Saturday, May 22, 2004 Saturday, May 22, 2004... are these stereoscopic views of Lake Mahopac. It's a little more crowded these days.
8:35:22 PM # Google It!
categories: Place
Friday, May 21, 2004In "High-Tech Bibliophilia," his review of the Seattle library, Paul Goldberger writes,
I thought of the Carrère & Hastings building often as I walked through the Seattle library. Two buildings could not possibly look less alike, but both were born of a marriage of earnestness and opulence. When the library on Fifth Avenue was finished, in 1911, a grand library that was free to the public was still a fresh, almost radical notion, and the architecture was intended to give it gravitas. In the same way that McKim, Mead & White designed the original Pennsylvania Station to confer a kind of nobility on the act of entering and leaving the city, Carrère & Hastings expected the public library not only to house books but to dignify the act of seeking them out.
The New York Public Library has two things the Seattle library doesn't: the front steps, and Bryant Park.
Meanwhile, Seattle has a cheese grater.
9:19:48 PM # Google It!
categories: Place
For Better or Worse, on the question, How could she make her feelings more obvious?
7:53:01 PM # Google It!
Jon Udell remarked yesterday on the differences between The New Yorker's fawning review of the new Seattle Public Library and Keith Pleas's brutal assessment of its usability.
Bravo, Keith! The New Yorker and its readers don't know it yet, but architecture criticism is (or should be) forever changed by what you've done here.
Daniel Berlinger counters that there is more to architecture than usability, but remarks, Thank goodness buildings learn.
The thing is, buildings are terribly hard to change. The physical world is not as plastic as the mind, and so we mold our use to the building, rather than correcting the structure to fit our use of it.
I'm on the other side of the country, so must rely on others' impressions of the building, on their words and pictures to tell me about how the structure feels. Yet when I look at these images, I want to flee home, and find comfort in my couch.
This is not a building that wants patrons.
(Well, at least one of the floors is impressive.)
5:36:48 PM # Google It!
categories: Place
Thursday, May 20, 2004Larry Staton, Jr., passed on James Maule's excellent essay on gasoline prices, to read while filling the tank with $30 of regular unleaded.
I'm curious. At what price do people stop buying the higher octane mixes, and switch to regular?
4:43:25 PM # Google It!
Hello.
You don't know me, but I use your product. It works great, except for a poor design decision you made in regard to downloads.
When I download a file, you first save that file to a temporary spot. After the download completes, you then copy it to where I told you to save the file.
There are a number of problems with this approach.
I can understand the belt and suspenders approach to downloading files, but please move the damn thing. Don't copy it.
Thanks.
4:00:18 PM # Google It!
The Journal News reports that the town of New Castle, which includes the hamlets of Chappaqua and Millwood, is planning to require that commercial buildings in the hamlets include second-floor apartments.
The proposed law, which could change as it is discussed over the next several months, would set minimum height requirements of two stories and 30 feet for buildings in the hamlets and require the stores to stay on the first floor.
Sounds like a good plan.
9:10:12 AM # Google It!
categories: Place
Wednesday, May 19, 2004The CWA See-N-Say is hilarious. Meanwhile, the union has announced that they'll be striking for four days, starting at 00:01 on Friday. The job action is to emphasize their demand for access to jobs in growth areas. They do not want to be stuck in the dead-end PSTN jobs.
Think of the union as a contractor, which it essentially is, in competition with construction teams from Level3, with call centers in Bangalore, with repairmen from Radio Shack, though not with Accenture. Think of yourself as a free agent. Can the union compete with bids from those companies? Can you compete with the consultant?
Why not?
(Whether or not this company should seek outside providers for certain operations depends on what this company is.)
4:49:09 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry
Denise Howell has signed up for teaching her tot sign language. Our first made great use of the sign for "more."
I think it is interesting that we, humans, equate an inability to communicate with the lack of intelligence. This shows in our language, in words such as barbarian and dumb, and in how we treat manglers of it. We think in words so we focus on them, when there are so many different ways to talk. The parent learns to communicate with her child as much as the child does with her parent.
And that's a wonderful feeling!
11:42:48 AM # Google It!
categories: Language
Tuesday, May 18, 2004LazyWeb, don't fail me now! Fuck LazyWeb.
Q: What plays audio/qcp files?
A: An audio/qcp file is a Qualcomm PureVoice audio file. Qualcomm provides a PureVoice converter to turn the format into a WAV file, which can be played by pretty much anything.
The sound quality is awful, but what do you expect from a phone? jwz discusses using the converter to move sounds to your phone. You can attach a voice memo to an SMS message to get it off of your phone, but not if you make the audio first.
4:38:27 PM # Google It!
What you want is not often what you can afford and what is available. I want to visit the moon, but I don't think that will happen soon enough. When we were looking for our house, the search took most of the Spring of 1999. The housing stock available was either too small, too expensive, in a neighborhood we didn't like, too heavily taxed, or just plan ugly.
CoolTown Studios discusses what the citizenry wants in a home. Survey says, they want to walk. Fannie Mae says a great neighborhood is more important than a great house. The market says that demand is so high that people buy anything they can get their hands on. There is not enough supply, and new homes are built large and far away. Or, as a commenter at Brad DeLong's writes,
Fact: the US population is growing by an estimated 3 million plus annually. In 8 boom states, growth is over 2% a year.
Fact: most of that growth is concentrated in a few dozen cities.
Fact: the only place to build in these high-growth regions is out in the boonies.
Fact: gas is getting more expensive by the day, commute times are skyrocketing, and everyone wants to live near scarce public transport (but no one wants "them" to build new stations or lines near existing housing stock).
Result: inner suburbs of big cities, especially those handful of places with good public transport, walkable streets, safety, amenities AND good schools are golden. Prices there will never go down, but the rate of increase will slow to the single digits, maybe even (shocker) below 5% in the near future.
Those are some numbers I'd like to validate before placing a bet.
3:46:50 PM # Google It!
categories: Place
From the I-have-an-online-column-but-that's-not-trendy-enough Department we find that Holden Lewis, of Bankrate.com, writes Mortage Matters, which, in the course of providing helpful news and information about the mortgage market, somehow forgets to provide item-level URIs so I can pass the news on to my cronies. And bankrate engages in the odious practice of wrapping out-bound hyperlinks in bankrate frames.
However, there are two interesting pieces of note. First,
Economist Brad DeLong has a friend who is buying a house outside Manhattan. In his weblog, DeLong has one bit of advice: Get a fixed-rate mortgage, regardless of what Alan Greenspan says. (The Fed chief said a couple of months ago that more home buyers should consider adjustable-rate mortgages.)
In the comments responding to DeLong's posting is a passage that should be engraved in stone. Reader K Harris writes, "Are you considering an ARM because you can't afford the fixed-rate mortgage? Buy a cheaper house."
And secondly,
BUBBLE?: Who will suffer when the housing bubble pops? Not publicly held home builders, writes Daniel Gross in Slate. The nation's big home builders have learned lessons from the past and aren't building vast tracts of speculative housing. Instead, they start building when a buyer signs on the dotted line. So if a housing bubble pops, they won't be forced to sell tens of thousands of spec houses at reduced prices.
Why do I care about this bubble? Because we're putting our house on the market.
12:46:10 PM # Google It!
Monday, May 17, 2004I'll second Martin Geddes's recommendation to sell telephone numbers directly to the public.
Telephone number portability requirements reduce the ability of the carriers to use the customer's dependence on the number as leverage to retain the customer. Perhaps I'm not steeped enough in regulatory affairs to understand the logic of requiring number portability without explicitly stating that the number belongs to the buyer.
Regarding the value of some area codes over others, the 212 area has a certain cachet. When I was a student at Fordham, it was well-known that you stood a better chance that the sweet thang you met downtown would call you, because it seemed like you lived in Manhattan. Manhattan numbers were worth more than the outer boroughs; the Bronx was just lucky, for a while.
11:14:20 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry
After sharing a cellular phone with my wife for years, I finally took the plunge and got a line for myself. The new hardware, an LG VX6500 is feature-rich, which means that in the week I've had the phone, I've spent more time taking pictures and messaging than talking. And Verizon likes that.
But shouldn't I be supporting my employer? Sure, I'd love to do that. But competitors lose on three counts here:
Would the triple distraction of voice, Internet, and video help? Not in the least: We are TiVo.
10:19:15 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry
