Posts

Larry Lessing has thought the better of his Congressional run and decided to drop out.

Alex King posts about lowering the noise on Twitter. He suggests that Twitter change “What are you doing?” to “Say something interesting,” which works for me. The truth of Twitter is that it is many things to many people and the beauty of it is that you can mold the Twitter experience to your own tastes. If I want to follow people who treat Twitter like a shorter-form blog, I can, or if I want to follow coworkers who keep everyone abreast of what they’re working on up to the minute, I can do that as well. Ultimately we all get to decide who’s interesting to us, and limit our Twitter experience to only those people. As Russell Beattie points out, that’s a powerful thing. ...

Ed Ward laments the early demise of small magazines like No Depression, brought about in part by a restructuring of the postage rates for second class mail approved last year. Here’s how the new scheme works: The new rates, though, were bizarre: the more magazines you shipped, the less each unit cost, and smaller-circulation magazines were burdened with unreasonably higher per-unit costs, instead of everyone paying the same rate. But that’s what happens when you allow big business to write the laws. ...

Over the past decade or two, it’s been impossible not to notice the trend of people moving back into cities from the suburbs, and more recently, the rise of engineered walkable neighborhoods in suburban centers that emulate some of the best qualities of city life. Call it urban renewal if you like, or gentrification if you’re less sanguine about it, the trend is real and it’s certainly coming to a city near you. ...

In food as in everything, there are few simple answers. Everybody wants some heuristics to help them determine what’s good and in the food world, people look for terms like “organic” or “artisinal” or “local” and generally assume them to be shorthand for, “The person who produced this really cared about how it tastes.” Heath at Wooly Pigs shoots down that kind of laziness with vigor. First, a little background. Wooly Pigs is a small farm in Washington state that is the only producer of Mangalitsa pigs in the United States. Mangalitsa pigs originate in Hungary, and are much closer in lineage to wild boars than any other domesticated pig. In other words, he’s exactly the kind of farmer who benefits from people with fat wallets looking for easy heuristics to help them pick which food to eat. ...

To satisfy the clamoring from some commenters, I’ve installed the Ajax Comment Preview plugin. No longer will you have to wonder how WordPress is going to mangle your comments, just click on the “Preview Comment” button to find out.

Back in December 2006, Andrew Shebanow commented on the difficulty of creating a converter for Microsoft’s Office 2007 document format, which uses XML after Bob Sutor of IBM called it a one-way format due to its complexity. Based on some numbers posted a Microsoft explaining why it would take longer to release a converter for the Mac version of Office, Shebanow came up with this estimate of the effort required to build such a converter: ...

How do auto makers deal with problems where a parts on a car vibrate noisily? In some cases, they just add some weight to the part that vibrates. This is sort of a sneak preview of a post I’m working on about good hacks versus bad hacks, and how to tell them apart. And maybe another post on what a pain it is to lay out HTML forms using semantic markup in a fashion that works in all of the popular browsers. ...

I endorse Larry Lessig for Congress in California’s 12th district but only on the condition that he keeps blogging if he wins. Something tells me this is going to be a very well-funded Congressional campaign.

Talking Points Memo has won a Polk Award for legal reporting, specifically for breaking the story of the Bush administration’s purge of US Attorneys. The revelation that the Bush administration was firing US attorneys for political reasons ultimately led to the resignation of much of the senior staff of the Justice Department, including the Attorney General, and the reporters at TPM dug up the story by noticing a couple of anomalies and pulling the threads. ...