work/space

A week or two back, I noticed an oddity in the confirmation messages I get from PayPal after they've processed a funds transfer: Toward the end of the message, PayPal tells me that I can click on links in the message to see my monthly account statement. Here's a crop of what I see:

The messages are, as far as I can tell, legitimate PayPal emails--they come shortly after I actually log into PayPal and complete a transaction, and they're the only confirmation I get from PayPal that my transaction has completed. Does PayPal really think I'll click on a link URL that starts with SECURE.UNINTIALIZED.REAL.ERROR.COM? Perhaps this is some elaborate phishing scam, or PayPal checking to see how gullible is customers are. Or Apple Mail is processing the link in an odd way before displaying it. In any event, it seems to contradict all that advice PayPal and parent company eBay give users about avoiding scams.

I thought this might be a one-time thing, a bug in a server somewhere. But it's happened both times I've transferred funds in the last month. And I haven't, obviously, clicked that link. Ever.

Posted by johndan at 11:22 PM | Permalink

From Overheard in New York (including the subject line above):

Six-year-old boy: Words, words, words, words! One day, there will be no words.

Seven-year-old sister: That will be a beautiful day.

--2nd Ave & 7th St

[via Overheard in New York]

Posted by johndan at 01:47 PM | Permalink

In "Write Me a Love Letter in Mrs. Eaves Ligatures," Squid and Beer considers (based on personal experience) the use of Comic Sans in email .sigs as a serious romantic incompatibility marker:

I was having dinner with the aforementioned Matthew a couple weeks ago when this topic, and that of an ex boyfriend came up. “He signed his emails with Comic Sans,” Matthew said. I nearly fell off my precariously perched barstool. “What?” he followed, “I thought you knew and liked him anyway.”

[via Typophile]

Posted by johndan at 12:15 AM | Permalink

John Curran's Great Diagrams in Anthropology, Linguistics, & Social Theory Flickr group is interesting browsing. Appears to mostly be clipped from a wide variety of sources (a Far Side cartoon about anthropologists, the much-reproduced Post Modern Toasties, a model of face-work based on Goffman, etc.).

Posted by johndan at 05:39 PM | Permalink

For about six months, shortly after a quick cycle of hard drive upgrades, the keyboard and trackpad on my MacBook Pro have occasionally frozen. Last spring I backed it up and erased the hard drive, took it apart, checked all the connections, and restored everything. No luck. The lockups were getting worse, until last week it would sometimes freeze up through reboots seven or eight times before it'd boot in workable shape. Then I wiped the hard drive and rather than just restore the full drive from backup, I installed a new version of the system and only copied over the Documents folder, then went through the twenty-hour process of resinstalling programs from scratch, on the off-chance that there was a scrozzed prefs file somewhere.

No luck. So yesterday I wiped the hard drive again, reinstalled the OS from the install DVD, and today took out the forty-some tiny screws and re-seated all the connections. So far so good. But if that doesn't work, we're looking at using a hammer.

Posted by johndan at 01:16 AM | Permalink

Given our hectic schedules this summer, we were forced to squeeze our summer vacation into about eight hours in the backyard this afternoon. All things considered, it was actually a pretty nice vacation.

Posted by johndan at 10:21 PM | Permalink

The back of a delivery truck in front of me at a stop light this afternoon: Jax Genuine Cheddar Cheese Curls and Girard's Limousine Service.

Posted by johndan at 04:15 PM | Permalink

From the oddly named Hungry Man TV, the short film Tarantino's Mind. Nice.

A film buff tells a friend that he's finally broken "the code" - the mystery behind the character & story threads that bleed from one Quentin Tarantino movie or screenplay into the next. His friend is less than impressed. Starring Seu Jorge (The Life Aquatic) and Selton Mello (Tarja Preta). A short film by Brazilian directing duo 300ml.

Posted by johndan at 01:40 AM | Permalink

MSNBC appears to have unintentionally combined two unrelated news stories (a grizzly attack in Alaska and a woman committing suicide after her home was foreclosed on).

Or there's a very hairy Loan Officer with salmon on his breath somewhere in Alaska.

Posted by johndan at 06:21 PM | Permalink

My MovableType installation (which runs this weblog) is having issues with comments, so I've turned them off. Think of it as something like the times when you yell at stupid things on TV safe in the comfort of knowing that the people on screen can't actually hear you. If nothing else, you can picture thousands of spammers yelling impotently about viagra (a pun that was unfortunately accidental).

Posted by johndan at 08:27 PM | Permalink

Since it works over wifi and not bluetooth, the Remote app on the iPhone will control iTunes on the computer in my office even if I'm in the lab, around 300 feet away. (Possibly useful, I guess, as part of an elaborate prank.)

(BTW, the Remote app has my vote for the most useful development for the iPhone. 3G's irrelevant to me given the fact that I can barely get Edge coverage at my house; the nearest AT&T 3G is two hundred miles away.)

Posted by johndan at 07:11 PM | Permalink

Video of a mesmerizing but seriously creepy flock of birds.

[via Boing Boing]

Posted by johndan at 05:04 PM | Permalink

I linked to an early version of Matt Harding's website several years ago in an earlier incarnation of this weblog, but the current version is even better.

[via The Huffington Post | Raw Feed]

Posted by johndan at 07:35 PM | Permalink

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale has 11 pages from The Book of Accidents: Designed for Children (1831), a scared-straight sort of primer for small children on all the ways that they might be killed.

The Bull is a noble looking but ferocious and terrible creature; and when provoked he assumes the air of sullen majesty, and often tears up the ground with his feet and horns. They should be carefully avoided and never teazed [sic] by children. These two boys here seen had been taking a short walk, and were crossing the fields together, when they were pursued and one of them overtaken by the ferocious animal. After taking the poor boy on his horns, he tossed him high into the air, and catching him as he fell, tossed him up a again and thus continued to do until left for dead.

[via metafilter.com]

Posted by johndan at 01:40 AM | Permalink

Google has long been used as a method for gauging public opinion (I use it frequently decide on how to spell a word—the variant with the most hits wins). A trial lawyer in Florida is now using Google search data to defend a client against obscenity by defining community standards based on queries entered into Google by users in the defendent's community. As the New York Times reports,

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

This is why lawyers make the big bucks.

Posted by johndan at 12:45 AM | Permalink

According to the Telegraph, the Benrath Senior Centre in Düsseldorf set up a fake bus stop to help keep Alzheimer's patients from wandering too far. According to Franz-Josef Goebel, chair of an association that works with the Centre,

"They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home."

The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

"We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later and invite them in for a coffee," said Richard Neureither, Benrath's director. "Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave."

Brilliant usability strategy, a distant relative to the reminders and other attention-grabbing artifacts most people create around themselves (post-its, notes on the fridge, marginal comments)—Alzheimer's is an extreme case, but not categorically different from more typical, routine memory loss and corresponding need for reminding.

[via The Morning News]

Posted by johndan at 12:44 PM | Permalink

An overview to growing and harvesting creatives.

[via Noisy Decent Graphics]

Posted by johndan at 01:41 PM | Permalink

Tom Waits interviews himself at Anti's website.

Q: What is up with your ears?
A: I have an audio stigmatism where by I hear things wrong- I have audio illusions. I guess now they say ADD. I have a scrambler in my brain and it takes what is said and turns it into pig Latin and feeds it back to me.

Posted by johndan at 12:17 AM | Permalink

things magazine notes this odd story, a small chunk of an NYT article by Pico Iyer on jet lag:

One day in 1971, a woman called Sarah Krasnoff made off with her 14-year-old grandson, who was caught up in an unseemly custody dispute, and took him into the sky. In a plane, she knew, they were subject to no laws, and if they never stopped moving, the law could never catch up with them. They flew from New York to Amsterdam. When they arrived, they turned around and flew from Amsterdam to New York. Then they flew from New York to Amsterdam again, and from Amsterdam to New York, again and again and again, month after month.

They took about 160 flights in all, one after the other, according to the stage piece ''Jet Lag.'' They saw 22 movies an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again and turned their watches six hours forward, then six hours back. The whole fugitive enterprise ended when Krasnoff, 74, finally collapsed and died, the victim, doctors could only suppose, of terminal jet lag.

As Iyer notes, Krasnoff and grandson's story shows up in Jet Lag, a play by Jessica Chalmers. (Surprising that there's not already a DeLillo or Ballard novel or short story about about Krasnoff....)

[via things magazine]

Posted by johndan at 10:27 PM | Permalink

Kottke has, I'm assuming, many interesting things to say about the above graphic, but for me the graphic itself is almost more compelling without any accompanying text. In fact, so far I've actually avoided reading any of the other material in his post because I'm guessing that the text will explain what the figure means, and I rather prefer the sense of wild possibility that the figure currently suggests to me. Some things are better left as mysteries.

[via kottke.org]

Posted by johndan at 09:42 PM | Permalink

Posted by johndan at 12:02 PM | Permalink

I drive up to Churabusco occasionally just to see the sprawling wind farm installed this year. Something like eighty three-hundred-foot turbines. The picture doesn't even come close to how disconcerting it feels or the scale.

Posted by johndan at 04:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Pixies as ballet.

[via Boing Boing]

Posted by johndan at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It could be just that I'm worn out by this semester, but this "'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Becket" video is amazingly funny.

[via Fimoculous.com]

Posted by johndan at 05:12 PM | Permalink

I make it a policy to ignore most media coverage of politics, with the exception of meta-satire: The Lincoln-Douglas Debates of 1858 (Slight Return).

LINCOLN: Ahem, I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -- I do not expect the house to fall -- but I do expect slavery will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you love America this much (extending fingers), this much (extending hands slightly), or thiiiiiis much (extending hands broadly)?
LINCOLN: I think we covered this…
GIBSON: If I may interrupt…
LINCOLN: Please.
GIBSON: I noticed, Mr. Lincoln, that your American flag pin was upside down…
LINCOLN: Yes, the wind caught it. Now, as I was saying...
GIBSON: We get questions about this all the time over at Powerline and on Hannity’s talk show. Mr. Douglas has said this is a major vulnerability for you in the fall. So I’ll ask again – do you love America?
LINCOLN: (scowling with a forced smile). Yes.
GIBSON: If your love for America were ice cream, what flavor would it be?

[via Boing Boing]

Posted by johndan at 09:33 AM | Permalink

Posted by johndan at 04:23 PM | Permalink

(I have nothing to add to that title.)

[via metafilter.com]

Posted by johndan at 05:17 PM | Permalink

In which the author provides personal responses to search engine queries found in the work/space server logs.

03 Apr, Thu, 08:22:13 Google: background color of work space for best work

I decided to check in with the experts at Pantone, since any corporation that can build a multi-million dollar business on getting people to pay hundreds of dollars for chips of paint that hardware stores across the country give away for free must know something, right? They said it's Pantone 18-3943 (aka, "Blue Iris"): "As a reflection of the times, Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspect of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic." Cool.

03 Apr, Thu, 15:53:31 Google: johndan johnson
You know, there are a lot of days when I just want to throw in the towel and bag that whole "then a hyphen, then E-I-L-O ... no, O ... right, O-L-A ... No, the there are two L's, but there's an O in the middle. Right. That's close enough; most people don't even try to pronounce it. It's Finnish. You're welcome."

05 Apr, Sat, 05:30:14 Yahoo: WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY WORK SPACE DESIGN?
I don't really mean anything; I just named the weblog "work/space" (note the slash mark--it's edgy) because I was surprised to discover that Boing-Boing, Gizmodo, and Bitch, PhD were taken and I couldn't come up with many better alternatives.

06 Apr, Sun, 10:34:26 Google: "parent directory " /color climax/ -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums
I have no idea what the hell that means, and I feel a little dirty just for reading it.

Posted by johndan at 05:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In which the author provides personal responses to search engine queries found in the work/space server logs.

11 Mar, Tue, 13:16:27  Google: 3A
Bingo!

11 Mar, Tue, 17:09:44 Yahoo: on a long enough timeline the survival rate for everyone drops to zero meaning
If you think about this one long enough—could be seventy or so years—I'm sure it will come to you.

12 Mar, Wed, 17:15:12 Google: 3A
I said "Bingo" already. Come up and get your damned prize already.

13 Mar, Thu, 20:25:12 Google: "your company's app" and something happens
I think the site you want is www.thebusinessplanofanyweb2point0company.com

15 Mar, Sat, 07:29:38 Google: johndan eilola-johnson
I'm glad you asked that. It's "Johnson" then "Eilola," with a hyphen between them. So, "Johnson-Eilola," not "Eilola-Johnson." I appreciate you spelling "Eilola" correctly, though—that's rare.

15 Mar, Sat, 07:48:35 Google: johndan eilola-johnson
You're just yanking my chain now, aren't you? You're that damned 3A guy!

15 Mar, Sat, 22:41:18 Google: www.people.clarkson.edu/~johndan
Over there to the left a little—type the URL into that field instead. Happens to the best of us.

Posted by johndan at 11:50 PM | Permalink

Finalists for the 1st Ballardian Home Movies contest. You'll have to hit the site for the actual movies (YouTube), but here are some various quotes from judges on the winning entries (which, perhaps not surprisingly, sound exactly like what I might predict reviews of home movies based on JG Ballard would sound like):

A static shot, half composed of white, with red material intruding beneath. A seemingly random collection of sounds from talk radio or television are heard, slowly snatches emerge. Mopeds, a body found on a golf course. Murder on the roads, in the suburbs. “They shouldn’t be here,” claims a politician or letterwriter and as if to answer the listener appears to move away

Machine noise, loud and abrasive. A tool kit, saws, cutting tools. The slow reveal of a pile of Ballard titles leads you to wonder if here JG’s works are being recut, sliced, diced and served again. The Day of Creation is the final title to appear. The maker has taken Ballard and chopped him up.

This film chases its own tail, eventually disappearing into the black hole of inner space. Utterly beguiling.

CCTV-positioned footage of a seemingly empty street lined by lock-ups hiding ephemera, memory junk, yesterday’s crashes. Daylight as harsh as the artificial strip lighting. In a denial of creation we return to the water from which we emerged.

[via notes from somewhere bizzare]

Posted by johndan at 11:12 PM | Permalink

Web Zen this week covers architecture. Eyesore of the month, pop-up architecture from students at the Shimizu Lab, not fooling anybody ("a chronicle of bad conversions and storefronts past"), more. Above is Massaharu Asano's Ise Shrine from Pop-Up Architecture.

Posted by johndan at 11:31 AM | Permalink

About a month ago, I was in the drugstore (a large, upstate NY chain) and suddenly realized I was humming along to a track from Wilco's last album, which had apparently replaced the usual muzak playing over the store's PA system. Later that week, I was in the grocery store and a cut off Spoon's latest album was on. Earlier today, I was in the same grocery store and track from Sufjan Stevens' Illinois was playing.

As you age, the probability of your music coinciding with the ambient sounds of commerce approaches one.

Posted by johndan at 02:39 PM | Permalink

Posted by johndan at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This 8-bit video covers all the basics of how to behave in an Internet forum (mildly NSFW).

[via boing-boing]

Posted by johndan at 04:56 PM | Permalink

Admit it: You've always wondered what would happen if you suddenly found yourself in deep space with only a large blob of free-floating water and a tablet of Alka Seltzer. (Much technical talking up until about the 60 second mark, at which point all hell breaks loose.)

[via The Mediaburn Radio Weblog]

Posted by johndan at 10:56 PM | Permalink

A FilmFour documentary/retrospective about Clockwork Orange, primarily interviews + film footage). (NSWF if you're offended ... OK, probably just NSFW for most of you.)

Posted by johndan at 02:32 PM | Permalink

Posted by johndan at 01:02 PM | Permalink

The landscape urbanism bullshit generator constructs semi-random buzz phrases. Obviously satirical, but the output reminds me of Eno and Schmidt's Oblique Strategies for the theory set.

[via metafilter.com]

Posted by johndan at 12:03 PM | Permalink

The book version of Chris Marker's remarkable Le Jetée is apparently coming back into print [spoiler warning—although for this movie, it's probably not an issue]. Marker's short movie, best-known probably as the inspiration for Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, makes 12 Monkeys and Memento look like Cat in the Hat. That complexity and indeterminacy is either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you look at it. (I side with the former.)

[via Ballardian]

Posted by johndan at 05:53 AM | Permalink

In an ongoing effort to start things on fire figure out how electricity works expand my technical abilities, I'm building a Firefly tube amp, using John Calhoun's preprinted circuit board and instructions, along with something like 12,000 resistors, capacitors, tubes, and miscellaneous parts I don't know the functions of, ordered from electrical suppliers on the web. I have about four wires left to solder, but I'm avoiding those last steps because at this point, it's potentially an amp.

Posted by johndan at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A 1957 New Yorker article on a fourteen-year-old prodigy named Robert Fischer.

We sat down to watch what was going on. Young Fischer, whom we discovered to be a lanky lad with a mischievous, rather faunlike face, was playing against a stout, elegant man in his middle twenties—an Argentine named Dr. Dan J. Beninson, who, we were told, is scientific secretary of the United Nations’ Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. They were playing chess such as we had never seen before—making their moves with split-second rapidity, while exchanging banter with each other and the kibitzers, most of whom were of college age. Within a few minutes, they had finished one game and were launched on another, and Fischer was asserting, with a triumphant grin, as he pushed his queen, “You’re dead now.” “That’s what you think, Bobby, my boy,” Dr. Beninson answered, instantly bringing his bishop across the board—an unexpected stroke, apparently, since it caused young Fischer to clap a hand to his head and brought a burst of laughter from the kibitzers. Everybody seemed to be having a high time. Once, when Dr. Beninson lingered over a move for perhaps three seconds, Fischer threw up his hands in feigned disgust and groaned, “It’s no fun to play chess if you take all year over a move.”

There are a couple of other good Fischer links at the Kotke post I grabbed the above from.

[via kottke.org]

Posted by johndan at 11:32 AM | Permalink

I just spent 20 minutes locating and downloading six separate updaters for MS Office 2004 for Mac from Microsoft's website. I haven't even gotten to the "install and reboot" portion

Is this tortuous updating process (including at least one crucial update to plug a security hole) Microsoft's punishment for using a Mac? No wonder so many people run outdated and unsecure configurations on their computers.

Or maybe it's just me. I've also installed Windows on machines a couple of times recently and the process always included at least that much time trying to get automatic updating configured correctly. Which, in theory, would have automated updates if I could get it running. And maybe Apple's setup is no better for new users and I'm just thinking it's easy because I've been doing it for so long.

[Update: And like magic, two day's later a dialog box pops up on my computer to ask me if I'd like to install an Update to Mac Office 2004. Cool. If I'd known Microsoft was listening, I would have requested something more substantial, like a pony.]

Posted by johndan at 07:55 AM | Permalink

Another Design Observer link: Tom Manning uses the chaff text in spam (those chunks of randomly grabbed, meaningless words inserted into spam email apparently to confuse spam filters) to create oddball, surrealist comics.

Every day for two and a half weeks this past spring, I decided to create a comic strip based on a spam text I received that day. My anonymous and presumably automated collaborators supplied the words. I figured out how those words might translate into a daily strip. The email subject line provided the title of the comic, and the author's name was that given by the spammer. The result is a modern kind of surrealism that is hard to imagine without the strange magic of today's technology. Enjoy.

[via Design Observer]

Posted by johndan at 04:03 PM | Permalink

Web Zen this week covers design, including a link to The Director's Bureau Special Projects Idea Generator (show above). Click the center button to randomize a three-word title, then tweak as necessary by spinning the rims of the individual words. Sort of like Eno's Oblique Strategies, but—oddly—both a little less random (you can tweak them) and a little less focused (you aren't directed to actually do anything besides name a project).

Posted by johndan at 03:28 PM | Permalink

GetLoFi has the top three picks from their recent one-day circuit-bending challenge. Above is Squelchbox's YouTube clip of the process (and results) of his work on a Talk and Learn. Strange. In a good sort of way. The other two picks also have YouTube clips at the GetLoFi post.

[via GetLoFi ]

Posted by johndan at 02:45 PM | Permalink

I listened to part of this episode on mapping from This American Life a couple of weeks ago while driving into town on a Sunday morning, but forgot to post a link to the episode until I saw the post at Super Colossal. Among other things, the TAL episode had a nice interview with postmodern geographer Denis Wood (link to TAL Flickr set of Wood's maps; a link to the radio interview is in the Flickr set page overview section).

[via Super Colossal]

Posted by johndan at 01:35 AM | Permalink

Not so much inside jokes since they're pretty obvious, but one of the things I like about products designed for small, geeky user bases is their frequent use of ironic jokes. The FMR RNP preamp ("RNP" stands for "Really Nice Preamp") has in/out jacks on the back labeled "Guzintas" and "Guzoutas" (see above); the headphone gain knob on the Presonus FP10 goes to (you guessed it) 11.

They're not even really good jokes. And they're typically very small or otherwise obscured. The RNP panel above is on the back of the box; the label on the FP10's headphone knob is so tiny you have to squint to see it. Which (to me anyway), shifts them from unfunny into funny somehow. Or maybe it's just that they were so expensive (for my budget) that I'm looking for some reason to believe they're more sophisticated than they really are (or than I really am).

Posted by johndan at 02:51 AM | Permalink

Mister Rogers learns to play Donkey Kong. Really. "So he's a carpenter. That's why he'd be using a hammer, isn't it?"

[via metafilter]

Posted by johndan at 05:51 PM | Permalink