Monthly Archives: July 2005

In “Lost in Translation: IA Challenges in Distributing Digital Audio,” Boxes and Arrows (June 15, 2005), Dan Brown writes On the other hand, a virtual environment enables behaviors unimaginable in the physical world. Wouldn’t it be great if I could … Continue reading →

One of the considerations with the location of a house is which school district it is in. In some states, determining the school district is easy: it’s coterminous with the political unit, such as the city or county. In New … Continue reading →

National Geographic has an excellent documentary based on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel now playing on PBS. I suggest telling the TiVo to catch it for you.

I spent the majority of today installing an enterprise-class document management system’s client. Now, I get a request to file my request for x electronically. This is just too funny. To understand, you need to know that the request form … Continue reading →

Can you imagine a world where the supply does not respond to the demand? I can. It’s called in-house software.

John Lienhard, in his essay Fusang, talks about the Chinese discovery of the Americas. The Chinese were very isolationist, 1500 years ago. China thought the outside world was benighted and uninteresting — to be avoided and sealed off, not sought … Continue reading →

Is procrastination a learned behavior, or genetic?

I have to wonder in what world industry analysts live. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel article on broadband prices’ dropping to dial-up levels discusses the End of Internet Access as We Know It: “At some point, we may see dialup disappear – … Continue reading →

We should have such children! And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college … Continue reading →

Rick Ochoa pointed out Planarity, a simple game by John Tantalo at Case-Western Reserve University. All you have to do is align the vertices so that no edges overlap. Good luck!

Via Ernie the Attorney we find that the Congresscritters have the mistaken impression that they are there to do something. In the instant case, it’s H. R. 3073, a bill to rid Congress of that pesky Supreme Court, in which … Continue reading →

Joe Gregorio‘s post, A World Made of (Well-Designed) Cities, points to two interesting pieces: Tim O’Reilly’s reprint of a Stewart Brand lecture on urbanization, and a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy presentation, Visualizing Density (which he found by way of … Continue reading →

I’ve come up with what I hope is a practical application of podcasting: love notes. Secretly download the new version of iTunes and subscribe to the love notes feed. Synchronize with the Significant Other’s iPod. Wait for her astonished call … Continue reading →

Via Eric Hancock, I learn that Apple appears to be caching podcasts. This is a damn fine idea. Eric wonders, It should be relatively easy for Apple to allow publishers to opt out of Apple caching. Well, yes, by golly, … Continue reading →