nickd

from the nyt

Sun, 30 May 2010 11:28:00 -0400

Our experience of technology has been largely wondrous and positive: The green revolution ameliorated the problem of world hunger (for a time at least) with better seeds and fertilizers to increase harvests. When childhood diseases were ravaging the world, vaccines came along and (nearly) eliminated them. There are medicines for the human immunodeficiency virus and AIDS. There is the iPad.

i’m not about to equate the ipad to curing polio, but i was struck by the existence of this paragraph all the same. putting the ipad at the end of it is almost like a punchline - and with no explanation, as if everyone is supposed to nod and be like “oh, yes, the ipad,” as if we all already know the obvious benefits.

yulquen redux

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:28:54 -0500

my bike was stripped last year; they took the stem, rear wheel (which i built, tensioned, and trued all by myself), seatpost, and seat. when i saw the bike next, the handlebars were dangling from the brake housing.

two days later i bought a republic bike which is not bad but is still not the same and also weighs four pounds more and is harder to pedal. i’ve used it since. what was left of my bike, my real actual bike, the one that i love really ridiculously dearly for it being a material possession, sat on the floor of my apartment.

over the past two weeks i bought replacement parts, which are not the same parts (except for the seat) and do not feel like the same parts but still suffice in making the bike feel like the bike, which is very good.

yesterday i put all the parts onto the bike except for the brake cables and housing.

today i installed brake cables and housing; removed the bottom bracket lockring that refused to stay on and was a small, subtle pain in my ass for a year; tightened my rear cog onto the hub; tensioned the rear hub; and rode eight blocks to sultan’s market.

i had no preparation for how good that mile ride would feel, for aforementioned reasons of this being my bike and it feeling perfectly sized to me and handling precisely how i expect a bike to handle now. it was so god damned fantastic that i should just give up on further description on this here tumblr. when i arrived at sultan’s, though, a dude was unclipping his bike from the rack, and told me:

“man, it’s so good to get riding again.”

indeed, dude. indeed.

a place to call home

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:58:00 -0500

When I buy a computer, I move in. I change the background to solid black. I run software update (or whatever equivalent) to install the current versions of basic utilities. I tweak its OS-level preferences so it fits my workflow. I open the email program and add in my server. I install a few important applications and utilities. I plug in an external hard drive and load the iTunes library that references my music. Then I get to work.

Some of these apps fulfill basic needs that have become fundamental to modern computing experience: email, iTunes, system preferences. Others move a little more afield: for example, Dropbox is a good example of an app that feels very natural to use on a desktop, but could be done entirely through the web instead.

As a freelance employee who’s hopped around computers a lot lately, I now have the process of moving in down pat, and can get all this out of the way in a couple of hours. None of it is essential, but it is important because it makes the computer a little more mine - even if it isn’t.

Moving in is more than just setting up the picture of loved ones on your desk. It’s having something that fits your flow and allows you to do what you want while being happy.

Moving in is orders of magnitude more crucial on a personal computer. For me, dozens of apps are installed on a fresh OS: Tweetie, iStat Menus, Perian, Growl, Coda, Transmit, LittleSnapper, AdBlock, Things, CS4. Dashboard widgets are installed. Plugins out the wazoo. It’s nearly certain that you’ve moved in more to your personal computer than your work computer, if the two are separate.

So this may vary for you. It may belie my being a “power user.” But I think that this is important, and I’m going to say it, just get it out there, and you can do what you want with it. If the iPad is going to replace one’s laptop - or one’s entire computing system, whatever that is, and however complex that is - and become a dedicated device, it should allow us to move in (and out!) easily. Something that would allow easy download of any sort of media, including transferring between apps; backups (cloud or an external device like Time Machine, it doesn’t matter); and easily transferring information to another iPad.

It may be (and probably is) great right now as an augmentative device: one that you use along with your primary computer. But this is a matter of our stuff now: our music, our email, our work. And the jury’s still out - we are, after all, discussing an unreleased device that only a handful of pundits have seen. But whatever the iPad offers, this remains: over the years, we have all amassed a corpus of information, an array of types of information, that we keep to ourselves, and file away on our computers. We move it from computer to computer every few years, when we buy another one. We back it up periodically. We move some of it (but only some of it!) to the web.

And whether consciously or not, we treat this as our possessions. Our moving into another computer has become similar to schlepping our physical crap into a new place, and decorating it well, so that we can feel more comfortable during our time there.

Considering all that, it would be tremendous (and indeed revolutionary) if the iPad was a place that we could comfortably and casually throw our data on - our electronic possessions, our lives - and call home for a little while.

From: [REDACTED]

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 12:50:38 -0500

Subject: PSD slicing
Date: December 29, 2009 11:48:58 AM CST
To: Nick Disabato

That’s exactly what I do. I’m about to start another quarter of school, but come June I’ll have desperate need of a steady-like gig, so please please pretty please keep me near the top of your referral list.

Unless it’s Drupal. Then they can fuck themselves.

Thanks.

Photo

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:01:08 -0500

The Evolution of the Magazine

Sat, 19 Dec 2009 16:51:04 -0500

oh bang bang bang

couch:

Laura Brunow Miner has some thoughts on magazine publishing:

Robin Sloan was kind enough to call Pictory, my recently launched project, the future of content. But I think what he really meant is that it’s the present. Sports Illustrated and BERG have put a lot of time and brainpower into creating really impressive examples of future possibilities, and rumor has it that Gannett spent a year with IDEO developing the experimental online magazine The Bold Italic.

I can confirm that that’s exactly what Gannett did with The Bold Italic (I know a few of the people who have been working on it first hand in the tower next next to us).

Meanwhile, I’ve been in my sweatpants next to the cat food bowl for the last eight months working on Pictory. They did massive user research studies to discover that online users are missing high design, large photos, and editorial polish on the web, and that people respond to personal, human stories. I thought about what people would care about seeing in an online photo magazine, and we ended up with some of the same conclusions.

And yet, I love Laura’s approach so much more. True, The Bold Italic has different aims and its own merits, but I like lingering over each of Pictory’s showcases to let the photos and stories sink in. I like that I can enjoy the content regardless of where I call home or what experiences I have. I like the thoughtful curation and blatant disregard to that certain absurd idea.

Really, I just want to watch Pictory do nothing but thrive.

on gratitude

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:26:00 -0500

so christmas is coming up, and we’re already butt-deep in chanukah. normally i send my amazon wishlist off to my parents every year on black friday, so they have a month to buy my presents. i always overpack it so they can only buy a few things, which keeps the element of surprise intact. it’s a nice little tradition. but i totally screwed the pooch on it this year, waiting over three weeks past the normal time to fire away the email, and i’ve realized that there’s a reason for this, one i sort of unconsciously dodged until tonight.

see, i don’t even think i really want gifts for christmas this year. (my ten-year-old self is crying in his cynicism-grave.) instead of gifts, or perhaps as your gift, i want you to do me a favor. i know i already threw a five-figure campaign to get my book published, shamelessly hawking the concept to you for three months, and you’re probably tired of my asking favors of you. but this favor is different. this favor is both easy to do and free, and it won’t take you too long.

here is why i want this favor: it’s because this was, in many ways, the hardest year of my life. it became uninspiring and blasé in march and a minor hell in may, and hasn’t let up since. two people that i know have died. one of my friends got cancer. another one of my friends spent the entire year wracked with emotional torment because their significant other left the country. dozens of my friends were laid off, and most of them didn’t get their jobs back. i went six months not sleeping well. and while a lot of stuff has resolved itself (e.g. i’m writing a book, i don’t have to worry about its funding, and i took a job that’s more substantially more well-suited to my own interests and beliefs), it’s been two steps back in my personal life, which has made things doubly hard on me.

so here is the favor. ready? i want you to be grateful for the good things in your life. i want you to go out and express that gratitude however you see fit. if you’re one of the fourteen people left in the country that’s all-the-way happy with your job, go and buy drinks for your boss and coworkers. (if your boss teetotals, hug them instead.) if you somehow legitimately enjoy the winters in chicago, throw a snowball fight, or take a walk outside at 2am just because. write thank-you letters to your friends. lazy? shitty handwriting? fine, write emails instead, they will still appreciate them. healthy but uninsured? a minor miracle: be grateful for everyone who covers their mouth on public transit. tip your letter carrier. overtip your bartender. ride the santa train. walk down NMA at 5:30p on a wednesday with the holiday decorations out. send out text messages to the people you wish you connected with more, asking how they are doing. (here is what the text could say: “Hey, how are you doing?”)

but also - and here is the mushy romantic part! get ready! - if you have a lover, here is the most important thing that you can do. you should go over to that lover and tell them that you are grateful for their existence, and their love. because one very, very sacred thing that exists in this rather bleak-at-best world is knowing that someone out there gives such a passionate damn about you, your health, your success, and your well-being, and is willing to take you seriously and meet you halfway in their life.

this can come in any form that you want. sit down and say a few sentences. hug them. it doesn’t matter how you show your appreciation for all they have done for you, but it does matter rather tremendously that you do it. and i think that no matter what bullshit cards this year has dealt you, it’s very acutely worth it to go back and reassess the ways in which your life is charmed and blessed and blissed - and that an awful lot of people in our frayed and anxious generation tend to lose sight of one of the more significant ones.

b.c.a.g.

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:20:00 -0400

because my girlfriend and i are awesome, we spent a good swath of yesterday evening discussing a complicated grammar problem. we have no idea how to solve it, so we are asking you.

so let’s assume you have a boa constrictor, and somehow it is sworn in as the attorney general of your state. still following me? okay, good. now assume that that happens again - boa constrictor, attorney general - but in a different state. it doesn’t matter how this happened, and it doesn’t matter whether the respective boas are good at their jobs. every good snoot knows that the plural form of “attorney general” is “attorneys general,” but how do you describe multiple instances of attorney general that also happen to be a boa constrictor? the problem is that a boa constrictor is a compound noun (whereas “general” is an adjective that modifies “attorney”), so technically the plural can be either boas constrictor or boa constrictors.

POTENTIAL CANDIDATES:
boa constrictors attorneys general
attorneys boa constrictors general
attorneys boas constrictor general
boas constrictor attorneys general
attorneys general boas constrictor
boa constrictor attorneys general
attorneys general boa constrictors

etc. there are many permutations of this. probably only one, maybe two, are correct.

like a pen

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 13:34:00 -0400

i want a pen, but i am very particular about what it does and how it works, so i have decided to “crowdsource” its acquisition. here is what i want:

1. i want the cap to screw off. i don’t want it to pop off, because then it will pop off at all the wrong times.
2. it must be ~3-4” long, any longer and that’s too long. (i don’t really care how fat it is, but it shouldn’t be comically so.)
3. it - preferably the cap - has to attach to a key ring.
4. either black or brown ink. blue ink is used by investment bankers and old people.
5. it should not be flimsy, which means it should not be plastic. in an ideal world this would suffer world war 3 gladly like a rotring or dietzgen, but it should at least suffer the war of being attached to my key chain and biking around a lot.
6. by proxy the clip that attaches it to a key ring should probably not wear over time.
7. the ink shouldn’t freeze at -10F. minus. ten. with a headwind.
8. bonus points if it’s refillable.
9. bonus points if it’s an 0.7mm rollerball.

n.b. that the closest i’ve come is nyuh which fulfills every requirement except for #1, which is a dealbreaker. any suggestions?

ixduxidiahcichitla

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:54:00 -0400

so i’m waiting to get a table at some nonspecific local neighborhood dive. it’s nice and sunny out and fall has started and we’ve all got hoodies on. in short order, adam asks me: “so what is it that you… do?”

“well uh i’m an interaction designer…”
“right. what do those do?”
“basically we try to make technology easier for people to use.”
“really! so you design interactions.”
“yes.
pause.
“if i said that i was a designer of interactions, and not an interaction designer, would it have made more sense?”
“yes!”

cask-strength facepalm. fwiw apparently he thought “interaction design” meant a specific kind of design process that was somehow more hands-on? but like, putting all the semantic hair-splitting about our profession aside, i feel sort of like i always need to explain my career to other people in what amounts to five or six paragraphs of canned manifesto - which i have down by now, but hoo boy does it sound pretentious and awkward to come off like you just invented your own career path and now you live in a city where there are, like, five of you. maybe this would be easier in san francisco, where there appears to be more interaction designers than homeless people about 15% of the time. maybe it would be easier if i just said “usability” which is a tiny subset of interaction design. but i have found it easiest to simply say “web designer” which both 1) completely isn’t what i do at all, ever, under any circumstance and 2) even if it were, interaction design applies to the web just as much as it does industrial design or software engineering, and so it’s equally disingenuous to zoom in on only a tiny part of the proverbial techno-fustigatory venn diagram.

but it punts, right? and it satiates the asker, because everybody has their own vision of what it means to be a web designer by now. i say this to construction workers on the el platform, or the 50yo waitress at my favorite greasy diner, or the panaderia baker under the blue line, and they get it: they know what a web site is, they know that people make them. it doesn’t matter the particulars of what that all involves, but if they want to know specifically what it is that i do they can ask and i can tell them that i do usability, information architecture, content strategy, etc.

so i guess i’m writing this because i’m curious whether it’s okay to like start from the blanket term “web design” as a catch-all at most parties or whatever, and then if they want to ask more questions they can? or that this entire post is a tacit confession that i suck ass at small talk. you can probably read it one of those two ways.

kickstarter

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 23:23:04 -0400

as you probably know, i’m writing a book that’s called cadence & slang, due to be out in late 2010. well, i just started a kickstarter project for it.

it would mean the world to me if you donated whatever you could, even if it’s only a dollar. check out the kickstarter page for more information. this book is many years in the making, and it’s somewhat the culmination of many things in my life. i hope that you find it enjoyable once it’s out.

beatles

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 14:50:00 -0400

so i’ve had the privilege of listening to the beatles’ digital remasters a few days before they’re set to be released. without offering my opinions outright on the subject, let me offer some of the perspectives, both positive and negative, offered by many of my friends over the past couple of days. these are the most common beliefs surrounding this release, and i think that it’s possible to ascribe to a different set of them depending on your own morals and views on music. really, this can go either way.

the cash grab. the beatles’ catalog has been remastered, recontextualized, and reissued dozens of times in the past four decades. how is this any different? would they do this if not for the money?

historic preservation. the beatles’ recordings belonged to a specific time during which they had far greater (or at least far more appropriate) effect than they ever will have. remastering and reissuing them so frequently doesn’t pay enough respect to the context that they came from.

device-appropriateness. people listen to most things on ipods and itunes these days, which means they’re downsampled to mp3 format. in comparison to this market, very few people own the original LPs of beatles albums. remastering them so they sound clearer and crisper on these devices is at the very least a concession to technological progress. it’s also a signifier of public demand: lots of people want the beatles’ recordings to have a higher treble and louder peak.

device-appropriateness corollary. why the fuck are the beatles still not on itunes?

other beatles-related works. why not provide the same treatment to zapple albums, or the plastic ono band, or john lennon’s solo work? on one hand, you’re ignoring the other corpus of work that these people issued, and you’re strengthening the beatles’ “brand” which dilutes their original spirit. on the other hand, people give a much larger crap about the beatles than the plastic ono band.

stereo vs. mono. the remasters are coming out in both stereo and mono versions. (as of press time, i have only heard the stereo version.) but why remaster these albums in stereo at all, when the band expressed significant hesitance towards the form?

stereo vs. mono, pt. 2. take a song like “eleanor rigby,” one of the most loved in their catalog. everyone knows that paul’s vocals are multitracked in it. during each verse, one track shifts to hard right, while his other tracks are around 20% left (or at least that’s what my ears tell me). then, each chorus features all voices dead center. what does this tell us about the song’s feelings of loneliness and alienation? does it help to give us this, or is it right to color the song in this way in the first place?

Books.

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:44:00 -0400

couch:

Here’s why: when nickd cares about something, he will research that thing ad nauseam. This is why he’s a beer aficionado. I will almost blindly trust him with any recommendation he makes, and he’s seldom led me astray — much to my taste buds’ enjoyment and wallet’s dismay. With interaction design, he’s doing the same […]

i am drinking interaction design.

oldtobegin: abloodymess: i would kill for a La Pasadita...

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:40:44 -0400

oldtobegin:

abloodymess:

i would kill for a La Pasadita burrito right now.

IS THAT AS BIG AS IT LOOKS

it’s bigger:

oh and it’s only ten dollars. when i’m hard up for cash (as i am these days), i get one of these and refrigerate the rest. feeds me for the whole week.

marco: When was the last time you intentionally hit the Clear...

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:25:00 -0400

marco:

When was the last time you intentionally hit the Clear button on a form? You know, that button that looks nearly identical to “Submit” and is usually placed right next to it but performs the most destructive action possible?

HTML tutorials stopped including the Clear button about a decade ago with good reason.

immediately after reading this post, i updated instapaper to 2.1 and mistakenly cleared my twitter login information in settings, using a button that appeared at the top. is there any way that this can be removed? i think it’s sort of covered with the circled “X”s that appear when you focus to a form blank, and i don’t know if such a simple prompt needs two ways to clear the data in it.

(while i’m on my soapbox: for the past year instapaper has changed the way i read on the web. it is by far my favorite iphone app. thank you for making it.)

74

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 14:15:00 -0400

i am standing in a backyard on kimball avenue and basically world war three is going on - per usual on the 4th, i know, but the sun has just set and so we’re watching what is probably the annual peak of people blowing up their country. after yesterday i have a theory, which is that the poorer the neighborhood the more likely they are to blow up their country right proper on the 4th, which means going to indiana on july 06 the year before and buying a truly world-ending quantity of fireworks at 8% retail (buy 1 get 11 free) and leaving it in the basement for a year. the people in the yard immediately to our left are setting off some sort of blinding strobe thing on the ground, while the house behind us is lighting proper mortars, a few purple but the majority red.

it rained 3 hours ago and you’d never know if not for the deep fog that set over the city, one of only a few times a year that that happens in chicago, which diffuses the fireworks’ light in ways about as strange and unpredictable as the fireworks themselves - this of course (given the probability of fog here) being the first time that i’ve ever seen fireworks in fog, seeing them in such a different way brings on a degree of wonder that clichéd-ly brings on a lot of happy memories of childhood. this persists for most of the evening.

then at ~9:30p i have to bike from the party on kimball/belden to a rooftop party on grand/noble. you can take many routes to get there, and they’re probably all good, but the way i decided on involved taking kimball to homan to grand. this route involves going through west humboldt park. i’d qualify logan as a middle/working-class neighborhood but west humboldt park as a full-on poor neighborhood, which (according to said law) naturally means that the fireworks will go from innocuous world war three to possibly harmful world war three, people lighting mortars off in the middle of the street because they can, because there’s no way for the police to handle the level of widespread fireworks consumption at hand here, because the police are busy dealing with shot-off limbs at this time of night anyway, etc. and so every so often a mortar would go off less than 15ft away from me and i’d look up and behind me on my bike and almost plow into parked cars because of how damn amazing the mortar in question just was. or i’d bike past an alley at near-full speed and peek down an alley just long enough to see a dozen apparently-unsupervised kids fleeing a tiny spark which of course belongs to a fuse that is slowly dwindling into a mortar the size of my fucking torso; and of course the mortar is located under power lines but like hell anyone cares today, it being the day of hilariously wonderful and inadvisable decisions, etc.

kimball/homan are narrow-ish, major-ish residential streets; grand is a much wider street that goes through heavy industry, the metra engine shop is located at grand/california and a few random metal foundries and factories dot the strip, some warehouses, etc. they’re all very tall and tend to front the street with all bricks and no fanfare. this means grand at times becomes somewhat cavernous for a non-downtown street. sound traveled interestingly here, last night; fireworks shot 1,000 feet off (in residential areas) would travel into the cavern and sort of ping-pong around the building walls. when i biked past the metra factory - which is entirely covered with aluminum siding - the explosions took on this almost galaga-esque flanged metallic character, each bang returning two fast echoes afterward, pew! pew! and of course the whole street is empty because it’s a holiday and nobody is at work at the factories, they’re too busy blowing up their country. i think 2 cars passed me for the entire 2.5-mile stretch of grand between homan and noble. it was one of the best bike rides i’ve ever had. easily top 3.

once i get on the roof things have died down a little bit, but the area i just came from, you can see that in the far distance such that all the explosions looked about 3mm tall and you could like hold them between your thumb and pointer finger and crush them like a purple or green or red or white hairy lightning bug. it all persists for another hour and two witbiers into it i head back home. i think, living where i do, that the 4th of july is my favorite holiday. i hope you had a good one too.

suburban diaspora, pt. 2

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 16:36:00 -0400

the yard sale went well. erin and i sold about $180 worth of junk, which helped tremendously towards getting a few more things that i need to do a proper lit review in advance of writing my book. thanks for coming out if you did.

what i want to discuss today is condo associations. our building is a u-shaped courtyard building, not unlike many in chicago (especially around rogers park and edgewater, but also on some boulevards - erin and i live on palmer square, part of the original burnham-devised boulevard system). it’s unique, though, in that our half of the building is rental apartments, and the other half is condos. one side has a plaque saying “managed by ______”; the other has a slightly fancier-looking plaque with “_____ condo association”.

so at like 9:30a we start setting up, putting stuff out there on our building’s front yard. it’s perhaps worth noting that our building’s yard is similarly bifurcated, with a clear-cut lawn on the condo side and a few little bush plants on the apartment side. we set up our stuff spanning both sides. around 10:45a, a resident from the condo side comes out to walk his dog and voices his concerns about the existence of a yard sale. he walks his dog around the block and comes back to apologize and say “i personally think it’s great that you’re selling, but there are a few other residents who don’t want this sort of thing happening.” he then tells us about how a cadre of three condo residents set up a palmer-square-wide yard sale at the end of the summer, and routinely call the police and cite obscure laws to get any “competitors” to fold.

none of this is illegal, but it’s underhanded and offensive all the same: basically, it’s entirely possible to be a jerk to your neighbors within the bounds of the law, and you can either choose to do so or not. i don’t want to wait two months to put on a yard sale; neither do any of the several other households that have teamed up with us to sell, and neither do any of the dozens of friends who came by to check out our wares and grill some meats with us.

in the next two hours we receive two similar warnings from two other residents. both were on our side but expressed worry about the aforementioned three residents. one even apologized for the existence of these residents. during this period a middle-age-looking woman is spotted at a second-floor window staring directly at us, talking on the phone, and looking pretty pissed.

around 5pm, three hours before the yard sale is supposed to end, one of said residents comes by and says “nobody wants you here” and leaves. ten minutes later a cop car pulls up, asks what’s up, we tell them we’re holding a yard sale, they laugh and leave. i’m guessing if you call the police as frequently as this person does, in an area much more known for gang turf wars than bourgeois complaints, then the police believe you’re the middle-aged woman who cried wolf, and stop taking you very seriously.

also: “nobody wants you here.” really? that’s funny, i thought the several hundred folks who came past, smiled, purchased merchandise, and thanked us for putting this on would indicate otherwise. perhaps they should have been more honest and said that the only people that didn’t want us there was them. perhaps they should know that living in an urban context means accepting the actions of reasonable neighbors. none of us were making any noise beyond talking. we planned to fold up the yard sale before sunset. nobody was in the way of these peoples’ existence, and yet they made the decision to raise a stink about it. and for what?

oh, but this isn’t the end of it, boys and girls. on tuesday, on my walk to work, the exact person who i saw in the second-floor window was outside our (our!) building, reseeding the lawn that we had a yard sale on only 72 hours prior. the lawn that, mind you, was already almost entirely dead because a densely leafy tree was choking out all the sunlight and water on the grass. the lawn that she reseeded, with the tree that she didn’t prune the branches of. and then a day later, this passive-aggressive sign was posted, gloriously replete with snarky, self-righteous tone, right down to the “i’m” as if they alone owned the lawn:

, the final sentence of which is likely aimed at another neighbor on our half of the building, whose dog routinely relieves himself on a corner of said yard. apparently people keep dogs, and apparently they have to pee.

this isn’t the first time that i’ve witnessed such disrespect for urban contexts out of people who live in them. living in a dense environment like this means respecting the intentions of other people, meeting them halfway and holding a conversation with them that involves more empathy and rationality than writing off their existence and wasting the police’s time. a majority (and as of press time, over two-thirds) of humanity has lived like this for hundreds of years.

if you’re going to treat your environment like this, then maybe you should sell your condo to someone that gives a legit, impassioned crap about their neighborhood, and harbors greater tolerance for the actions of their neighbors. then you can move to bolingbrook and tend your meadow with all the other sheep. nobody wants you here.

group sale and cell phone aim

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:26:00 -0400

two things of note these days.

1. erin and i are organizing a group sale, to take place this saturday june 27 from 10a-8p at 3026 w palmer square. we’re on the north side of the square, just west of sacramento. quite a few people will be selling. we’d love if you came out and bought our lightly loved second-hand hipster merchandise. we’ll be grilling and killing some beers, too. maybe i’ll even pull out a frisbee. shock! horror! intrigue!

2. i just got an aim client on my phone that 1) persists when you quit; 2) pushes notifications of new instant messages from buddies when quit as if they were SMSes; 3) archives conversations; 4) short of file transfers and DCing, is about as fully-featured as any proper computer-based client out there. the client is not the important thing (though if you own an iphone, let me direct you nyuh-wise); the important thing is you should add nickdisguise to your buddy list if you want to yell stuff at my phone in a slightly different way than texting. if you do so, you should let me know your aim screen name/google talk name/etc so i can add it myself and we can be “friends” on the “cloudsync paradigm.” so what’s yours?

etymotic prop

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 20:50:00 -0400

they make crazy expensive buds, but i’ve worn their earplugs to what must be several hundred shows by now, and this past week i filed a warranty claim with them that was handled with immense grace and prompt, unflagging service. can’t go any longer without giving them high marks for the way they treat other people.

whuffle dull

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:51:00 -0400

i really wish there were a dashboard widget i could install that tells me precisely how much sleep i need and how i can get to a point where i figure out my circadian rhythms, like if you wake up opposite to the apex of a sleep cycle (which in average people is like 90m) you will feel like shit all day, or if you wake up at exactly the right time you can basically greco-roman wrestle a dragon. i wish there were some way to systematize the process, is what i am saying here. it’s plenty easy for me to check how much ram remains on my phone or how much bandwidth i’m taking up on my computer, but i can’t for the life of me figure out how little or much caffeine i should need to take in order to not fall asleep riding my bike out and still not get a headache and feel like death and take it out on any living creature i see, out of the thousands of living creatures i encounter on my commute out alone. or maybe, like, telling me to switch to black tea, or taurine, or just fucking off and popping no-doz. or some widget that would remind me on a daily basis that mountain dew amp tastes like someone pissed into a green jolly rancher. or maybe some popup that would disable my web browser and splay a message all over my monitor that reads “WARNING: IF YOU SPEND FIVE MORE MINUTES AWAKE YOUR BRAIN WILL FEEL LIKE IT HAS BEEN WRAPPED IN ITCHY SALLOW WOOL FOR THE REST OF THE WEEK” in bold italic red all-caps 72px helvetica.

i want there to be some easy, constructible answer to all of this, basically. i spend almost all of my life entrenched in the very logical constructs that technology affords, and then when i’m forced to somehow confront the constraints of my own body i just sort of flounder around and yell a lot. in the past my body just did the work for me without thinking much about it, and willpower (which i’m pretty sure i have an above-average quantity of) made up the rest. as i age this is less and less the case. but you don’t care about this. you care about this other thing: i’m going to see telepathe at the bottle tonight. i’m showing early because i heard that the opener kills it. i hope i can see you there. bring a pillow if you come, ok? we can take a nap to the vocal harmonies.