Archive for March, 2009
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[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 19, 2009 by admin in Technology
Thursday, March 19th, 2009Printers have feelings too you know
The other day, I heard a friend in an adjacent office talking to their printer. They were saying “C’mon, that’s it, that’s it” and occasionally tapping on something while they jiggled the paper tray. I said “Wow. Who’d have thought twenty years ago that one day we’d have voice-activated printers?” They stared at me blankly for a second and then busted up laughing. I added “and it only requires occasional percussive maintenance”. Why is it that even though the printing press was invented around 1450, they still can’t seem to produce a printer that simply does the single task appointed to it? If you’ve ever worked in an office, you’ve probably experienced the rage induced by cryptic messages like “PC Load Letter”, which is so commonplace that the movie Office Space included the well-known Going Away Present Scene, in which printer justice is finally served. The clip featured at left would go a long way toward explaining some of this phenomena; you might want to be careful how you treat your printer next time you’re frustrated. And also be careful how you word the notes you leave in a faulty printer at the office, especially if the problem is that an inkpen jammed the machine.
Detroit’s Real Renaissance Center
[ Comments Off ]Posted on March 18, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Wednesday, March 18th, 2009The Powerhouse Project Draws International Attention To Detroit
Usually when one mentions the words “Detroit” and “Renaissance” together, one is referring to Detroit’s Renaissance Center, four 39-story towers which were originally a Ford Motor Company development project in the early 1970′s and are now owned by General Motors. As someone who grew up in nearby Ann Arbor, with its tree-lined streets, PhD-educated cab drivers, and insanely overpriced real estate, I’ve always sadly thought of Detroit in the same way I might think of Beirut: a slightly scary, bombed-out city that I might have to pass through to go elsewhere. At the same time, I’ve always held some hope for the place, in spite of its history of corrupt mayors and urban blight. I’ve always though that if Cleveland can do it, so can Detroit. Which is why the Powerhouse Project excites me. Although a small project initiated by a handful of people, it’s gaining international attention thanks to groups like Amsterdam’s Detroit UnReal Estate Agency. The basic story is that Detroit couple Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope bought a run-down house in northern Hamtramck (let’s start calling it “NoHam”!) for $1900.00 with the intention of building a mini green power grid in the neighborhood. The project has snowballed a little, so they’ve gotten considerable positive press. To learn more, check out this piece at ModeldMedia.com, this NYT Op-Ed piece, or the WFUM Radio segment The Upside Of Foreclosures, which has both a transcript and an audio stream. You can also visit the Powerhouse Project web site. Let’s go, Detroit! With inspired thinking like this, maybe we can avoid the Bushvilles of Sacramento!
Your Dog Did His Duty, Are You Doing Yours?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 17, 2009 by admin in Editorial & Opinion
Tuesday, March 17th, 2009The Straight Scoop On Plastic Bags And Poop
It struck me yesterday as I was walking the dog and picked up his “business” with a plastic bag that the same Liberal Elitists who who got the whole poop-scooping movement rolling probably never considered the unintended consequences. I was curious. How many dogs are there in America, and how much plastic goes un-recycled because of this practice? Doing some rough math, based on the idea that I can squish a plastic bag down to about a one-inch cube, I determined that we waste enough plastic this way to fill the first 26 floors of the Sears Tower. Which, as you can see, forced me to create one of the worst info-graphics ever. The fact remains that in spite of tremendous improvements in America’s recycling behaviour, we still only recycle an estimated 2 percent of the plastic bags we use daily. San Francisco was one of the first communities to tackle this problem head-on, but real action remains feeble nationwide. Interested in keeping your consumer behaviour green in general? Another big offender is cell phones; consider selling your discarded phones to GreenPhone.com. They claim that for every phone they buy, they plant a tree. You can also make smarter choices in the first place; EnergyStar.gov has been around for ages, and has plenty of great resources for consumers. And for businesses looking for greener computer hardware, there are resources like EPEAT.
Visualizing Your Facebook Network
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on March 16, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, March 16th, 2009Four cool apps for graphically viewing your Facebook network
I’ve been fascinated with the visual mapping of networks of people ever since I ran across TheyRule.net in 2003. TheyRule is, on the surface, a fun, Flash-based way to see how the powerful and wealthy in America are connected. In their words, TheyRule “aims to provide a glimpse of some of the relationships of the US ruling class. It takes as its focus the boards of some of the most powerful U.S. companies, which share many of the same directors“. This kind of information mapping has come a long way since then (we’ve touched on Fleshmaps, Heatmaps, and Tag-clouds here before), to the extent that if you have a Facebook account, with the click of a button you can activate a variety of visual tools for sorting and viewing your network of friends. Visualiser, for instance, allows you to see how your contacts are connected to each other, and do filtering based on things like sex or relationship status. Facebook Mutual Friend Network Visualization seems to offer fewer sorting tools, but has a simple and attractive interface that shows friends as nodes that you can click on to change the focus of the network. FavMapper lets you explore a map of your friends’ favorite music, movies, and books with interactive animation, and lastly, TouchGraph Facebook Browser displays similar connections from your Facebook account, but does it based on the photos that friends have shared in their accounts.
Same Oldbama?
[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 15, 2009 by admin in Politics
Sunday, March 15th, 2009Is Obama The Next Jimmy Carter?
On occasion recently I’ve missed the simple message of terror and paranoia served up on a regular basis by the Bush administration. At least you felt like you knew where things stood. Although I got a definite kick out of the Democratic Party’s brief dalliance with making Rush Limbaugh the new GOP leader, it ultimately just smacks of politics as usual, and as a friend of mine pointed out yesterday, a candidate isn’t likely to get elected in this country unless they’re playing pretty nice with the existing (and frankly corrupt) Washington bureaucracy. All of which leaves me a little disillusioned; although my gut tells me that Barack Obama is a good man with good intentions, can those good intentions survive in the cesspool that is our nation’s capitol (and guidance from a guy like Rahm Emanuel who offers parenting advice like this), or will Obama end up being another Jimmy Carter?