Screenprint by Scott Saw
June 5, 2009
Artist Scott Saw is getting into screenprinting. I’m tempted by Deep Space, a limited edition print on black acid-free paper.
The web is great for visual art. As a consumer, I get to “sample” a lot of it online. I hope that it’s great for the artists as well, since they can easily give out samples. But you can’t beat the real thing, preferably signed by the artist, for your wall.
Travel Posters
June 2, 2009
The Boston Public Library is running an exhibition of travel posters. The site of the exhibition is Flickr. The collection spans many destinations, but I find this poster particularly pleasing and appropriate.
Good for the BPL!
Titanic Days for GM and EMI
June 1, 2009
Sometimes things just connect up. Consider, for example, these three stories from today’s Guardian.
Things That Aren’t (Just) Search
May 28, 2009
So, what isn’t (just) search? The last week or two has given us great insight into this question.
- Yahoo is not a search company. Good call by CEO Carol Bartz. I’m glad to see that the stock has gone up: I bought some a few months ago, on the basis that things couldn’t get much worse without provoking a takeover.
- Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine. It’s “a computational knowledge engine,” and so can do some things better than Google or other search engines.
- Bing is, according to one of its URLs and to the video currently there, a decision engine. I agree with Erick at TechCrunch that Bing isn’t the best name. It makes me think of the singer, and of the song “I’m dreaming of a blue screen of death“.
For the record, I’m not a search engine either. I am married with children.
The Snail in the Cloud
May 21, 2009
I’ve used this photo before, because I find the Post Office boxes rather lovely, in a vintage sort of way. Little did I suspect at the time that the photo might become relevant to cloud computing.
But (as I read at GigaOM), Amazon Web Services is now going postal, since snail mail is sometimes faster than the internet. “Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, explains… that it would take up to 13 days to sling a terabyte of data across a 10 Mbps network… So Amazon is offering customers the chance to store their data on an external device, ship it via post, and Amazon will load it.”
The Geek According to Facebook Quiz
May 19, 2009
I’ve been taking too many Facebook quizzes of late. Much of the time, I’ve been following in the Facebooksteps of my usually-more-serious wife. I usually do better than her.
She was disgusted that she scored only 2/10 on the Geek Level quiz. I took it and got 7/10: studious. I rather like the sketch of the result.
Other quiz outcomes include my being Yale (among the Ivy League, strange since wife went to Yale and ended up as a “lesser ivy” on the quiz), being McCoy (among the characters from Star Trek classic, whereas my wife, the medic in the family, was some other crew member), and being the Dude (among cult movie characters). In the unlikely event that you want more, I’ll link to my Facebook profile.
Sex, Books, and Movies
May 17, 2009
Describe Your Sex Life With A Movie Title is a currently popular topic on Reddit (and, I believe, elsewhere). Among the comments I’ve upvoted are:
- Stop or My Mom Will Shoot.
- Alone in the Dark.
- 28 Weeks Later. For us, it was more than 30 weeks later, but not as near to 40 as we were expecting. But things worked out well for our early baby, as I hope that they did for the 28-week baby.
There was an earlier topic, Describe Your Sex Life With A Book Title. My comment there referred to Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion. I strongly recommend the novel.
There is a movie, which I recommend less heartily. It is sometimes referred to by the same title as the book, and sometimes as Never Give an Inch. As someone remarked on Reddit, once you start thinking about these topics, almost anything seems to fit. Perhaps I should rephrase that. Or perhaps I should just top typing now…
Back in Boston
May 6, 2009
Wake Up the Earth is a festival that happens every year near Stony Brook T stop in Jamaica Plain. We went this year. We parked on Center Street, did a little shopping, watched the parade (which I think wends its way all the way down to Stony Brook), had lunch, then wended our own way to Stony Brook via a playground.
The photo shows some of the taller paraders. I also took photos of some musical paraders, including Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band. Lunch at Bukhara went very well, thanks to the buffet, the friendly staff, and the fact that our kids were pretty good. By that I mean that, considering they are 5 and 2, their eating to trouble ration was pleasingly high.
The festival itself was very crowded, but fun. The following day, my wife Judy had to go to a different Stony Brook (on Long Island, New York) for work. The kids and I met some friends at the Children’s Museum. It was not at all crowded, perhaps because of swine flu concerns. I imaged parents keeping their kids away from such public places, and taking them on a nice long “safe” drive in cars…
The big local news story concerns the Globe, but that deserves a post of its own…
Fun in Philly
April 26, 2009
Philadelphia fun this weekend has included a trip to the Museum of Art and a surprise. It has also included more heat and humidity than I’m happy to cope with in April, and the disappointment of not seeing the Cézanne exhibition to which I was so looking forward. We were at the museum in the morning, and the next entry time for which there were tickets available was 4pm.
But enter and enjoy the museum we did anyway. We went, not only to the main museum, but also to the Perelman Building. Some of the gallery space there is currently devoted to an exhibition of Henri Matisse and Modern Art on the French Riviera. The painting is by Dufy, and shows the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, along which I promenaded many times when I lived near there.
In the afternoon, we were fortunate enough to stumble across Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, a much-mosaic’d house and courtyard. You can see my ***** review at Yelp.
Hard Times at Boston Globe
April 22, 2009
The photo may look as though it’s left over from coverage of Salem at Halloween, but it’s actually scarier than that. It’s New York Times Co. chief executive Janet L. Robinson. Here’s a quote from the Globe article featuring the photo.
Company officials… singled out “significant losses at the New England Media Group” as a major factor in the Times Co.’s weak performance in three months ending March 31… While every segment of the company’s business was battered by the steep advertising decline in the first quarter, the New England group, dominated by the Globe, turned in the weakest performance. Advertising revenue tumbled 31.6 percent for the New England group.
That makes it sound as though the Globe is dragging down a media firm that would otherwise be buoyant. But the graphic that accompanies the corresponding article in the Herald gives more detail. The 31.6% decline is $55.7M. For NYTCo as a whole, the decline is $334.7M, or 27%.
Other numbers also point to the Globe being about a sixth of NYTCo, and doing slightly, but not massively, worse than the rest of the company. No wonder Universal Adam put it thusly: New Yorkers blame Boston for their problems.
