A Real TVGasm
Jan 26, ’06
10:27 AM
Wonder Showzen. Jackass. Punk’d. My Super Sweet 16. Beavis and Butthead. Laguna Beach. Gauntlet 2. Spongebob Squarepants. South Park. Drawn Together. Best of Comedy Central Stand-Up. South of Nowhere. Dora the Explorer. Zoey 101. And best of all, The A-Team.
All now available from the iTunes Music Store. There goes my bank account.
The Horror
Jan 25, ’06
5:11 PM
“User concerns mount over possible BlackBerry shutdown” – Macworld
“Life without a Blackberry? Users shudder to think” – Reuters
“Blackberry blackout threat leaves CEOs aghast” – Brocktown News
“Buy a goddamn Sidekick II already.” – Dan Dickinson
Far Above Cayuga’s Wat~1
Jan 25, ’06
5:03 PM
Cornell gets $25 million grant to build William H. Gates Hall, launching new home for computing and information science
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded $25 million to Cornell University to support the construction of the signature building for a planned information campus that will bring together the several units of the university’s Faculty of Computing and Information Science (CIS).
The new building, to house the Department of Computer Science and elements of the Information Science Program, will be named William H. Gates Hall. The Committee on Alumni Affairs and Development of the Cornell Board of Trustees approved the building’s name at its meeting in New York City, Jan. 20.
According to Kenneth Birman, professor of computer science and chair of the CIS building committee, the information campus project is still in the feasibility study stage. Gates Hall is estimated at 100,000 square feet and projected to cost about $50 million. Expanded construction beyond the signature building is planned, based on support from Cornell and additional donors. When completed, the information campus will be a complex of linked buildings integrated with a variety of green spaces and common spaces designed to involve students and provide opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration.
About a dozen possible locations are being evaluated, Birman said. The proposal for the project calls for the information campus to be strategically located in proximity to the Colleges of Engineering and Arts and Sciences, the Life Sciences Technology Building and other key academic partners.
Gates Hall will house a lecture hall, faculty offices, classrooms, laboratories, student project spaces and conference rooms. The building will make innovative use of technology to foster collaboration both on and off campus, and it will include facilities specifically designed for CIS researchers whose primary offices might be elsewhere on the campus. As in Duffield Hall and the Life Sciences Technology Building, which is under construction, there will be formal and informal meeting spaces to foster “intellectual collisions” and cross-pollination.
I love that “intellectual collisions” is in quotes while cross-pollination is not. Also, I can’t wait to see where the hell they find 100,000 square feet of space on campus.
End alumni griping!
(thanks to Dad for the link)
75×75
Jan 23, ’06
11:08 AM
From LA.Foodblogging, via A Hamburger Today; the In-N-Out 75×75.
How bad is it that I’m now ridiculously hungry?
A Music Geek Holy Shit Moment
Jan 20, ’06
10:13 PM
I’ve always been interested in the intersection between pure music and pure technology – perhaps this explains my music game fixation, or the mashup addiction.
So when I saw a picture of Kid Beyond giving a demo of Ableton Live at NAMM, I had to ask my former roommate and resident DJ expert Dave Cross (not the comedian!) what he knew about it. He had, after all, been telling me how much he loved Live not a few days beforehand.
Timely as ever, he linked me to a video of the same sort of demo, also given by Kid Beyond. It is fucking unreal. It’s turned me into some sort of stuttering fool who can only say things like “The beatbox…loops…foot pedal…holy SHIT”.
If you’re any sort of geek who’s into music technology, you MUST see this.
Kathryn Yu vs. Ticketmaster
Jan 19, ’06
9:51 PM
My friend, Kathryn Yu, had a photo ripped off by Ticketmaster.
I can only hope that there is some justice in the world.
Lynchian
Jan 19, ’06
9:10 PM
“An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term “refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s definable only ostensively – i.e., we know it when we see it. Ted Bundy wasn’t particularly Lynchian, but good old Jeffrey Dahmer, with his victim’s various anatomies neatly separated and stored in his fridge alongside his chocolate milk and Shedd Spread, was thoroughgoingly Lynchian. A recent homicide in Boston, where the deacon of a South Shore church gave chase to a vehicle that had cut him off, forced the car off the road, and shot the driver with a high-powered crossbow, was borderline-Lynchian.
A domestic-type homicide, on the other hand, could fall on various points along the continuum of Lynchianism. Some guy killing his wife in and of itself doesn’t have much of a Lynchian tang to it, though if it turns out the guy killed his wife over something like a persistent failure to refill the ice-cube tray after taking the last ice cube or an obdurate refusal to buy the particular brand of peanut butter the guy was devoted to, the homicide could be described as having Lynchian elements. And if the guy, sitting over the mutilated corpse of his wife (whose retrograde ’50s bouffant is, however, weirdly unmussed) with the first cops on the scene as they all wait for the boys from Homicide and the M.E.’s office, begins defending his actions by giving an involved analysis of the comparative merits of Jif and Skippy, and if the beat cops, however repelled by the carnage on the floor, have to admit that the guy’s got a point, that if you’ve developed a sophisticated peanut-butter palate and that palate prefers Jif there’s simply no way Skippy’s going to be anything like an acceptable facsimile, and that a wife who fails repeatedly to grasp the importance of Jif is making some very significant and troubling statements about her empathy for and commitment to the sacrament of marriage as a bond between two bodies, minds, spirits, and palates…you get the idea.”
(from David Foster Wallace’s fantastic 1997 compilation A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again)
I discovered something strange today, and it’s made me curious.
Another Flickr Collision
Jan 14, ’06
9:56 PM
Back during WWDC, I wrote a post about Flickr and it’s habit of causing real-world collisions, spurred by a post from Buzz Anderson. So: I use del.icio.us, a wonderful social bookmarking app. Part of the functionality is that I can subscribe to bookmarks from people I trust or on subjects I’m interested in. Today, while riding the subway, I checked my inbox, and the top link was from Buzz:
Cool Cyber Dude on Flickr - Photo Sharing! This guy should win a Macworld Best of Show. Bobby and I have seriously been on the floor laughing for about five minutes after seeing this photo... to macworld photo humor virtualreality by ldandersen ... labeled as Online ... on 2006-01-13 07:56:08
Now, I’ve been to my Apple expos before, and I know the type that ends up in shots like these. And so, just reading this, I can only imagine what I’m in for while my Sidekick tries to load the photo. Certainly this would have to contain more than the standard geek t-shirt and possibly even more than the Apple dyed hair and/or tattoo that’s become commonplace over the last few years. This would have to be a truly unique geek to get someone like Buzz on the floor laughing for five minutes.
It loads. I looked. And then I died – not of laughter, but some weird mortified-and-aware-of-the-collision way.
It was, of course, a picture of my boss.
Adding to further the collision: the picture was taken by Mike Merill – who I’ve been bouncing email with because he works for Panic and was involved in getting me my Katamari shirts.
World! Too! Small!
Getting Rid Of The iTunes 6.0.2 Ministore
Jan 10, ’06
3:11 PM
The recently released iTunes 6.0.2 release adds a new obnoxious “ministore” to the bottom of your windows.
If you want it gone, look under the Edit menu -
Or, on a Mac, just press Shift-Command-M.