally this was on my mind recently regarding all sorts of free resources on the Net, whether source code or guitar tabulature or MP3s. Historically I consumed a lot of stuff from others for years and years without giving. Recently when my girlfriend was wondering why people create weblogs I gave it more thought and realized my web site is a little way I can offer up what I’ve learned to others, and I feel so much better.

  • Deepleap is closing down. Sad. It’s not often I wish Microsoft would buy up a company and integrate the technology, but that would have been a nicer ending in this case.

  • Just read that Blogger’s going down for maintenance…Blogging against the clock!


    In my love/hate relationship with New York City it’s been mostly love lately. After seeing a bunch of co-workers from other countries tour the city I see it with new eyes.


    Tonight as I walked north through SoHo and the West Village there are tons of interesting people out, players around the chess tables in the thousand year old store on Thompson St., dogs of all descriptions being walked everywhere. I stop to get a haircut at this weird little barber shop with a strobe light in the window and a sign in the window that reads, “Watch batteries changed.” I figured the sign must have been left over from whatever the store was previously. As the barber finished up my cut a man walked in and said, “The guy in the smoke shop next door said you change watch batteries.” “Yes, please have seat…”


  • Courage




    Thomas Paine


  • Perseverence




    Harry S. Truman

  • The Feature, a hippish, smart mobile magazine thingy from Nokia. For some reason I look at it and think James Bond.