Hey, it's my first review on Cool Tools!
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
| Gadgets | Gear | Reviews
There are 10.3 million unemployed people in the United States, and I'm one of them.
For the last three years I've been working at DonorsChoose.org which as you all know provides educational resources for public school classrooms. Several months ago the Executive Director job changed. The regional ED's were no longer doing marketing, public relations, or teacher outreach -- in short, the stuff I most enjoyed. My staff was downsized. And I was going to be doing mostly development work.
Now I don't mind fundraising -- I've been at it for long enough -- but it wasn't why I joined DonorsChoose.org, and my heart wasn't really in it. So it was time to move on. (You should still totally give to them, though! Teachers need you!)
What's next? Well I've been doing more work for ImprovEdge, which uses improvisation to teach business skills. And I'm looking around for full-time employment -- there's a foundation job I've interviewed for, and a couple of other warmish leads. I get to spend more time with the boys. And there's all sorts of unfinished projects for me to continue to not finish.
Anyway, that's the Mike Employment Situation update. More news as events warrant.
| Unemployment
Mapping and visualizing music collections. I so want this! Too bad it's just thesisware at this point. Check out the demo video -- I especially like the feature that shuffles songs with smooth musical transitions.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Maps | MP3
Check out this Register story on human intervention in the Google algorithm:
Google this week admitted that its staff will pick and choose what appears in its search results. It's a historic statement - and nobody has yet grasped its significance.posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
Since the whois data on ishbadiddle.com opened up, I've had several databases thinking that I must be a business. Ishbadiddle has been offered a line of credit. Ishbadiddle was asked to take over Lehman Bros. 1 Today, Experian called me up:
Caller: Hello, is this Eesh... Badeedle?
Me: Who? [I don't usually get calls asking for Eesh Badeedle, and besides, I'm only on my third cuppa coffee.]
C: I'm trying to reach... [clearly struggling to pronounce Ishbadiddle, or figure out why any business would have any business calling itself that].... Eesh Badeedle.
M: [Finally connecting Eesh Badeedle to Ishbadiddle] Who's calling?
C: This is Experian. We're trying to update our business records for Eesh Badeedle.
M: It's not a business. It's just a website.
C: So there are no transactions involving Eesh Badeedle?
M: [Momentarily pondering what sort of transactions via this blog might qualify] Um, no. It's just a website.
C: It's just a website.
M: Yes.
C: OK. Would you like our toll-free number in case you have any questions?
M: No, not really!
[We wish each other a good day.]
1
Not really.
| They Make Phone Calls
Via Cynical-C
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
In past years I've liked Kiva gift certificates as holiday gifts. They avoid the deadweight loss of buying an actual gift, have the customizability of a gift card, and people can choose whether to lend the money out or just withdraw it and spend it.
But I'm annoyed by their new policy which says basically if you let money sit there too long, they're going to appropriate it as a "gift" to Kiva. This only happens under the following narrow circumstances, namely when a lender:
For many Kiva Lenders, the best part about lending is re-lending; $25 can be used to help multiple entrepreneurs over time.Some lenders haven't caught onto this part of the lending process, and funds from loan repayments are sitting idle in their Kiva Accounts, neither re-loaned nor withdrawn ... It seems a shame to us. Unused Kiva credit sitting idly in the system isn't helping entrepreneurs in the developing world
Part of why this annoys me is that I recently tried to make some loans and was unable to. Each time the loan would show up first as needing money then as fully subscribed. I actually wasted an hour on this. There were other loans that needed money, but they weren't the loans that I was interested in making, so I let my money ride.
I think it's good that Kiva is selective about the organizations it partners with, and understand that sometimes they'll have more money than loans to fill. But then why take the money from me?
I don't think I'll be giving more money to Kiva any time soon. The only question I have is whether I'll be pulling my current money out now, or turning it over and letting it ride once more.
posted this | this entry's link | 2 comments | Microcredit | Microlending
One of the consequences of being blog-free for half a year is the accumulation of old data -- bookmarks, feeds, ideas, reviews, etc. Normally when I'm facing an RSS feed with over 100 unread articles, I'll just give it up for lost and zero it out. It's the internet, right? There's always more of it. But today I started skimming through a year of posts from Things Magazine, a great source of interesting links. Here are a few things that caught my eye:
The History of Visual Communication. Antique Dental Instruments. I Love Typography. Twin Peaks, Then and Now. How Michael Finds Good Stuff on the Web. Douglas Coupland on Visual Thinking. Face Research. Morbid Anatomy. A Short History of Anatomical Maps. A Timeline of Lego Minifigs. The Evolution of the Front Page. The Green Knowe books, one of my favorite kidlit series, had a final book I didn't know about? The Paris Exposition of 1900. London Poverty Maps. UK Loneliness Map. New York's ugliest skyscraper. New York in Black and White. Digitally tracking nightlife in San Francisco. Fictional Cities and Towns. 72 Views of the Tower of Babel. Zeppelins! Fembots! The Circus! What can you buy for five dollars? Business cliches. Wal-Mart v. Starbucks. The pointless museum. A personal history of electronic writing. Suggested Donation, "a blog about Museums, Archives, and Libraries: and the poor suffering lot who work in them." 50 cult books. Survival tips for time travelling back to 1000 A.D. Throttling in Comics (a bit like Comic Book Bondage Cover of the Day.) How to Hack a Traffic Jam -- I've been using this method for a few years now, it's also safer and much calmer. PostCrossing -- get postcards from around the world, hopefully better than a chain letter promising same. Microtypography, Designing the new Collins dictionaries. The aesthetics of Star Wars, James Bond, and Bond Villains.
That is all.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Children's Books | Circus | Comics | David Lynch | Design | Ephemera | History | Imaginary Places | James Bond | Legos | London | Maps | New York City | Paris | Robots | San Francisco | Star Wars | Typography | Zeppelins
You can get some true randomness generated by atmospheric noise -- or, if you prefer, by radioactive decay, which would be more useful for deciding whether your cat is alive or not. Via MeFi
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Random | Web Tools
Anh Cao, first Vietnamese-American in the House, and apparently our Philosopher-Congressman: "Life is absurd but one cannot succumb to the absurdity of it." and "I truly espouse Aristotle's definition of virtue: To walk in the middle line."
David Paterson, Governor of New York State and, apparently, our Gubernatorial Comedian: "I ask all of you to turn your plate over. There may be a gold seal on the bottom of your plate. If you have that seal, you will be the next senator of the State of New York."
posted this | this entry's link | 2 comments | David Paterson | New Orleans | New York | Philosophy
I just used Amazon's Universal Wish List feature, which lets you put items from other non-Amazon stores onto your Amazon Wish List. I must say this is incredibly smart -- even if some revenues go outside Amazon, it still makes Amazon the central place to go. It's like the part in Miracle on 34th Street where Santa Claus convinces the salesfolk at Macy's to send their customers to Gimbel's if they have a better deal.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind
Mike generously invited me to post links here to my recent appearances on WNYC's Soundcheck with John Schaefer. I was interviewed on the show this past Friday, 5 December, for a recurring segment they call "Who's on Top, and Who Should Be" -- a rundown of current Billboard chart activity along with other music picks. (As you can imagine, this sort of geekery is right up my alley.)
The Friday segment (heard via streaming audio here, or download it via iTunes) was my third appearance on the show and my longest yet (about 23 minutes), and we covered a lot of ground: from record sales on Black Friday, including the underperformance by Kanye West and Guns n' Roses, to how iTunes is upending the old methods for releasing pop singles and promoting albums.
One of the nice things about WNYC is they keep old shows up on their website seemingly forever. Since Ishbadiddle was inactive when I appeared on Soundcheck over the summer, here are links to my appearances back in August and September.
Those were fun: In August, the first time I went on the show, I was on vacation in Croatia, and they reached me by e-mail; I did the show live by phone from a soba in an Istrian hill town. (Surreal!) They invited me on to talk about an Idolator column I posted just before leaving on the trip, about the 50th anniversary of Billboard's Hot 100. A month later, they invited me back to talk about another column I'd done about the music industry's attempts to kill singles and force consumers to buy albums.
For a laugh: note that in the August and December appearances, the hosts keep pronouncing my name moh-LAHN-fee (with the "a" sounding like "Evian"), rather than the correct, more pedestrian muh-LAN-fee (with the "a" like "can"). I love how these public-radio folks keep wanting to make my name sound more highfalutin than it is!
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | WNYC
Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77
When I started working at Union Settlement Association in East Harlem it was the organization's centennial year. We had all kinds of events and celebrations, including an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York that featured photographs by Helen Levitt and Bruce Davidson, who took pictures of East Harlem during the 1940s and 1960s respectively. We also got a grant for David Lee to take photos of present-day East Harlem.
At the final centennial event, we had several performers, including Johnny Colon and Odetta. Before the concert, Odetta and David were chatting, and when they had finished, she turned to us and said, "Do you know who that is? That's Bill Lee's son." Nearly everyone else in the world would have said "Spike Lee's brother." She went on to tell us that Bill Lee had played bass for her, but had to quit touring so he could go home and take care of his boys.
"They turned out OK," I joked. Yes, she said, they did.
| New York City | Obituaries | Odetta
The Ghosts of John Jay High. A short doc film from the perspective of the students at John Jay, the school on my block, a mostly-minority school in a mostly-white neighborhood. Via Frank.
posted this | this entry's link | speak your mind | Education | Park Slope | Race & Ethnicity
It's been an all-Harry Potter week here in the Everett-Lane household. The boys have "discovered" the series (I think a friend of Ben's was telling him about it) so we've been reading The Sorcerer's Stone, listening to the audiobook in the car, and watching the movie. They can't get through the books fast enough -- I had to explain that it took us ten years to find out everything that happens to Harry et al. (Incidentally, the concept of "spoiler" is hard to explain to a 5 and 7 year old. It's far easier just to answer their questions.)
So in re-re-reading the first book, a question occurred to me that hadn't before. Dumbledore tells Harry that the Stone was safe in the Mirror of Erised, because only one whose heart's desire was for the stone itself and not for its powers would be able to retrieve it. Anyone else would see themselves using the stone, not possessing it.
"It was one of my more brilliant ideas, and between you and me, that's saying something. You see, only one who wanted to find the Stone--find it, but not use it--would be able to get it, otherwise they'd just see themselves making gold or drinking Elixir of Life. My brain surprises even me sometimes..."
But when Quirrell looks into the mirror, he sees himself with the Stone, presenting it to Voldemort. So by Dumbledore's logic, Quirrell should also be able to retrieve the Stone, since he only wants it so he can give it away.
Possible explanations:
1) Quirrell is lying, and sees himself gaining immortality, gold, etc.
2) Since Voldemort is part of Quirrell, and Voldemort wants to use the Stone, then part of Quirrell wants to use the Stone, so merely gaining the Stone is not his heart's true desire.
3) Quirrell sees himself presenting the Stone to He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Blogged, but since V. is on the back of Q's head, he's really presenting to himself.
4) Quirrell can't get the Stone... because he's evil!
Your thoughts on this extremely important matter?
By the way, if you're wondering just how Ron played that chess match, this fellow was tasked with coming up with the game.
posted this | this entry's link | 3 comments
