Dish draining closet – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
From en.wikipedia.org, originally posted by Dustin Boyer.
Why the heck hasn’t the dish draining closet caught on here? It makes so much sense. Is just that you can’t store as many dishes in a dish draining closet as you can when they are dried and tightly stacked? If so, does that mean people have too many dishes?
Tomorrow, You Can Take Bike-Share for a Test Ride
from Streetsblog New York City. I am so glad that a serious bike share program is coming to NYC, I will definitely take a test ride.
Recently a friend of a friend asked to be put in touch with me, saying:
I’ve been trying to think of ways to raise money so I can purchase land, and I thought of your friend from (highschool?) who sued a few large corporations on his own.
I’m thinking about filing a lawsuit against large herbicide/pesticide companies (Monsanto)… I would use the settlement funds to reclaim land, and restore ecosystems.
This isn’t the first time that I’ve been approached by people who wanted to sue a corporation just like I did. Therefore I wrote a long, detailed reply, and I am publishing it here so that everyone hankering to sue a corporation can “benefit” from my experience. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer (yet) and this is not legal advice.
With no further ado:
Seeing Like A State: Why Strategy Games Make Us Think and Behave Like Brutal Psychopaths
Now that I think about it, I can be pretty thoughtless and cruel to my units in strategy games. Sometimes I will take care of my units’ lives, name them, and mourn their deaths, but other times I will simply use them as disposable cannon fodder. In real life, I am a Quaker, and it is disturbing to think that perhaps being placed in charge of a country can have a similar effect on your psychology as being placed in charge of units in strategy games.
“Bands are like marriages. Or maybe only good ones are. Who knows why a good one works, let alone why it stops working.”
William Gibson, “Spook Country”
A couple weeks ago I resigned from the internet startup that I founded and moved to Atlanta to work on, OpenHatch. (It may give you a sense of how complex and awkward this was when I tell you that Karen was hired as an intern and is still working at the company.) All that the interwebs need to know about this is that “I left to pursue other opportunities.” If you want to know more about why I resigned, I can tell you the story over a drink sometime, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why it reached the point where I had to resign. I’m reminded of a scene from Spook Country by William Gibson, when Garreth asks Hollis Henry why her band The Curfew broke up. Hollis says “Bands are like marriages. Or maybe only good ones are. Who knows why a good one works, let alone why it stops working.” I suppose you could say the same thing about startups.
Today is demo day, the day when the product OpenHatch has been building all summer is revealed to the press and potential investors. I have been invited by OpenHatch to attend, and I will be doing so, even though this is something of a bittersweet experience. If a startup is like a marriage, then this is like attending my ex’s wedding. I’m still on good terms with everyone involved, and I’m happy for them and I want them to be successful, but I can’t help but wish that I were the one getting married. Nevertheless, the launch of OpenHatch is something I put a lot of time and energy into, and I want to see how it turns out.
I will be liveblogging/tweeting/denting about the event as it happens, you can follow my updates here and on Identica.
So sorry it’s over
Blink-182, “Man Overboard”
So sorry it’s over
There’s so much more that I wanted and
There’s so much more that I needed and
Time keeps moving on and on and on
Soon we’ll all be gone
UPDATE: I lied, I’m just going to live update my microblog, blogging is so 20th century.
I’ve decided on a naming scheme for my computers for the immediate future: monstrous and highly dangerous women.
My Macbook Pro which was recently stolen (more on that later) was named Sveethot, which is “Sweetheart” when spoken with a thick German accent, as the Jägermonsters do in Girl Genius. I imagined Sveethot as a female Jägermonster, which implies a predilection for hand-to-hand combat and a great deal of raw “processing power”, where by processing I mean the ability to dice you up into little pieces and serve you for dinner.
I am currently borrowing an IBM Thinkpad laptop from Prerna (whom I cannot thank enough for her generosity), and after backing up her data I wiped it and installed Ubuntu on it. A newly installed computer needs a name, and I decided on Terminatrix. This is in part a homage to my old old Dell desktop, which had a model number beginning with a “T”, something like a T-1000. This also reveals that I am really interested in seeing Summer Glau in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, and in seeing Terminator:Salvation, even though I expect to be rather disappointed by both of them. Surely thinking of Summer Glau and deadly robots when I look at my laptop can’t be a bad thing! Terminatrix brings to mind a machine that keeps going and going despite whatever punishment you might deal out to it, and I hope that this laptop will be similarly indestructible so that it will always continue to work when Prerna (or her friends) need it.
Really I just like the combination of attraction and fear that these names imply. I love computers, but they are fickle creatures that can arbitrarily destroy you whenever they feel like it. Treat them with the respect they deserve.
I have received funding to build a startup this summer with my friends Asheesh Laroia and Raphael Krut-Landau, who I know from our work together with Students for Free Culture. The funding is from [UPDATE: whoops our funder is currently secret, can’t tell the internet who it is yet].
We will be moving to Atlanta for the summer as part of their startup accelerator program starting May 18th, so if you are in Atlanta or know people there, please drop me a line, and maybe we can hang out 🙂
The startup will be closely related to free culture issues, specifically free / open source software. I don’t want to say too much publicly about the startup until our company is ready for the attention and makes some official announcements, but if you want to know more feel free to contact me privately and I can tell you about it. Stay tuned!
UPDATE: OK, you know what, for my loyal readers I’ll drop another hint. The startup is loosely based on this idea I posted about a few years ago, although it has evolved a lot since then. Once again, talk to me privately for more details.
My apologies to everyone who is following me on Livejournal! I re-imported my entire Livejournal archive into my blog but I accidentally left my LJ cross-posting plugin turned on, so it got into an infinite loop where I would import a post, and then it would get cross-posted, and then imported again… This meant that duplicates of my old posts dominated everyone’s friends pages. I went back using Xjournal and manually deleted all of the duplicate posts from Livejournal, so everything should be back to normal.
The good news is that all of the old LJ comments have been imported with threading this time, thanks to the new Livejournal importer in the unstable “trunk” version of WordPress 🙂 Huge thanks to Beau for writing the importer, it worked perfectly.
I’m moving my blog from LiveJournal to my new personal website at Skyfaller.net, following in the steps of Nick. The rumors about LiveJournal being in danger of shutting down certainly triggered this move, but it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, to have more control over my own data.
I would like my loyal LJ readers to follow me to my new site, and to achieve that I’d like to make sure that my new blog has all of the features of LiveJournal that my readers find important. Why do you use LiveJournal? What makes it a good experience for you? What features of LiveJournal do you think are useful, and distinguish it from other blogging sites? I have already added a number of features to my blog that LiveJournal has:
What else should I do? Please let me know in the comments.