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Enjoyed Recommended

The Disqus Challenge

Last night, I conducted a small experiment: I switched the internal Movable Type commenting system for Disqus.

For background: leaving feedback on my blog, I’ve been told repeatedly, has been too difficult and too cumbersome, and so my rate of feedback has plummeted greatly. This has been caused by a chain of inconveniences:

  1. Years ago, I became fed up with blog spam and wished to have no part of it, and shut off anonymous comments. This is a huge wall for people wishing to leave feedback.
  2. Movable Type’s login methods are largely grounded in a Javascript wrapper that can be finicky.
  3. The types of authentication supported – LiveJournal, TypeKey, OpenID – are not nearly as popular as, say, Facebook or Twitter.
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Best Of Enjoyed Narrated

You Made Me Realize: APW 2009

This is mud. Three hours of heavy rain shortly after the start of the festival combined with a not insignificant number of feet walking across the grounds combined with the frequent animal visitors to the park (geese / dogs / feral cats / et cetera) yield a unique mud blend that is extremely slick yet sticky and also heavily smells of shit. While the texture will threaten to cause you both to slip and to be stuck, this is temporary and location based. The smell will burn your nostrils for the duration of the festival no matter where you are positioned.

This is how you discover your new favorite band, later.

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Enjoyed

Things I Learned While Eating Poutine With Pat Kiernan

Poutine with Pat Kiernan at Pomme Frites

Friday evening , I got to meet NYC’s favorite morning news anchor, Pat Kiernan, over poutine. If you’re looking for some sort of a reason why, follow these links in order. Longtime readers may remember my professed love from 2004, which did not go unnoticed. The group of six – three “winners”, two Gothamist staff, and Pat – spent two hours talking about practically everything. A condensed list of things worth mentioning:

* Poutine is a “delicacy” of Eastern Canada; Pat, being from Calgary and Edmonton prior to moving to NYC, has no particular attachment to the dish.
* Pat began working for TimeWarner at Pathfinder, which may have been one of the first major dotcoms to implode in the mid-90s. Pat’s primary project on the site – the Fortune Business Report – was brought to NY1, where it still regularly airs.
* Because Pat’s Papers hadn’t quite launched yet when I posted about it, I appear to have given Pat’s Papers its first inbound link, which caused it to finally appear in Google’s search results.
* The sleep schedule of someone who has to be in to work at 4AM can only be described as a meticulous science.
* I actually like poutine. I always find chili overpowering on fries, but a splash of gravy works pretty well. The cheese curds also give you a little more control over the cheese/potato ratio than standard cheese fries. That said, the bottom of the cup does get kind of congealed.

Possibly the world's first 'poutine toast'.

Gothamist has more.

(Photos in this post mostly taken by Tien Mao.)