February 2008
18 posts
Steve Martin and "Worse Is Better" →
“Steve’s insistence that greatness isn’t something you can count on, or even something you should strive for, resonates deeply for me. Greatness is far too difficult, too abstract, too daunting. Being good— consistently good— is the real goal, and that takes hard work and discipline. Being good— that’s something concrete you can roll up your sleeves and...
January 2008
34 posts
New Google Toolbox for Mac →
(via Eric Case)
A small but useful collection of Cocoa odds-and-ends released under a liberal Apache license. Includes utility code for dealing with pretty standard problems like drawing round rects, shading, escaping and unescaping HTML and XML entities, and filtering lists. Probably more interesting, though, since it seems to be one of the more requested Cocoa features Apple’s never...
Sam Walton on Pricing →
“Never ask, “How much might someone be willing to pay for this?” Ask instead, “At what price could I sell a huge number of these?” Read the biographies of Henry Ford and Sam Walton and you’ll learn that this was the one question asked by both men throughout their lives. The correct answer to that question lifted Henry and Sam out of the shadows of obscurity to stand...
George Packer on "The Choice" →
I saw a lot of people linking to this article awhile back, but I finally read it on the plane back from Chicago, and I think it’s something everyone voting in the upcoming Democratic primaries should read. Packer doesn’t come down on either side, but rather presents a deft analysis (with many supporting examples, quotes, and anecdotes) of the Hillary/Obama decision as a choice between...
‘I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!’: A Guide to Proper Usage →
“‘I drink your milkshake’ has such Dickensian grandeur that its miniaturization in the mouths of SportsCenter anchors, scab gag writers, bloggers, and their ilk is practically a national tragedy.”
I’m with the good people at New York Magazine on this one—let’s not turn “I drink your milkshake!” into the new “Where’s the beef!” ...
The Crunchies: A Sartorial Wilderness →
“The dress sense of the award winners is grim. Nothing hip, nothing radical, nothing innovative, perhaps one here or there vaguely smart, but really just oceans of drab dullness. A payroll conference would be more fashionable and edgy.”
(via Matthew Mullenweg)
I hate to sound superficial, but I think their complete lack of style (or even, really, interest in style) really says something...
Amusing Myself To Death: On Cloverfield →
(via Courtney Patubo, via Jason Schupp—wow, hat trick!)
I saw Cloverfield tonight, and definitely had a sense throughout that it was more than your typical action/horror/suspense movie. I was tempted to snarkily Twitter early on that “Cloverfield is a movie about cameras,” and I do think that’s one part of its comment on the situation America finds itself in today, but I...
Everywhere Magazine →
Speaking of my friend Jason Schupp, I just picked up the first issue of Everywhere, the new travel magazine project from his employer, SF-based 8020 Publishing (the same people who do JPG). I think it says something that, without having heard of it before or knowing that Jason had worked on it, a copy of it caught my eye amid rows and rows of magazines at Fog City News, and I walked out with it.
...
WatchMy girlfriend gave me a Diana camera for Christmas, which has revived my flirtation with medium format toy cameras. I was at the camera store buying 120 film for it today, and the clerk told me enthusiastically about how someone had hacked their Holga to work as a motion picture camera. Naturally, I went home and looked it up, and I think the results are very lo-fi cool, if a bit impractical...
PodWorks 2.9.3 Beta 2 →
I’ve been hard at work on a new PodWorks update (2.9.3), aimed primarily at mitigating some reliability problems caused by iTunes’, shall we say, less than stellar AppleScript implementation (which PodWorks relies on to transfer songs to iTunes). In addition to confirming that iTunes is responsive (e.g. that it doesn’t have an error dialog or the preferences up) before trying a...
Mike Lee's Lemur CATTA →
I suppose I’m a little behind the curve on this one, but I finally had the opportunity hang out a bit with Mike Lee, Delicious Monster engineer and “world’s toughest programmer,” at MacWorld this year, and I was really impressed by his idealism, work ethic, and ingenuity.
As someone who has, on a few occasions, had the mixed blessing of a lot of traffic from Digg (and all...
Would You Take a Tumblr With This Man? →
“The West Coast has never tempted Mr. Karp. ‘It’s incredibly incestuous in Silicon Valley,’ he said. ‘It always turned me off. It’s so hypercompetitive—that was always my perception, though I haven’t actually had the experience.’
Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, Mr. Karp continued, have a tendency to cash out early. ‘I want to build something I’d be happy to be...
Jens Alfke on the Apple Omerta →
“Finally—and this may seem petty—Apple’s lack of individuality bugs me…ever since the return of Steve Jobs, the company has been pretty maniacal about micro-managing its visible face, to make it as smooth and featureless as an iPod’s backside. (In my darker moments I’ve compared it to the brutal whiteness of “THX-1138”.)” While it may not have been the main reason I...
“I have few resources and since expectations are unbounded, it’s a certainty that...”
– David Watanabe (via Ammon Skidmore) While I haven’t exactly experienced anything like the bile that’s been directed at David Watanabe over his inclusion of ads in the search results returned by his free Safari add-on, Inquisitor, I can certainly sympathize with his frustration. There...
Brent Simmons: ‘NetNewsWire 3.1 is free’ →
Not only is the elder statesman of RSS readers now available free of charge, it also now features custom icons by my brother Bobby. Oh happy day!
“What is unusual about “No Country for Old Men” is not simply the level of audio...”
– Dennis Lim: “Exploiting Sound, Exploring Silence” (via Briana Mowrey) One of the most interesting things about working on Soundtrack Pro was that it gave me a new appreciation for motion picture sound design, probably one of the least noticed and appreciated of film trades. When a sound...
7 tags
Buzz's Guide to NYC
Now that I’ve spent a lot of quality time in New York City, my friends who are planning their own visits frequently ask me for my recommendations. For some time now I’ve simply been copying a list of my favorite NYC hangouts from email to email, all the while thinking I should really just do a blog post about it. So, I finally did, and here it is. Keep in mind that these are merely...
PocketTweets: Now with Ajax
Justin Williams: I just released an updated version of PocketTweets, the Twitter client for the iPhone & iPod touch developed by myself and Bobby Andersen. The major feature of this release is that I converted the timeline retrieving portions of the application to be pulled in the background via Ajax. This speeds up page load times immensely. Congrats to Justin Williams and my brother Bobby...
"Runnin' Down a Dream" Trailer →
I think this bit of Peter Bogdonavich’s Tom Petty documentary is just brilliantly edited. I love how it starts with the riff for “The Waiting,” tells the story of the song’s evolution, and then transitions seamlessly into him playing the fully produced studio version in the video. Can’t wait to see the whole thing. (via Tim Shey)