Honor Relics, Embrace Change
I’m now in my 20th year of being a career Internet technologist. And, in the spirit of embracing change, I’m available for hire.
You’re Never Too Young for a Sonic Screwdriver
Makers don’t only dream, they also learn, discover, invent, fabricate, and — often with great enthusiasm — share not only what they’ve built but what they’ve learned along the way.
You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.
Albert Freakin' Einstein
It’s a Consumer Appliance. It’s a Digital Media Consumption Device. Oh, and it takes calls.
Jeff Bezos this week trumpeted Amazon’s Fire Phone, an all-new smartphone-cum-shopping-appliance species with a fork of Android OS at its core and cameras perched on most every available conceivable surface, most of which unblinkingly observe the user. (Selfie fans take note.)
Espresso Cocktail
Sometimes you want coffee. Sometimes you want a cocktail. Why not have both? It should be made abundantly clear this cocktail calls for a freshly pulled shot of espresso… and no, there really isn’t a substitute. Sorry.
What’s That in Your Shopping Cart, Marissa Mayer?
I was hoping nobody would win PowerBall this week so I could take the $1.2B I was planning to win next week and buy Tumblr, but Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer beat me to it.
Just What Do You Do With A Gigabit Of Bandwidth, Anyway? Paradoxically, You Wait.
So, just what do you do with a gigabit of bandwidth, anyway? Slate technology columnist Farhad Manjoo recently traveled to Kansas City, home of Google’s über-fast fiber optic Internet service — Google Fiber — to get a first hand look.
Read more“Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.”
Quotable: Simon Pegg On Being A Geek
— Simon Pegg
Et Tu, Best Buy? Why Are Captains Of Technology Scuttling Their Own Ships?
There’ve been interesting developments since Chief Yahoo Marissa Mayer put the kabosh on work-at-homers in late February. Did I say interesting? I meant disturbing.
Read more“Sprinkling the Internet on a bad business model does not magically make it a good business model. It merely means that the people who are pursuing a bad business model are hoping you are credulous enough to believe that being electronic is space-age zoomy and awesome and there is no possible way this brilliant business plan could ever fail. Or even worse, that they believe that being electronic means all these things, which means they are credulous. Which is not a very good thing to have as the basis of one’s business model.”
— John Scalzi
Just a Sprinkle of Internet…
John Scalzi on e-publishing imprints bamboozling a new crop of fresh-faced and too-trusting authors.
Amanda Palmer’s Viral TED Talk: The Art of Asking
[ted id=1682] I watched Amanda Palmer’s TED talk — a talk about fairness, and reciprocity, and art — and was struck by just how deeply I miss making connections with people as a performer… kinetic, buzzing, random, wholly improbable and...
Time Warner CFO’s Gigabit Remarks Not Short-Sighted, But Protectionist; Still Dumb
While the remarks of the leaders of IBM, Digital, and Microsoft may have resulted from a lack of vision, or of imagination, or just fundamentally misunderestimating the aspirations of their consumers, the same cannot be said of Time Warner.
Let’s Be Present Together, Each in Our Own Happy Places
There’s nothing struggling Internet portal Yahoo has done in years to rival the reaction to this week’s leaked memo announcing the beginning of the end of tele-working in favor of employees’ “physically being together.”
Designing Work Spaces the Google Way: Driven by Data
After years of being among “the world’s best hermit crabs” by repurposing others’ leftover bits of real estate, Google is considering building its own Googleplex “from scratch”.
SPAM that’s actually (plagiarized) good advice: is this a new thing?
The contents of comment SPAM I received this week. So far as advice goes, I like it, though I don’t see any reason you couldn’t have your coffee and recess, too.
Your Weekend Dose of Wonderful: Yosemite Range of Light
Read moreThe knowledge of how to fight Roya, and the money for fungicide, the labor to treat it, and to cut back the trees deals a huge blow to the income and profits of the coffee farm. The real impact is on organic farms, whether certified farms or organic-by-default farms, on casual coffee farmers who have little technical knowledge, and on smallholder farms in general. In a couple crop cycles, Roya unmanaged is the death of the coffee farm.
–Tom Owen
Roya — coffee leaf rust — is an increasingly clear marker of the climate change crisis. And it’s devastating.
From Tom’s “How Can a Leaf Rust? Roya in Guatemala” which I humbly suggest should be required reading for folks in the specialty coffee trade.
Read more“When people keep shitting on your lawn, might as well plant flowers. Which is to say, make other, better things out of that otherwise useless pile of shit. If they didn’t want me to do that, why did they keep giving me shit?”
— John Scalzi
The Money Quote
Author John Scalzi describes his wildly successful “Counteract a Bigot” drive.