blog.mignault.net

Reading Our Own Dogfood

In Tough Economic Times, New Jersey Libraries Are Flourishing – NYTimes.com:

Jude Schanzer, the director of programming at the East Meadow Public Library, on Long Island, tells the story of a middle-class woman in her 50s who dropped in late last year after work and applied for a library card. She confided to a librarian that it was the first library card she had possessed since childhood.

“Now I don’t have to buy my books,” she told Ms. Schanzer. “This is how I’m cutting back.””

We read a lot of contemporary fiction in our house, my wife and son in particular – and when the economy first started going south, we started using the Westchester consortium. We had been a buying a lot of books that were read once and then never touched again. Now if only the catalog wasn’t so damn AWFUL.

The hen dies in the first half-hour.

Disney Eggs: They’re Eggs. By Disney.:

We have rarely been as confused or disturbed by anything in our lives as we are by the new “Disney Eggs,” which we discovered via a commercial break during the fourth hour of Today.

As you see, it’s eggs. With Disney characters stamped on the shells. Possibly selling at a markup. Is this some kind of tie-in to a movie, or further proof of the evils of agribusiness and the coming apocalypse?

Help.

Or a fruit basket

Bailed-out Wells Fargo plans lavish corporate getaway to Vegas.:

“Recognition events are still part of our culture,” spokeswoman Melissa Murray said. “It’s really important that our team members are still valued and recognized.”

Give them a fucking plaque.

(Via Think Progress.)

No silver bullet 2.0

Big Contrarian → Lies, damn lies, and the CMS.:

Beware the off-the-shelf system.

Amen. If I learned anything in my 10 years as a in-the-trenches corporate developer, it was that there is no such thing as an off-the-shelf system. Either budget to suck it up, spend the dough, and build it yourself or budget to spend a lot of time (and money) customizing, tweaking, and getting frustrated.

There is a heppy land

A Heppy Site:

Craig Arf has launched georgeherriman.com, dedicated to all things Krazy Kat. It’s got all sorts of great stuff like the biography pictured above. I have been buying all the Fantagraphics reissues as they come out, and I know I’ll be spending a lot of time exploring this site. Li’l ainjil.

(Via The Ephemerist.)

And brush your teeth

The Blog That Goes Ping » Helpful Advice From A Benevolent Guru:

In the comments to this blog post by Sten K Anderson, which addresses this phenomenon from another perspective (with respect to Joel Spolsky, who’s another Paul Grahamy type), a commenter named Chris Williams says: 

“You will look back at what you’ve written in ten years and laugh at your naivety. Stop worrying so much about what other people might think, they’re all faking it anyway – even your ‘heroes’. Also, check your spelling.”

That might be the best guru advice you can possibly get.”

What he said, especially about Kricfalusi-as-guru, though John K has really interesting and excellent taste in cartoons and comics. At least he did when I read it for awhile.

Applescript made sane

Graphing Your Favorite Feeds with NetNewsWire and Ruby :: dot unplanned:

After the election, my list of feeds in NetNewsWire became the source of some consternation. I’m still not completely recovered from the “must … know” paranoia that grips me, so I’m loath to unsubscribe to the political stuff: What if the world starts to end? How will I know?

mph has been doing some very interesting posts about using Ruby as a potent antipsychotic for Applescript. Here he builds graphs of attention scores for his feeds in NetNewsWire. I need to do this myself – too many damn feeds. Interesting and fun series. Check it out.

Free the teeming millions (of bits)

Free the Linked Data 4:

[I should have blogged about this general thought before I jumped ahead in my previous post with a URI pattern proposal. It is more important for people to embrace these principles than it is to mindlessly buy into various constraint models.]

In Linked Data, Tim Berners-Lee points out that “It is the unexpected re-use of information which is the value added by the web.” Four rules are given to facilitate unexpected re-use:

1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information
4. Include links to other URIs, so that they can discover more things

Despite the “Linked Data” analysis, the principle of unexpected re-use and these four rules can be applied to HTTP in general without an RDF basis.

I try to keep the ‘unexpected re-use of information’ in mind. You can’t even begin to anticipate every possible use of your data people can come up with. So the best thing to do is get out of their way as much as possible and give them the access to create something new and undreamed-of. Be generous in what you provide and unfettered in what you expect.

(Via Q6.)

Cheesy fonts

Ecofont | less is more:

SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.

‘After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well.’

Appealing ideas are often simple: how much of a letter can be removed while maintaining readability? After extensive testing with all kinds of shapes, the best results were achieved using small circles. After lots of late hours (and coffee) this resulted in a font that uses up to 20% less ink. Free to download, free to use.

A simple, yet effective idea: take out most of the inside of the font while not actually becoming an outline, save a bunch of ink. Even better yet, make it free to download and use. From what I hear (haven’t tried it yet) printing it at smaller sizes is almost indistinguishable from regular fonts. Will definitely try this one.

(Via Providence Public Library Tech Blog.)

Technorati Tags:
typography, green, fonts

Silencing spam calls

macosxhints.com – Silence certain iPhone spam callers forever:

“Like most people, the iPhoneWriter.com team hates spam in all it’s forms and permeations. Electronic mail, snail mail, Boy Scouts selling popcorn, and unsolicited telephone calls all qualify as ‘spam’ in our book and they’re all obnoxious. We find unsolicited telephone calls to be particularly irritating. How many times have you been in a meeting or driving or whatever, and had your Apple iPhone ring only to find a ‘phone spammer’ on the other end? Ugh.

Well, after one too many calls wondering if we were interested in having our carpets steam cleaned, enough was finally enough and we decided to stop the madness once and for all. The end result is a simple (and dare we say elegant) way to silence telephone spammers forever. Ah, the sweet sound of silence. Here’s how you can silence the telephone spammers on your Apple iPhone”

Excellent – no more “warranty is about to expire on my car” calls. Which infuriates me every single time it happens.

Technorati Tags:
apple, iphone