Like most everyone I know, my New Year's plans completely failed to materialize this year. Between everyone being scattered about the US, and drug connections falling through, I don't know anyone with a decent gameplan. Tonight will most likely fail to develop into anything more than a couple pints.
Of course, I should have expected this.
As everyone knows, New Year's Eve in New York always sucks. All of the parties thrown by promoters will cost you $150 (minimum) by the end of the night, so you just end up going to a couple of your favorite bars with your closest friends.
Which is exactly what you'd do if it were any other Friday night, except that tonight you have to fight your way through the tide of plastered bankers and their Hoboken brides. That, and everything you try to do costs twice as much.
What's even sadder is that it's been a year since last New Year's, which I spent on a friend's farm in West Virginia:
Exactly one year ago I had just finished helping to erect a 20 ft. tall bonfire (built around an incredibly dry bale of hay that we pulled out of the barn):
At midnight we lit it:
Maybe that was enough fun for two years. Almost heaven.
Okay I just stumbled onto your blog and I want to leave comments in almost every post because you blog about just the most beautiful, interesting things ever. (But I know old comments sometimes are overlooked.)
But yes, the pictures, the ideas, everything is fabulous. Like the bear and plane, that was one of my favourites. and the copper ball.! You get my award for best blog discovered in the last minutes of 2004. (and hopefully there is much more to come for 2005!)
Google and the billions of sources that back it up, say the only difference between gray and grey, is that the latter is preferrable to the British, and Americans tend to go with the prior.
Which saddens me a little, because I've always considered them different colors entirely.
Gray with an A: Warm Grays
Grey with an E: Cool Greys
Today, the MIT Technology Review posted an interesting article about Adaptive Camouflage. AKA: the shit the Predator had. I particularly like the revelation that shadows are the biggest hurdle towards simulated invisibility, it's appropriate somehow.
We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes. Please visit www.apple.com/itunes.
We are pleased to announce that all CoverFlow technology and intellectual property was recently sold to Apple. It has been incorporated into the latest version of iTunes. Please visit www.apple.com/itunes.
Bloc Party just recently signed to Vice Recordings for US distribution. Which pretty much means that in a couple months you'll be entirely sick of their addictive Les Savy Fav-via-London sound. Enjoy them now, while you have a chance.
I've been trying to remove this nail from a brick wall that runs the length of our apartment for nearly four months now. Upon hearing this, my brother laughed condescendingly and announced that within 10 minutes he'd have it out. An hour, two crow bars, a hammer, a sculptor's mallet and a hack saw later, it finally came out.
A ball of copper wrapping paper I offered the cats (they subsequently neglected it), and a plate I had to install in our floor (you could see into the loft below us, they could also see up into ours).
Pitchfork Media, the somewhat fading, but still totally useful, website of choice for indie rockers nationwide, has again published their 50 Best Albums of 2004. Like the Other Muisc Year End Recap, it's an awsome list of what you might want to download.
"Every facet, every department of your mind is to be programmed by you, and unless you assume your rightful responsibility, and begin to program your own mind, the world will program it for you." - Unknown
Clearly, the internet is a great way to waste time. One good thing to do, is to try and find people you know on Polaroid Scene, which as of January 1st will relocate to The Cobra Snake.
Rouge Amoeba announced today, a new applcation called Slipstream that will allow you to stream audio from any application to an AirPort Express. It should ship in early 2005.
My friend Aaron asked a really good question last night: Why aren't we lining the interiors of our homes with solarvoltaic materials, in addition to the more accepted practice of applying panels to the exteriors of our houses?
We use a considerable amount of resources, both material and monetary, generating the artificial light by which we illuminate our interiors, and a large amount of that energy is wasted as those photons bounce around our apartments. Only a miniscule fraction of the photons we make every day actually land in our retinas, right? So, why not harness all those stray photons, convert them to electrons via transparent solarvoltaic films on our walls, furniture, etc., and then use those electrons to power the lights in the first place?
It sounds like a responsible and signifigantly more efficient way to illuminate and power our lives to me.
1) the amount of photons within the house, even when heavily lit is miniscule compared to the amount oustide on a sunny day. but it might be enought to run small appliances (calculators, clocks, etc.)
2) bouncing photons make for bright settings even if they are "wasted" - that's why a sunny day on earth is so wonderfully bright and colorful, and yet every day in space is dark (no bouncing photons) except when looking directly at the sun (not recommended). so snatching up the extra photons would make the room "darker" in the same way a black wall would. that being said, im still up for capturing those rascally little wasted photons.
what i'd also be interested in seeing are floors with springs underneath them that convert mechanical energy into electricity. Not so springy as to make walking weird or difficult, but just enough so that all my nightly trips to the bathroom might power the next mornings coffee. or shoes with springs to lengthen my i-pod battery life.
Zuga Kousaku's screen saver Full Color Bossa is perhaps the most beautiful I've ever seen.
For those of you still on Windows, here's a little something for you: The Thief.
I hate constantly having resin and ash build up on my lighters after extinguishing bowls with the side of them. The heat from snuffing the bowl melts the plastic a little, so every little fleck of ash becomes permanently trapped on the surface of the lighter. It's filthy, let alone indiscreet.
Instead, I propose a disposable lighter that has a little metal dish embedded into the side of it. The dish would be a little over 3/4" in diameter, so that it would fit nicely around a standard bowl, and would be about 1/8" deep. The metal would help absorb heat, and would be easy to clean with a little Goo-Gone, and the dish would be deep enough to keep your hands and pockets untainted between cleanings.
It couldn't add more than a fraction of a penny to the cost of each lighter, right? The Brits have their Clippers, why can't we develop these?
Heather's folks gave me an AirPort Express for Christmas, and this thing is life-altering. I cannot convey enough just how amazing it is to browse through 50 gigs of music, and then summon to life RZA's beats or M83's strings. Technology is indeed approaching the transparency of magic.
Is it just me, or has the word "Crisp" started to really catch on in the mainstream?
I feel like I hear it every other day now, be it on a bus or on a blog.
Definitely the new "Tight".
I rarely remember my dreams.
I only have a chance if I wake up in the middle of one.
I tend to only remember the stunning ones.
It was a deep blue evening, and my family, Heather and I were swimming in a playful ocean.
Then something changed.
And the water lost its energy, losing its froth and calming to a deep black.
It was by far one of the weirdest sensations I have ever felt.
Good old Bushwick. I used to live there. At the Morgan stop on the L. The lofts on 250 Moore street. I think they were called Bush Gardens or something. Ah, the memories. Life Cafe delivers. It's the only place that was any where close to us. Good luck on your quest for delivery.
Hey man, no idea if you'll get a notification of this comment, but I'm moving to Bushwick next week and I wonder if you've had any luck finding a service in the intervening years since you posted this. If so, a tip on where to look would be greatly appreciated.
Other Music, considered by many to be New York City's authority on indie rock and bedroom electronica, has once again unleashed their free Year End Recap. It's basically a 30-page list of all the things you wish you had downloaded in 2004, but didn't know about.
In related news: Acquisition is a billion times better than LimeWire.
Briefly showered.
Removed a possible source of tetanus from our floor.
Took the train to Bloomingdales.
Bought 80% of our Christmas presents.
Walked a couple avenue of blocks, to a couple of other stores.
Took the train to lunch.
Ate curry.
Train home.
Did a week's worth of dishes.
Cleaned the house.
Did 5 loads of laundry (fixed broken dryer by beating it with a hammer).
Wrapped said presents.
Folded said laundry.
Made the bed.
Heather's family is landing at LaGuardia in a couple hours.
Man, your blog is very colorful. I loved the pictures you posted. I don't go to people's blog that often but there are times when I do and I think your blog is one of the coolest.
Matt Siber has a fairly articulate explanation of the concepts behind his work "Floating Logos" on his website, though I think the photographs alone communicate his intentions quite quietly and quite beautifully.
Can you hear fluorescent lights?
I can.
All the time.
They all sound a little different from one another.
But in general, it's a high-pitched sawtoothed buzz.
Not the rough, lower buzz of a broken fixture.
Or of flickering tubes in the subway.
That, I know you can hear.
I think I'm on the autistic spectrum. But I wouldn't say I have autism. That diminishes the struggle that autists face in this society. I'm pretty functional, far more so than most with Asperger's...
Still, I exhibit a lot of classic symptoms: slight face blindness, inability to read fiction, obliviousness to song lyrics, lack of eye contact, loud talking, obsession with pattern, etc...
If you haven't seen it lately, it looks like Jason's online photography portfolio has had a pretty thorough update. Lots of new East Village antics, starring the usual players.
Bloodwars is a online graff magazine that boasts an astonishing 14 free issues. Each a nearly 50 page PDF.
PDF delivery of self-published artists' books and magazines is a distribution model that's on the come up. Especially once PDFs wrapped in RSS work well, and art works are readable on portable devices via Podcasting.
The City of New York has recently introduced a new feature on nyc.gov, The New York City Map Portal, and it might just be the single greatest navigational tool to befall New Yorkers since Metrocard-sized subway maps.
Not only will it show you where the subway stops are (unlike Mapquest or Citysearch), but it will even show you which building you are searching for, who owns it, and all of their violations with the New York City Department of Buildings.
Why aren't there any dual-screen laptops available?
How much could an additional touch-screen LCD really cost? $500, max. That's not much to pay for all for the added benefit of a second display. I'd pay it.
Hardware wise, all you'd have to do is encase a touch-sensitive LCD under some sort of space-age, diamond-hard, crystal-clear acrylic. Something like the shit that space helmets and submersibles are made out of.
Software wise, Apple's set. OSX already has support for dual displays, with both side-to-side screen extension and screen mirroring, and for handwriting recognition via Inkwell.
When closed, the external display would show you your standard desktop and applications that were augmented to work well with a stylus. Upon opening the laptop, the desktop would slowly fade out on the external display and fade in on the standard internal display. As the external display faded from the standard desktop view, it would fade into one of many user-definable displays.
Some options include:
Having it run an Open GL screensaver.
Having it display a message to the folks across the library.
Having it change color to indicate that you have received new mail, or that your stocks are up (much like the brilliant Ambient Orb).
Viewing iTunes visualizations.
Playing games of Battleship.
Etc.
The options are limitless. And, that's not to even mention the benefits of a well designed tablet.
i like to light things on fire too!
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