November 2012
1 post
December 2011
2 posts
“The Thing is regularly viewed by members of the winter crew at the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station after the last flight out, usually in a double-feature with The Shining.[39] It is also viewed by scientific personnel at the Summit Camp on the apex of the Greenland Ice Sheet.”
—The Thing (1982 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Play
October 2011
7 posts
“And this is the essential broader point—as a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.”
—Rethrick Construction: The Mythical Man Month (via buzz)
Rick Ross Interview GQ October 2011: Music: GQ →
gq.com
So. many. quotables.
After he finished eating a dinner of fried cheese bread, artichoke dip, roasted chicken with sides, and three pieces of Key lime pie (two of them were to go; come on, son), he pushed his plates away and said, “That’s how you gotta eat. You gotta eat like a don.” He has a habit of handing down proclamations like that about the way bosses should live.
For once he doesn’t have on sunglasses, and you can see that he has the longest, most lustrous eyelashes a 300-pound man could possibly have. His butt crack travels from his Polo boxer briefs almost to the middle of his back. He’s shirtless, of course. If you know anything about Rick Ross, it’s what he looks like with his shirt off.
Frankly, it’s nice to finally see someone enjoy the disgusting excesses of fame and money instead of pretending to despise them, which is what rock stars and CEOs apparently feel they’re supposed to do. Maybe it’s because he wasn’t really successful until late in his twenties and so doesn’t take it for granted. But it’s got to be something constitutional as well. He loves being the Boss. When he signed his deal with Warner Music, he hung out the whole day and met basically everyone who works at the company. No one does that. It kind of violates the snobbery of being the talent. Heavy is the head that wears the crown? Not this motherfucking head.
September 2011
1 post
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
3 posts
February 2011
1 post
Amen break →
en.wikipedia.org
The “Amen break” was a brief drum solo performed in 1969 by Gregory Cylvester “G. C.” Coleman in the song “Amen, Brother” performed by the 1960s funk and soul outfit The Winstons. It gained fame from the 1980s onwards when four bars (5.2 seconds) sampled from the drum-solo (or imitations thereof) became very widely used as sampled drum loops in hip hop, jungle, breakcore and drum and bass music. (via Caleb Madison)
December 2010
1 post
October 2010
3 posts
10-Year-Old Movies: Hollow Man →
10yearoldmovies.com
Was Paul Verhoven the most underrated director of the 1990s, or the most overrated?
This was what went through my head as I watched a see-through Kevin Bacon twist a supermodel’s titties with his invisible fingers in Verhoven’s 2000 sci-fi thriller, Hollow Man. The movie is the last film…
Great post (click for more), Verhoeven’s movies defined much of the 90s for me (especially Robocop and Total Recall). Also brings up so many questions.
Some Verhoeven fun facts:
“The opening breakup scene with Jesse Eisenberg and Rooney Mara ran eight script pages and took 99 takes.”
—The Social Network (2010) - Trivia
September 2010
11 posts
Thing Labs "the blog": Big news! Thing Labs is merging with AOL! →
blog.thinglabs.com
We are pleased to announce that as of today, Thing Labs is merging with AOL. This deal has been in the works for a little while, and we’ve been dying to tell you all, but today it’s official!
First things first: Brizzly is sticking around. Of course anything can happen in the…
“For instance, in one episode of Step by Step, Cody acknowledges Full House as a fictional TV show. The character of Steve Urkel guest-starred in an episode of Full House as well as an episode of Step by Step. This creates a contradiction, since if Urkel was a real person in the Step by Step world — a world in which Full House was fiction — he wouldn’t be able to get into the fictional Full House world.”
—Suspension of disbelief - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Play
“You people work hard, you save your money, you teach your children to respect the law. Then when someone goes out and burns down half a city and murders someone, swaydo-intellectuals [sic] explain it away by sayin’ the killer didn’t get any watermelons to eat when he was ten years old…. The Supreme Court is fixing it so you can’t do anything about people who set cities on fire.”
—George Wallace, in one of many legendary speeches
ACTIVE, AFFABLE, F, SENIOR DESIRES SHARE /SUBLET APT (MANHATTAN)
EX-ART TEACHER DESIRES 1+- MONTH IN SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER SO AS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CULTURAL ACTIVITIES AND VISIT WITH TWO OF MY CHILDREN. NON-SMOKER.
There are a number of older women seeking sublets in NY on craigslist. e.g this ad. Which is fine, but a lot of them seem to insist on disclosing their old-lady-ness in the subject line. Here’s another.
Why is it written as if craigslist charged per-word for listings? Where do her other children live? Why do these two not want her to stay with them? Do I want to share an apartment with a woman whose own children do not want her around? What cultural activities is she into? Has she already seen abraham lincoln’s big, gay dance party? If so, would she be willing to see it again?
“
So why New York?
The thing is, I’ve lived in London since I was a child, and I love it. But it’s time to see a different part of the world. The thing about New York I like the most is the conversations I have — they’re just the best in the world. Everyone that’s interesting in America moves to New York and because of that you get the most interesting subcultures. The most insane nights I’ve ever had in my life have happened in New York.
It’s a good place to have insane nights. What neighborhood are you thinking of moving to? Williamsburg is like Shoreditch.
That’d be like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. I’ve been toying with the idea of moving to the Lower East Side. Matt lives in Bed-Stuy. Everyone I know who lives in New York lives in Brooklyn, but if I move to New York, I have to live in Manhattan for some period of time. It’s just so iconic.
” —Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke on The Boxer, Butt and Moving to New York — Vulture
“to be continued, we on that norman mailer shit,
in search of the truth even it goes through taylor swift.
tell her this.” —Jay-Z/Power remix
in search of the truth even it goes through taylor swift.
tell her this.” —Jay-Z/Power remix
Sword-and-sandal films, or pepla (singular peplum) mostly take an historical or imagined event and add an extravagant setting and lavish costumes, accompanied by grandeur and spectacle and a sweeping musical score.[1] The films of this genre are a class of adventure or fantasy genres that have subjects set in biblical, medieval or classical antiquity, often with contrived plots based very loosely on mythology or legendary of Greco-Roman history, or the surrounding cultures of the same era (Egyptians, Assyrians, Etruscans, Minoans, etc.). Gladiators, vikings, and slaves rebelling against tyrannicalkings are also popular subjects.
I’m having a hard time with Lord of the Rings being categorized as a Sword-and-sandal movie. Is it because it was good?
“Mass transit use in New York City is the highest in the United States, and gasoline consumption in the city is the same rate as the national average in the 1920s. New York City’s high level of mass transit use saved 1.8 billion gallons of oil in 2006; New York saves half of all the oil saved by transit nationwide. The city’s population density, low automobile use and high transit utility make it among the most energy efficient cities in the United States. New York City’s greenhouse gas emissions are 7.1 metric tons per person compared with the national average of 24.5. New Yorkers are collectively responsible for one percent of the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions though they comprise 2.7% of the nation’s population. The average New Yorker consumes less than half the electricity used by a resident of San Francisco and nearly one-quarter the electricity consumed by a resident of Dallas.”
—New York City - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
August 2010
2 posts
Rhyming Words with Themselves, sort of: Top Ten Homophone Rhymes of All Time | Rap Genius Blog →
rapgenius.com
A lot of these are just multisyllabic, and as dbentley says: Though I’m not sure I love this “discussing rap in uber-white guy speak” meme. Anyway, still with the entertaining.
“Contrary to the name and marketing shtick, there is no evidence that even one brother named “Einstein” has ever been involved with the chain. Einstein Bros was created by a chain restaurant corporation, Boston Chicken (now Boston Market) in 1995, as a way to market breakfast foods. The chain is now owned by Einstein and Noah Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, Inc., previously known as New World Restaurant Group, which also owns Noah’s Bagels, Manhattan Bagel, Chesapeake Bagel Bakery, Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea, and New World Coffee.”
—Einstein Bros. Bagels - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
February 2010
1 post
because there’s nothing quite as hardy har as other people’s chatlogs…
dolapo: have you considered that we could use this technology to build the ultimate porn sniffing device?
dolapo: s/could/should/
zack: i don’t like the words ‘porn’ and ‘sniffing’ together
shellen: the chrome extension?
ben: i’m not interested in your scented pornography
January 2010
8 posts
I’m feeling pretty good about the debugability of what I’m working on at work right now. A combo of
- python. code.interact and pdb for the win.
- no frontend server state. er, excessive memcachery.
- some quality abstractions. back pat, back pat.
means I can just hop on a prod box and just debug away in python.
Play
ranting at 30k feet
I hate code cruft. The remnants of code that might have been used at some point but are no longer in operation. It’s not just some weird OCD thing, the maintenance pain is quite real. As are the effects on development time. For many languages you can use static analysis tools to detect and remove unused code, but not for you Mr CSS. Maintaining CSS is the opposite of awesome.
For any random CSS rule, it’s too difficult to determine where the rule is being used or what depends on it. You see, you tend to use css classes to either annotate nodes or style them. You refer to css anywhere you generate or reference html. For web applications this means you end up referencing CSS classes in:
- Server side code that generates static html. These references likely live in whatever templates your framework uses. Or maybe you’re generating html by hand.
- Javascript. The terrible place. Maybe you’re using some javascript templating system, maybe you’re creating DOM nodes by hand. Maybe you’re doing both. You’re probably also manipulating nodes to change CSS classes dynamically.
The sum is that you’ve got references to class names and parts of selectors all over the place with no good way to tie the relationships together. A quickie solution is to name selectors so you can at least ack your source tree for references to them or parents. For whatever reason, this doesn’t really work in practice… so here I am grepping for ‘title’. Maybe it’s in some ${”) somewhere. Most likely it’s not.
You should know that there’s a pretty decent solution that some Google projects use internally. It requires a certain amount of discipline but gives back quite a bit in return. Someone should open source this. *cough
September 2009
1 post
August 2009
2 posts
July 2009
7 posts
@cw (c dubs) sent me this handy guide to my apartment earlier today. It’s true, I still have nothing. Hopefully this will no longer be the case come, um, two weeks from now. But there are exciting1 developments so allow me to enumerate.
Zipcar rocks my world. It allowed me to drive all over Oakland today. Getting furniture upholstered as well an espresso-fueled Target run. I came close to buying plants for the roof deck, but decided to worry about it later. I did end up buying lots more cleaning supplies.
Phone numbers are ten digits, not seven. Peoples, please stop giving out seven-digit phone numbers, I don’t know how to call them. xoxoxo.
My first official non-spam, non-philly-cheese-steak-delivery-free-free-free mail was from netflix. The movie? Special. Worthy of a first mail? Unclear.
I almost always want to go to eastward toward Valencia when walking out of my apartment. Even though Liberty runs through Guerrero, the street is broken at that intersection. Specifically, there’s a median in the way and no cross walk. Google Maps doesn’t show this very well, but here’s a street view. This forces me to jaywalk2 every single day. Please do not alert the authorities.
Bevmo is kind of incredible. I had no idea. So much selection.
@shellen demoed brizzly today. Sign up if you want in on the betaalpha.
Junipero is tasty tasty stuff.
The new Royce EP is also good.
As is @evan’s cassandra overview.
And slaughterhouse.
Exciting is a very very strong word True story, the word Jay describes an inexperienced person
