Lisa and I on the Brooklyn Bridge, taken some time in 2004. (I realize that it was not taken in the past year, but it’s a great photo!)
I can’t let this pass without a mention – last Friday was the 1-year anniversary of our move from Cambridge to Brooklyn. Since then, we’ve started new jobs, reconnected with old friends and made new ones, and had an all-around great time.
I miss Boston from time to time, but couldn’t be happier living and working in New York City. Why would anybody live anywhere else?
Upload a photo of yourself, and they’ll take it from there – 1970, 1976, and 1986 respectively.
I had a lot of fun playing with Yearbook Yourself, a site that will take your boring headshot and turn it into embarrassing yearbook photos that never were.
The truly amazing thing is that the 1970 composite (left) is a dead-ringer for my Dad around that time. This is what my mom kind of looked like in the early 60s.
The pool of my childhood is for sale. My, how things fall apart!
My friend of some 15+ years, R. Alvarez, just launched a sex column for The Indypendent, New York City’s leading social justice newspaper. It’s called The Macktivist, and she intends to make the column a “sex-positive, educational, kink-, vanilla-, homo-, hetero-, bi-, trans-friendly, smart go-to for the discerning reader.”
Not only is Ms. Alvarez a dear friend, but she also happens to be an entertaining and gifted writer. Go read her column now, leave her a comment, and send in your questions!
If you’ve got a few minutes, read this heartbreaking story of a feral child in Florida:
“Three years ago the Plant City police found a girl lying in her roach-infested room, naked except for an overflowing diaper. The child, pale and skeletal, communicated only through grunts. She was almost 7 years old.”
There is also a companion multimedia piece, with a video slideshow about Danielle’s progress, including speech therapy sessions.
If you’re curious about life in this small Florida farming town, the New Yorker has an unrelated piece on Plant City this week.
John Lydon still makes me laugh, even if only uncomfortably so.
Parlophone Records recently put all 22 Blur videos up on YouTube, which is pretty cool. It’s interesting to compare the Popscene video from 1992, with the iconic Song 2 video from five years later – there are a lot of similarities, (though I wish music video directors would refrain from putting sing-a-long lyrics on the screen).
Blur was my favorite band back in the 90s, and I’ve seen them perform live a handful of times, the best of which was a raucous small show downstairs at the Middle East in Cambridge, MA in 1997. [MOKB]
HD Trailer for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” – I would argue that the books get better in order, and if this trailer is any indication, perhaps the same is true for the movies.
Chris Fahey on “the fold”:
In fact, we should start thinking of “the fold” as something other than a hard line with an “above” and “below” portion, and we should stop thinking of the vertical positioning on a page as equivalent to priority. Scrolling up and down through a web page is a fundamental aspect of the web user experience, and there is much more to it than simply seeing what’s on top and then gradually seeing everything else (emphasis added).
I have no doubt that this is increasingly true, but wonder why ads are consistently placed “above the fold”. Is this just a remnant of this older thinking, or do they perform significantly better there?
Lucy chomping on a bone at Abilene, during Happy Hour.
We’re dogsitting for Liz this weekend, and it’s been a blast.
While I definitely prefer the independence of cats in general, I’ve really enjoyed spending time with Lucy – she’s a really good dog.
I’m writing this from the new Wordpress iPhone app. It’s a pretty light, straight-forward interface. It allows saving posts locally on the iPhone before publishing or saving drafts to the server, enabling offline drafting.
There is even rudimentary photo support - but you can’t really control the placement or sizing of the image - it is merely appended to the end of the message. You don’t even see the image markup until it is published or saved as a draft on the server.
But even then, the limitations of the iPhone become clear - there is no copy/paste, and the classes that determine how Wordpress displays uploaded images is unneccessarily complicated. (They should simplify that.)
So, though this is a pretty nice app, I’m not sure how useful it will be without more formatting options and copy/paste. For instance, I can’t even provide a link to it’s app store page. Also, why doesn’t the iPhone have characters luke curly quotes and em/en dashes?
UPDATE (from my Mac): Here is the link to the app.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog is a fantastic three-part web-only musical, starring Neil Patrick Harris. I can’t underline enough how good this is. Available online for free until July 20th, and then available in iTunes for $3.99.
Barriers erected outside the Carroll Street MTA entrance at 2nd Place and Smith Street, in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn.
Looks like the 360 Smith luxury condo development is going to shut down my subway entrance, and severely mess up the nice plaza in front:
Because the safety of our customers is of utmost concern, this closure will be in effect on a 24-hour, 7 days per week basis for 6-8 months (subject to the progress of the construction project)…
See outside.in for more history of this controversial development.
