Hey, kids, do you ever get sick of looking at the same few websites, over and over again? Have you worn a rut between your email, facebook, the Huffington Post, and The Greatwhatsit? Are you bored with the interwaffle? Well, my friends, bore no more! There’s a tool out there in the world wide webs [...]
Archive for the ‘Technology’ category
Your kids can dance to it while it wins a war
Anyone interested in music, history, technology, and how all three sometimes converge will find Dave Tompkins’s recently published book How to Wreck a Nice Beach fascinating reading. It’s a history of the vocoder from its development in the 30s by Bell Labs as a voice encryptor for the US Military to its infiltration of techno [...]
Facebook vs. the blogosphere
It’s been a long day, so I didn’t feel up to writing the post I was planning about socialism, anarchism, and capitalism. I figured I’d post a few cat videos, like this one that I saw on Facebook (I forget who posted it) of a cat playing with an iPad: Or this one, which I [...]
Do this at home: A Digital Pinhole Camera
Some hipster friends want me to tutor their son and some of his friends in the ways of manhood. Actually, the way they explained it, their son (friend to my son, same age) is studying chemistry, and they are looking to make the subject a bit more interesting. They would like me to develop a [...]
Breathing the World Around Us
About a week ago my mother was hospitalized after a rare reaction to the antibiotics she was given for pneumonia which caused her lungs to seize and interrupted her breathing. She was shopping with a friend of hers when she collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital. Thankfully she’s making a full recovery [...]
Biking to work
Things I’ve learned recently while biking to work: – A little shame plus a little inspiration make for a nice motivational cocktail. A few months ago, my friend LizardBreath bought a folding bike and started biking to work. Her commute is most of the length of Manhattan — much longer than mine — and she [...]
Pop quiz
1. True or false, social networking division: (a) Hollywood is making a movie about Facebook, starring Justin Timberlake. (b) Ashton Kutcher wrote the following in Time magazine about the founders of Twitter: “Years from now, when historians reflect on the time we are currently living in, the names Biz Stone and Evan Williams will be [...]
What’s all the fuss? Reconsidering the cross-country road trip
Depending on how you define these things, I’ve made seven cross-country road trips in these 40 years of life. The first two (my only round trip voyage) occured when I was about eleven or twelve. Family summer vacation: driving from Albuquerque to Maine and back again in a Ford Van with two parents and six [...]
The big blues marble
I first heard about global warming in the early ’80s. It was reported on by a local newscast, probably WPIX. I remember the jolly, post-story wrap up: So New York might be as warm as Florida one day? Wow, that sounds great! To recap our top story: beloved Yankee, Reggie Jackson, was traded to the [...]
Facebook pickles
A friend once described me as “an introvert who needs people,” a classification that goes some way towards explaining my love/hate relationship with the new ways we’ve come to communicate with each other. I hate talking on the phone, so I happily welcomed the spread of email. I got a cell phone in order to [...]
