“David Letterman has secured a deal with the striking Writers Guild of America that will allow him to resume his late-night show on CBS next Wednesday with his team of writers on board…”
Most of the late-night comedy shows are going back on the air January 2, however CBS will be the only one with writers. I still can’t fathom how John Stewart and Stephen Colbert are going to cope without their writing staff – my fear is that both shows will be slightly more awkward versions of Charlie Rose, (if that’s possible), with better production values.
Kudos to Dave’s negotiators, and let’s hope that the bigger companies step forward and offer to work out something reasonable as well.
UPDATE: Dave kept the beard! This photo is from the taping of his January 2 show.
December 22 came and went, and now I’m 30 years old. I can’t even comprehend that statistic. Growing up, I figured that I would have accomplished so much by that age – it seemed so far away. Today, 40 seems ridiculously far away. There is probably some kind of lesson in that.
The Mitchell Report was released today, confirming what everybody already knows – baseball players use performance enhancing drugs. It is interesting to note that while no prominent current Red Sox players are listed, more than a dozen Yankees, past and present, were among the 80-plus players identified.
It was announced yesterday that Google Maps’ Street Viewcomes to more cities, including Boston. So naturally, I looked up our previous apartment in Cambridge, MA. The weird thing is that myself, and our friends/upstairs neighbors Tyler and Sarah are pictured!
We’re having our moving sale, and that’s my Saab in the foreground. I can probably peg the date taken to August 11th or 12th, 2007 – the weekend before we moved.
Click the photo to see notes, look at it big, or check it out on Google Maps yourself. I am a little creeped out.
If you like photos, Flickr, and OS X, and don’t know about FlickrExport, then shame on you. It’s a nice little plugin that will let you easily export photos from iPhoto to Flickr. It converts your assigned iPhoto keywords to Flickr tags, enables you to add titles and descriptions, and choose to either add the photos to a new set, an existing set, or none at all – all within the dialog window.
The one rub is that it is made by an independent developer, Fraser Speirs, who has to feed his family – so, he charges about $25. A nominal price for something that has saved me hundreds of hours, and enriched my Flickr experience.
I’ve been playing around with the new Google Chart API, released earlier today. The API enables easy creation of charts, dynamically:
The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.
My example is shown below. I can think of a lot more convenient methods of creating graphs, especially when chartable data is usually already in Excel or Numbers spreadsheets. Still, pretty fun to play around with – check out what Brian Suda makes of it, on 24ways.
This past Sunday, we attended the Banksy opening at the Vanina Holasek Gallery in Chelsea. I love Banksy’s work, but it seemed a little odd to see his stenciled work framed and matted in a gallery, with penciled-in price tags labeled on the wall – $30k, $60k, $150k. It seemed a far cry from the street art and subversive work that he’s known for.
Still, he’s one of the more interesting contemporary artists out there – Lauren Collins has a nice profile piece, from The New Yorker in May. And, I love his album artwork for Blur’s last LP, in 2003.
More photos, and a video of Banksy’s subversive museum activity below the fold.
Drew McLellan kicks off the web community’s advent calendar 24ways.org, tackling a method for alpha-transparent PNG support in IE6.
When I find some time, I’ll look into making this site a little more consistent in IE6. They’ve also got a nice archive, from previous holiday seasons.
UPDATE: Dave kept the beard! This photo is from the taping of his January 2 show.
