Yeah, not so much for their editorial slant, really, but they have very prominently placed a great number of direct RSS feeds. Wish the Olympian was as good in that regard, but at least, and certainly not ideal, the Olympian is a source for Google news, so one can search past articles. For example, try this search: Katherine Tam articles, sorted by date, and maybe subscribe to it as either RSS/Atom or via an e-mail alert. It’s also too bad that old articles have to be purchased to get access online at the Olympian, but that’s another complaint.
Of course, now that I look at them, I would be much happier about the News Tribune’s RSS feeds if they were full text, so let me revise and offer muted kudos, which is better than none, I suppose.
On the other hand, they are specifically friendly about blogs on that page:
We encourage the use of thenewstribune.com RSS feeds for personal use in a news reader or as part of a non-commercial Web site or blog.
This is especially important in relation to some other papers that might be pursuing an institutional policy against bloggers:
The reason The Washington Post is on the attack is that they see their influence waning and are desperate to tear down the credibility of the blogosphere.
So, now I try to call the Good Guys, and their number has been changed to an 800 number. Instead, I go to the website and find that:
After more than 30 years of providing the best in high-end entertainment products, along with unmatched service and support, our freestanding stores are closing, and the Good Guys web site is no longer available for transactions.
They’re expanding some CompUSA locations. I wonder if the Oly store is going to convert, or if there’s a CompUSA moving into the West Olympia Mall now? Seems like Best Buy would have been smart to negotiate a non-compete clause when they moved into the mall.
I’m having a strong memory of the closure of all the Computer City locations back in the day.
Today, I realized, as I turned on the TV and found myself seeing a fight on Jerry Springer, that while fights on that show have me in a state of despair for humanity; I don’t seem to have the same reaction to hockey that breaks out at during a fight at the ice rink.
I wanted to call the local Best Buy to see if they had replacement Tivo remotes in stock. So, I dial the number and get their voice system. I say that I am interested in talking to someone in a department. I select the TV, Video and other products department. Then, I am given three choices without a useful choice related to my particular product, or zero to hear the list again. As I’m thinking, the voice says, “Exiting the system. Good bye.”
And then it hangs up.
I selected through at least 3 levels of the system, and yet it exits if I don’t make the next choice quickly. That’s an obnoxiously unforgiving and rude design choice someone made.
They’ve automated a process by which they hang up on potential customers. I mean, sure, score one for efficiency, I suppose. Just another example of how efficiency is not a very helpful design goal.
So, am I motivated to get my coat and go see if they are in stock? No. Am I motivated to now use the website instead? Actually, no, I’m even less likely to use their website now.
They have efficiently made sure that I would rather order the item I wanted directly from the manufacturer or, at the least from some other retail store. Further, even if I found that they were cheaper, I am now willing to spend more just so that I do not shop at their store.
Interestingly, they are likely completely oblivious to the fact that they’ve lost a customer. I’ll show up on some voice system metric as a disconnected call, but it will probably signify nothing to them. They’ve managed to obliviously and efficiently alienate a customer.
I was going through a box and found some CD-ROMs of old NeXT software. On a lark, I thought I would stick one in and see what happened. Well, Mac OS X recognized the app, gave it an icon, but with an overlay.
Starting up the application offers that the application cannot open because it is not supported on “this architecture” so that begs a very interesting question. The original architecture for the NeXT cubes and slabs was old motorola 68000 chips. The self-same motorola chips that Apple was using in their Mac II machines, which honestly boggled me at the time because of how much better the NeXT systems were when compared to the Mac II, in my experience.
However, most later applications offered fat binaries, essentially just the ‘app’ directory contained distinct compiled binaries for each architecture. Along with the motorola 68000 binaries, NeXT fat binaries often included PA-RISC and Intel.
So, do old NeXT apps for intel work on the new intel Mac OS X boxen?
For the most part it just wouldn’t matter, since the old apps are mostly curiosities now. The one app that I couldn’t live without was Diagram, but that has been replaced on my Mac by Omnigroup’s OmniGraffle, which for the longest time I called OmniGiraffe for some reason. In the back of my head, I do think about WordPerfect, although I doubt I’d use it, prefering to place my hope in some future native OpenOffice to replace Microsoft Office or if Apple keeps working on iWork. Of course, I also have InDesign, which I have yet to touch …
“The New York Times has an article on Paul Allen and his impact on Seattle via both his ownership of the Seahawks and his efforts to redesign South Lake Union and promote an entire new bioscience-based economy in that area.’ The writer, Timothy Egan, is of course using the hook of the exciting playoff game here tomorrow to talk about what Allen appears to be up to and the responses of the community to his efforts.’ The article talks about ‘Allen’s vision of a new-century city built around compact urban living and a biotech job engine that some officials suggest could one day rival that of the Boeing Company’.
I’m newly back to Seattle after many years in the Bay Area and I have been puzzled by the animosity that Paul Allen and the South Lake Union complex engenders here. He has already build a very cool sports stadium and a world-class museum.’ I like the idea that someone is planning ahead and seems to be focused on ‘building a new-century neighborhood, with green building principles and tight density, imagining a community of scientists who were never more than a few minutes stroll from their experiments.’”
The line between vision and social engineering is a bit ambiguous, I think, but it’s an important dialogue to have.
Interesting discussion about the south union bay property that Allen got when the Seattle Commons efforts failed because of the agreements made over the use of the money he gave to the project. Realistically, however, cities do the same kind of social engineering through zoning and infrastructure projects. At some level, it’s a vision of an area of Seattle that is in-city warehouses, primarily. There’s good reason to worry about gentrification of low income housing, but it’s a very poorly utilized area, in my experience. Another area that is mostly a wasteland is the area around boeing field, south of Sodo.
I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if Olympia could re-claim the land on which the Port sits. That’s an area with amazing potential. What if Olympia could do what Seattle couldn’t and create an Olympia Commons on the peninsula north of downtown? That would be something.
That sure would de-militarize the port. Although, it would likely move elsewhere and be less visible, and less of a catalyst to discussions about militarization. On some level, NIMBY just doesn’t promise to engender a dialogue, rather it becomes a kind of plausible deniability for those that don’t want to engage in the conversation. Which is better, really?
On some level, I wonder if it’s a mistake to buy west bay from the port. If the port moved to west bay, and the city reclaimed the peninsula, I think that would be better. The port could build a road along the old train track south that runs from west bay and route their trucks under the 4th ave bridge, away from downtown, and connect to I-5 and 101 there instead of via Plum.
I had a dream the other day that the Port moved out and the peninsula was reclaimed. There was a new high-speed ferry dock put in that linked from the city to Seattle. Also, the old rail bridge across the mouth of west bay was rebuilt as a pedestrian walkway to connect west bay to the peninsula. At some point in the dream that rebuilt bridge turned into a light rail that ran out to Evergreen on one end and south down capital in the other direction. I suppose there would also be a strong mass transit system running along the old 99 coming in from the direction of Lacey, linking to a branch that ran up the hill to west olympia.
Study: 100 vehicles found to switch spots throughout the day
BY KATHERINE TAM
THE OLYMPIAN
OLYMPIA – Free 90-minute downtown parking could be replaced with meters under an idea that soon will come before city officials.
The idea was first proposed years ago by members of the downtown association and the city’s parking advisory committee, made up of residents, has been studying the idea more recently.Committee members say the move would increase turnover so more shoppers can find parking spaces. And it would drive store employees into leased parking instead of spending the day moving their cars from one free space to another, when those slots are meant for customers.
…”
Wow. That was quick. I was pretty sure that the parking garage would end up costing the city enough to make it necessary to drop free parking, but this was pretty fast that changes are being made.
When the city is obligated to pay for the garage through parking fees and fines, money which is used for other purposes now, they will be more inclined to reduce free parking, and may end up being forced to be more and more aggressive with fines.
How does getting rid of free parking help make downtown more friendly? It doesn’t. It’s not about making it more friendly for everyone.
Downtown shouldn’t become just another mall, should it? Well, it won’t because the parking won’t be free anymore, but it’ll be close … however, watch for parking validation schemes to be introduced.
I’ve long thought one component to revitalizing downtown Olympia is the same for just about every town that felt the impact of I-5. The old 99 corridor should become the showcase for a modern and forward-looking mass transit re-design.
Intel, the maker of computer chips, has two design teams. One team works on the next chip while the other works on the chip after the next chip.
There should be two transit design plans. One for a complete and forward-looking re-design of the old 99 corridor, which will revitalize all the old main streets that practically died when I-5 was built, routing around them. The second design team should be working on what a complete I-5 redesign would look like when the 99 project is being implemented.
These two design groups would then leapfrog mass transit in the north-south corridor into the future.
It’s probably just a wild vision, but don’t we have so few of those wild visions anymore? Where are the multi-generational projects that offer hope for the future anyway? Who’s asking what their town or city will look like in 50 or 100 years, and acting on that now?
“Google Inc. is continuing to expand its advertising capabilities beyond the online world, agreeing to buy a company that automatically connects advertisers with radio stations. The price could top $1.2 billion.
The company, dMarc Broadcasting Inc. of Newport Beach, Calif., creates an automated platform that lets advertisers more easily schedule and deliver ads over radio and keep track of when they air. On the broadcaster side, the dMarc technology automatically schedules and places such advertising, helping stations minimize costs.”
Maybe not just so beyond the online world, if this also turns into an adsense for podcasting, yeah? Now, that would be something big.
“Despite the best attempts of the Republican Party and their good friends at the Washington Times, the Jack Abramoff scandal is owned, ‘lock, stock, and barrel’ by the GOP. Jack Abramoff has never ever, not one single time, given even a penny to a Democrat. Period.”
So many comments are being made about this. The thing that keeps coming to my mind is that they won’t make that mistake again. They’ll spread the blame and the money merely as a preventative measure, for tactical reasons. On one level it’s surprising that there wasn’t a defensive measure to mask the partisanship of the money, but maybe that’s a measure of the expectation of immunity from scrutiny. I doubt it will happen cleanly along party lines ever again, but I find myself doubting that it won’t happen again.
Following on earlier papercraft posts, here’s a paper model of Serenity the ship from Firefly and Serenity. Pretty amazing looking – even has a shuttle taking off.
Update: looks like the site got too popular. however, there appears to be another papercraft model of Serenity available at Paperworlds.
You look through this device at the night-time sky and it tells you what you’re looking at. Oh, it doesn’t need to be night, either.
Celestron is a famous maker of telescopes (I sold a truckload of their product in the Silicon Valley camera store I used to manage and they always made great products).
It has GPS, gravity, and magnetic field sensors to detect where it’s going.
But it just gets better from there. You can tell it ‘show me the cool stuff in the sky right now.’ It’ll take you on a tour and show you how to point the device with a series of LED’s in the viewfinder.
But it gets cooler than that. It has an audio guide that tells you what you’re looking at and gives you some facts about it.”
If this thing could be hacked to show arbitrary data about the world, it could be the mythic “urban spelunking” tool that Neil, Jason and I were dreaming about one day.
Say, you’re wandering around town, you look through this device at some building and it shows you “hidden” information that had been left by other people about that location in space. Notes could be left around anything in the ambient environment, viewed from any odd angle … a tagging folksonomy for the real world. Maybe even, somehow connected to concepts like Geocaching and some Google Earth API-based way to leave the notes.
I happened to hear tonight some really rotten electronic version of the 20th Century Fox fanfaire today. Is this the new fanfare they’ve decided on using for real? Horrid. It’s the casio version and not even cool enough to be 8-bit.
Someone (was it Williams, himself?) working on Star Wars resurrected the fancy, symphonic 20th Century Fox fanfare, and I’d heard it so often that I remember thinking at one point in my life that the fanfaire was actually part of the Star Wars theme.
If what I’ve heard is actually a permanent update, they really messed up.
A theatre group in Longview is putting up a production of Romeo & Juliet. Just as they start to move into the intense rehearsals before opening night, the actor playing Tybalt drops. Yikes!
Well, for whatever reason, and definitely flattering to me personally, my name came up as a possible replacement. Sure, they looked for people in the local community to take it up, but that my name came up at all is pretty darned cool.
I was browsing around, thinking about fan fiction writing within the Firefly / Serenity universe, and ended up on a website with an adaptation of Firefly to an very interesting roleplaying system called Risus: The Anything RPG by S. John Ross, who has an e-mail address at the old illuminati domain io.com … which is the kind of thing that not many people would think is as cool as I do. (Then again, I did score 47.14004% on a Geek Test.)
Risus is a very nice, quick and, in a good way, simple system. It reminds me of the feeling I had when reading the materials for Toon or Amber diceless game. One of the most compelling things about Toon is a built-in rule that if a player can manage to rationalize something in an entertaining way, that they should be allowed control outcomes. For Amber, the diceless aspect of the game allows for a straight-forward ranking of the characters based on their stats, such that a character might be the strongest, and therefore able to win in all contests of strenghth, another character might be smarter and therefore be able to outwit the first. No dice, just self-evident outcomes based on rankings.
The beauty of the systems I’ve mentioned, including Risus, is that they are minimal frameworks to help contain a collective storytelling experience. I find myself thinking that Risus might be a great way for an author to keep track of characters in their work, whatever kind of work that might be. It could be a nice shorthand for keeping character notes.
Additionally, there’s a whole, amusing intentional culture around the Risus system, with a special “Order” to which fans and customers of the Risus Companion can sign-up. The writing is humorous and the extensive use of stick figure illustrations add to the overall effect.
The simplicity of Risus reminds me of Andy Looney’s Fluxx or Peter Suber’s Nomic, especially in the primary rule, articulated by the author Ross, that “there is no wrong way to play.” A completely minimal set of Nomic rules consists of the rule that “All players must agree to the rules.” And the initial rule card of Fluxx is the entire rule set at the beginning of the game: start with three cards, and draw 1, play 1.
I guess the only thing left is to wonder if, somehow, Risus could be used to finally make a variation of Tafl that makes it fun to play and whether there’s a way to combine Risus and Icehouse Pyramids in a fun way.
As I’m reading the Risus Companion, I’m realizing that this is as fun as reading the old West End Paranoia books which has apparently been re-released by Mongoose Publishing.
The studios made films for theater chains that they either owned or controlled, and they harvested almost all their revenue from ticket sales. Then, in 1948, the government forced the studios to divest themselves of the theaters. Nowadays, the two are in very different businesses. Theater chains, in fact, are in three different businesses.
I was just reading some site and they used “biotch” in a sentence. I read that as “biotech” and was really thrown for a second. Now, I’m thinking it might be fun to use “biotech” instead of “biotch” in a sentence, for real.
“Don’t be such a biotech!”
Oh, that’s so retro-future. Could have been a line in the Max Headroom TV Show.
Musical instrument shops must pay an annual royalty to cover shoppers who perform a recognisable riff before they buy, thereby making a “public performance”.
It’s a good article following up on a posting to Boing Boing that really compares documents, and follows all the layers of trap that have been constructed around the content.
As insane as it is, the irresponsible suggestion that the technically inexperienced user should turn off any firewalls and enable activex on their box is not even close to being the most obnoxious and reprehensible part of this whole story.
The media companies are the conduit. They control the price at which the producers can sell their goods, because they are the actual purchaser. They also control the price at which the goods are sold to the consumer, because they are the publisher. They are a cartel of companies that believe they are in such a complete position of power that they can force the producers and consumers to both swallow any conditioning of the goods.
You can only introduce so much perversity into an economic system before distortions cripple it. From 2001 through 2005, consumer spending and residential construction had together accounted for 90 percent of the total growth in GDP, while over two-fifths of all private sector jobs created since 2001 were in housing-related sectors, such as construction, real estate and mortgage brokering. Much of the money spent did not really exist except as credit — incomes as yet unearned, hallucinated liquidity, wished-for wealth, all based on the expectation that house values would continue to rise at 10 to 20 percent a year forever.
Pretty depressing, but very interesting, especially in the comments about how the economic / energy crisis links to an American cultural mythic pattern:
This housing bubble economy represented, holistically speaking, the wish to maintain a sense of normality in American life, under conditions of disintegrating normality, and it is no symbolic accident that it centered on the images of hearth and home, because fundamental comforts were what many Americans actually stand to lose in a reality-based future.
“When Windows Metafiles were designed in late 1980s, a feature was included that allowed the image files to contain actual code. This code would be executed via a callback in special situations. This was not a bug; this was something which was needed at the time.
This function was designed to be called by Windows if a print job needed to be canceled during spooling.
This really means two things:
1) There are probably other vulnerable functions in WMF files in addition to SetAbortProc
2) This bug seems to affect all versions of Windows, starting from Windows 3.0 – shipped in 1990!
“The WMF vulnerability” probably affects more computers than any other security vulnerability, ever.”
A fundimental design flaw then, is it?
Back in the day, there were essentially no ways to infect NeXT machines. However, I remember having a conversation with someone I worked with that had worked with NeXT boxes longer than I had. Turns out that there was a way. The display system in NeXT was called Display Postscript. Postscript could contain executable code, and so it was possible to have a file, and image, that when viewed on a NeXT machine, would execute arbitrary code.
The display system in Mac OS X is essentially the same except that Adobe wanted to torpedo the display postscript, and so Apple went with, if I remember, essentially what could be called “display PDF” instead. I am not sure of PS files are still vulnerable to embedded code. I have vague memories that the issue was addressed in the past.
So, the flaw in WMF of having embedded executable code isn’t something that was only by design in WMF files. It appears that this design flaw was widely expected in graphic files that were to be used for printing graphics.
I wonder if the design flaw in WMF was developed to copy the postcript funtionality? I mean, would that not just be just? Instead of innovation in vulnerability, Microsoft may have even copied that from someone else, too.
And, some say that Open Source is all imitation of other people’s work?
