Yankees I just returned from the hypothermia-fest that is a nosebleed seat at Yankee stadium in April. Apparently the key is pre-drinking so you don't notice the cold, and alternating hot chocolate with miller light.

Yankees lost, and took my hopes and dreams with them. I'll never cheer again.  ¶ 4/29/2008 11:14:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Today “Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity” William Butler Yeats  ¶ 4/28/2008 12:10:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Warm weather With the blessings of the scantily clad, the warm weather also brings out the homeless. I don't know where they hibernate in winter, but come April, they arise in all their drunken rambling glory and converge upon the 1 and 9 trains with a ferocity. All of a sudden it's hard to pick a non smelly subway car or turn the headphones up loud enough.  ¶ 4/21/2008 11:16:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Kids Hmm . . . The older I get, the louder teenagers become.  ¶ 4/18/2008 06:48:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Urban Zoo Most New Yorkers hate rats except in the subway. You're bored, you're waiting for a train, and there's an entertaining rat rambling around on the tracks down there. Since it can't jump up to the platform, and we're not going to jump down to the tracks, the two of us creatures can check each other out, with no action implied. Actually a rat or two (or even five) is a great thing when you're waiting for the train. If only that were the only place you saw them. . .  ¶ 4/17/2008 11:42:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Ponzi I'm pretty sure that the stock market is just a giant ponzi scheme. Ever see a graph of stock market appreciation in the last 30 years, laid over the GDP growth in the same period? It's trouble. I'm mean really, who's going to buy all these stocks once the baby boomers retire and want to cash out?  ¶ 4/16/2008 12:01:00 AM 1 comments links to this post

Info fragmentation Manufacturing has a concept of Economic Order Quantity, where the cost of holding inventory is weighed against the downtime cost of switching a machine from one task to another. Essentially, the lower the switching costs are, the more economical it becomes to process work in small batches rather than large (which is good because you can have more variety / responsiveness).

As email and instant messaging overtake snail mail and telephone calls, I'm noticing my information batch sizes are compressing too. I remember when I first started using email, I'd write long, multi-paragraph missives that looked a lot like a letter. These days I can barely be bothered to tap out more than three consecutive sentences, because I view e-mail more like a conversation than a volley of essays.

A lot of my information work is being similarly batched. Two straight hours of dedicated work seems increasingly difficult for me, as I flit back and forth between one inbound message and the next. It's not that I'm not working, it's just that I'm constantly coordinating my work with the consumers and co-producers of the work, so that we neither under nor over deliver.

Is this more efficient from an EOQ perspective? Hard to say. It certainly feels more ADD.  ¶ 4/15/2008 09:42:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

You heard it here first

Websites look too geeky.  They look computer-ish and digital and unnatural.  I predict that in five years, better imaging software will allow site designers to make websites look more organic and commonplace.  Like they were crafted from leather, or cut from stone, or carved into wood.  Text areas will look and feel like they were written on paper.  There will be less double-clicking and more pushing and pulling things around the screen.  And this currently-popular, stupid iPod jello look will seem hopelessly old-fashioned and out-of-date.

  ¶ 4/13/2008 11:25:00 PM 2 comments links to this post

Google killed blogger While I appreciate Google for the supreme awesomeness of its search engine, I'm mad at the company. They bought Pyra Labs, the original Blogger.com, years ago, and haven't done a thing with it since. It's languishing and stale and forgotten, and it's a cruel fate for the brand that pioneered it all. Now I'm contemplating switching off blogger onto moveable type or wordpress or some other such platform. Sad. Google is irresponsible with its acquisitions. :-(  ¶ 4/13/2008 05:52:00 PM 1 comments links to this post

ESP

Back in the 60's, all the science fiction writers presumed that people in the future would have full mastery of human extrasensory perception, and that we'd read one another's minds, and predict the future and be able to move things around by just thinking about it.  Futurists don't really talk about psychics anymore, which is a shame because I think it's actually coming to fruition via the internet.  I can read through Facebook status updates and know immediately when one of my friends broke up with someone or got promoted in their jobs.  I click two or three buttons to have Amazon deliver the object of my choosing to my house.  I have alerts e-mail me when big news affects my stock portfolio.  I'm sitting silently in an empty room and am telepathically connected to the world.  Pretty impressive.

  ¶ 4/12/2008 06:28:00 PM 0 comments links to this post