Now that I’m working full-time (more on that soon), I don’t have as much time to loll about and read everything that comes into my RSS reader. Rather than unsubscribing from all of the trivial stuff, why not create a “high priority” label in Google Reader, and apply it to the “can’t miss” feeds? Matt Wood explains this strategy on 43 Folders:
“If there were some feeds that I didn’t mind missing, and some of which I wanted to read every single word, I should organize them that way, not by their putative subject areas.”
Nothing wrong with keeping a long list of other labels, (sports, nyc, photos, etc.), but by adding this new label, it’s easy to prioritize the important feeds. Then, when I get time, I can catch up on Julia and Jakob.
This is why I love thanksgiving – invite some family and friends over, cook a ridiculous amount of food, crack open 7-8 bottles of wine, and go to town. Lisa has the right idea here:
For our first Brooklyn Thanksgiving, we invited Lisa’s sister Kelly, Rohit, Shane, and Megan, and it was amazingly fun. I am thankful that everyone could join us in our new home. I’m also thankful that Lisa is such a good cook, because it was so tasty.
In six years, Kenny’s vision has grown into a trio of charter schools under the rubric of Village Academies, located in New York precincts where a muscular poverty has thrived for generations. The numbers alone tell a compelling story. Locally, passing rates for seventh-grade math hover around 30 percent. At HVA, the rate is a stunning 96 percent.
In High School, I was always jealous of other kids who knew exactly what they wanted to do with their life – it took me until half-way through college before I really found my calling, which explains my liberal arts degree.
So, I’m amazed that there is a Design High School in the Lower East Side. It has a pretty interesting mission:
We believe that when students are engaged in the process of designing, they are learning to observe, seek problems, identify needs, frame problems, work collaboratively, explore and appreciate solutions, weigh alternatives, and communicate their ideas verbally, graphically and physically.
And they even invited artists, students, and staff to create streetart on the roof of the school. Here is a video, from Rocketboom:
MUJI opened in Soho yesterday, and if the crowds were any indication, people are excited. The shop has a nice mix of nicely designed inexpensive clothes and housewares. maxwellgillinghamryan has a video tour on vimeo.
More photos of MUJI, and the new CB2 store next door, after the jump. [from iPhone]
If you look in my iTunes library right now, you won’t find any U2. But, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have the entire back catalogue. The Joshua Tree was my first CD when I was a kid, I even have Under a Blood Red Sky on vinyl.
But, just because I don’t really listen to them anymore, doesn’t mean that I don’t get a little excited when something new U2 comes out. In advance of the re-release and remastered special edition of The Joshua Tree, the band has released a video on iLike’s Facebook app where Bono discusses an unreleased track included on the compilation.
U2 – “Wave of Sorrow”
The sentiment is moving, but man, I can’t believe the guy sings along to his own recording… as ever, Bono straddles the line between egomaniac and saint.
“The Wi-Fi HotZone, which is available today in certain areas, will be fully operational on by month’s end with a footprint of more than 20 city blocks from Times Square to Central Park South and from 6th Avenue to 8th Avenue.”
Holy iPhone grail! Who needs to wait for muni-Wi-Fi?
Letterman to pay employees through strike “Strike or not, employees of the ‘Late Show With David Letterman’ and the ‘The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson’ will be paid through year’s end.”
There were rumors that Jon Stewart was going to pay his writers through the WGA strike, which turned out to be false. While I’m sure that the Daily Show host sympathizes, he doesn’t have Letterman money.
Dave is already losing an estimated $600k a week in salary, and because he ownsthe Late Show, CBS has stopped paying his production company, Worldwide Pants. What’s interesting is that while Dave is shelling out for employees of Pants, much of the show’s technical staff are CBS employees, according to one blog:
These employees (at least in Los Angeles) have been on the street since day 1 of the strike. CBS does not want to pay them. They’re like the bastard child nobody wants to claim.
So, this thing goes on. Letterman is doing the right thing by his writers and staff – hopefully this thing will get resolved soon. In the meantime, the Late Show writers have a strike blog, and Ze Frank has returned to the really small screen to offer his thoughts: strike day, and strike #2.
A new Robert Scarano “luxury” condo building at 326 State Street, in Boerum Hill.
A week or two ago, I walked past a new Robert Scarano “luxury” condo building at 326 State Street, in the northern reaches of Boerum Hill. This past Saturday, Tyler and Sarah were down from Boston for a visit, and we walked by again – and they were having an Open House. Why not have a look? [from iPhone]
I finally managed to upgrade to Leopard (OS X 10.5), and overall it seems like a nice update. Time Machine is still doing its initial backup, but I can’t help getting a little excited by its superfluous animations… I know that I’m supposed to hate it, but who could fault Apple for making something so horribly boring, like backups, and inject a little fun?
One interesting little tidbit that I discovered, is that iPhone web apps make very nice Dashboard widgets. In about 10 seconds, I created a Web Clip in Safari of weather.com’s iPhone app. It provides a lot more information than the standard OS X Weather widget, and it looks nice.
Keep in mind that not all iPhone apps will work well for this – PocketTweets, for instance, will only load in Mobile Safari. And, because of the higher screen resolution on the iPhone, some apps’ font sizes might be too large to be of much use in the Dashboard. But, I think that this example illustrates nicely the power and simplicity of Web Clips in Leopard.
My only real gripes thus far are the translucent menu bar, and that Camino’s bookmarks bar looks like a franken-monster. I can’t seem to find a cure for this yet, but it’s not jarring enough to make me go back to Safari.
It’s friday – time to get ready for the weekend. I finally got around to getting the new The Go! Team album Proof of Youth, and it’s great. I’m loving the juxtaposition of hiphop, noisy guitars, and the multiculti lineup.
Here is a live video:
A short documentary on the band is below the fold.
I just noticed that boston.com launched a redesigned site, and it looks very nice. You can read the editor’s redesign note here.
The new look is much wider, open, and easier to read. The Globe page especially shines, though they could better distribute some of the paper’s content across the columns. (And, I wish that they’d ditch the awful curvy logo for something less whimsical.)
Some sections on the site remain unchanged for now – which, according to the redesign FAQ, was intentional:
Different features and sections of the site are scheduled to debut on different days. While we realize that this might be confusing in the short-term, we’ve studied our options carefully and believe that the gradual switch we have planned will ultimately result in a better user experience.
Err, or that was a lot to roll out at once. Still, great improvement.
They were cleaning the Broadway-Lafayette station last night. It always struck me as a particularly filthy station, so I suppose this is good. But, people were walking through the suds, slipping around – the MTA must have some good insurance. [from iPhone]
I’m doing a little house cleaning of this site’s RSS feeds. For a while, I was experimenting with splicing in del.icio.us and flickr content along side the weblog posts. Kind of like my own tumblr hyperblogging experiment, via RSS.
However, after thinking about it, I’ve decided to limit the main RSS feed to only weblog entries. It just makes sense, since a lot of my del.icio.us and flickr content is channelled into expanded weblog posts anyway. And, Ricky makes a persuasive case against what he calls hyperblogging. So, the default feed is now just what I put through Wordpress.
