Photos

Inspired in part by Schockwave Rider’s^WP Kate, I just redid my wall to mark a new stage in my life. Here’s the result (click on it to see notes on each picture). I will explain some of them in more depth next week, for now, I’m quite proud with how it went out, I like it.

On a sidenote, here’s an iibb: Flickr’s on-picture notes were, and still are, a stroke of genius, but by now one should be able to embed a picture together with its notes into another page, akin to how one embeds YouTube videos.

Some weeks ago I was very interested in folksonomies because I was trying to build yet another one (though a political one at that). During my journeys I found out that Del.icio.us has a special kind of tag for filetypes—system:filetype:FILETYPE_HERE. Mixing it with the popular tag, I found many truly wonderful media shards for the filetypes that came to mind—mp3, jpg, jpeg, pdf, gif, png, mov.

Here they are, lest time forgets:

Supongo que uno no es realmente un blogger hasta no publicar un error en los MSM, asi que aqui les va uno que encontre hoy en la portada del Publico de ayer Sabado 8 de Julio.

With this in mind, enjoy the surprisingly thoughtful (verbal abuse is an art form, as Borges himself once wrote about), unrelenting Washington Post article on Britney. Here some teasers:

”...one thing led to another, and cartoon death was born.”

Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast

Reading processors

Trying out some information-design ideas inspired by Doug Engelbart,

I’m just so much interested in.. the kind of capabilities this perceptual machine we have in our brain. Like one thing I really, really want to try that I never had the resources, and part of it was that I didn’t understand grammar well enough, I’d like a parsing processor going that parses your sentences, and then it gives you the option of having the different parts of speech in different color or different brightness. And I’m just intuitively certain that if you started reading that way that this machinery would start adapting to it and pretty soon you’d be reading faster with more comprehension than if you had monocolored, monosized, etc. Things as they’re now. That’s the kind of thing that the computer aids can really really help you. So tell me if anybody can try it. Let me try it.

Doug Engelbart, ITConversations: Large-Scale Collective IQ

, (and the koan “what is to reading what a word-processor is to writing?”) I came up with two text-transformations: parts-of-speech coloring,

and spacing (pdf),

What do you think about them? Did they help you? Did they confuse you? Assuming that a “reading-processor” could apply such transformations instantly and perfectly (there’s a leap of faith) to whatever you read, would you use them?

A couple of months ago a prim little supermarket called Merkabastos opened 2 minutes away from my house. The store has been deservedly a hit around the neighborhood and now it battles with the oh-so-common problem of finding parking space for its customers.

Enter a pretty much vacant lot right across the street. Thru the years I’d seen it remain unused until some years ago it began to store construction machinery, and some years later they put a billboard on it (whose first customer, I might add, was the table dance on the other side of the beltway).

Anyway, what was bound to happen, happened: the Merkabastos management are renting the place as a parking lot for their customers and I find it amusing to think that the owner of the lot didn’t need to lift a finger to start earning a rent for her barren property.

Local Red Cross ads¹ (there are several versions of’em) are really good this year:

They make me think of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s sad, true words: “Death hurt us, so we will unmake Death. Let that be the outlet for our anger, which is terrible and just.”

¹ Their website’s flashy welcome is, alas, hideous.

I found this out in the Wild Wild Web and am not able to ascertain the author¹, which is a shame since she’s a genius:

¹ All I know is they probably come from ZatteVrienden but I don’t grok Dutch.