The development team at Harvest has a relatively new blog called Tech Time. My first contribution is about the conferences I’ve been to in the last year and whether or not they are worth it.
I try to keep an open mind (especially when I haven’t given something a chance) and so I decided to attend a few events in the past year. I didn’t do it intentionally, but I was essentially the Goldilocks of conferences, attending four events of varying size and content.
Check out this great collection of photos featuring the Royal de Luxe theater company’s massive marionettes. The biggest puppets are 40 feet tall (about 4 stories). Damn!
A giant old-school diver puppet. (Andrew Yates/AFP/Getty Images)
I just tried to use the Social Security Administration’s online office locator only to find out they’re “closed.”
I know B&H camera shuts down for the Sabbath, but what possible reason could a US government site have for turning off features after certain hours? Maybe the hamsters that power the servers have mandatory sleep breaks legislated by congress.
If you spend any amount of time on the internet, you are probably aware of Marilyn Hagerty’s recent review of the Grand Forks Olive Garden. The earnestness with which she reviews a chain that has 730 locations globally is so stupefying that people can’t help but feel something about the article (though mostly, I think it just makes people crave those tasty breadsticks).
Something that has 25k+ Facebook “likes” isn’t really the kind of thing I feel compelled to share on my tiny little corner of the internet. Leave it to Poz to change my mind with his own Olive Garden review:
As soon as we sat down, a woman sitting in the booth across from us — as if she knew what we were doing and wanted to appear in both our columns — suggested that Tommy try the chicken. “It’s WONDERFUL,” she said in the most sincere voice imaginable, as if she was talking about the latest Josh Groban album or the traveling show of “Wicked” or Meryl Streep’s performance in her last movie. It would be easy to jab at that sort of euphoria over Olive Garden chicken, and it might be funny too — I sort of did in that follow up line, didn’t I?
But snark wasn’t how I felt. Instead, I felt happy.
If you’re unfamiliar with the writings of Joe Posnanski and you are even a casual sports fan, you’re also going to want to set aside a few days to read through his blog, Joe Blogs. I was first introduced by my co-worker, Barry, and I’ve been reading with great interest ever since.
Photographer Timothy Allen has posted a wonderful look at a monument to communism in Bulgaria. It is one of the most remarkable things you will see today and the story is equally as impressive.
Buzludha is Bulgaria’s largest ideological monument to Communism. Designed by architect Guéorguy Stoilov, more than 6000 workers were involved in its 7 year construction including 20 leading Bulgarian artists who worked for 18 months on the interior decoration. A small, universally expected donation from every citizen in the country formed a large portion of the funds required to build this impressive structure that was finally unveiled in 1981 on what was the 1300th anniversary of the foundation of the Bulgarian state.
Timothy Allen’s First View of the Buzludzha monument.
Just look at that mysterious fog monster! How could you not want to see more? I promise that the reveal will not be a letdown.
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
The weight difference is unlikely to make much difference to holidaymakers’ baggage allowances, however, because each new tome is about as heavy as a single molecule of DNA.
George W. Bush, general partner of the Rangers, was in a box seat near the Texas dugout when the brawl broke out and said he considered for a second running onto the field.
“I thought about it, but then I saw Bo coming out and decided to stay where I was,” said Bush.
With quick thinking like that, is it any wonder he was such a fine president?
A copy of The New Yorker should not weigh 500 MB. … Condé Nast would never ship the paper magazine in a box that weighs 50 pounds. But that’s exactly what their digital editions feel like.
For most of my “web career”, I have been a definite taker of open source projects and not much of a giver. While I’ve always liked the idea of sharing work, I’ve always found an excuse to pass (not enough time, someone better than me should do that, baseball is on tv). Thankfully, Harvest asked me to spend some time working on a project we could share and no excuses were allowed.
Today, we officially released the first open source project I’ve been a significant contributor to. Chosen is a jQuery/Prototype plug-in for enhancing select boxes and I’m damn proud of it.
Chosen aims to solve a lot of the user experience issues presented by select boxes with way too many elements. It also aims to keep things easier for developers by relying on semantic markup and progressive enhancement. Double win.
After going through the experience of releasing an open source project, I’m disappointed it didn’t happen sooner. I used new tools and techniques (hello, CoffeeScript) through the process and the learning experience more than justified the time expenditure. I will definitely be going down this road again.
On page 51 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Harry receives a letter detailing the equipment that he is required to purchase for Hogwarts. The letter is reproduced here. Centives went to Amazon.co.uk to estimate how much each of the items would cost.
[snip]
One Pair of Protective Gloves (Dragon Hide or Similar)
Would Spirafil Synthetic Insulation and GORE-TEX waterproofing technology qualify as ‘similar’ to Dragon Hide? If so then they’ll cost you about £76.
Their conclusion is that a year at Hogwarts will cost you about the same as a year at a private American college (like Lehigh). If they’re right, it’s easy to understand why the Weasley’s are so poor. Putting 7 kids through 7 years of Hogwarts would set them back about 2 million bucks. Tough to do on one government salary!
Kottke linked to a handful of 10 hour videos the other day and it continues to boggle my mind that YouTube can handle them. I imagine the file size for such a crazy length of video is fairly large.
It seems that almost all of the 10 hour are computer generated, so their creation time isn’t anywhere near as long as the time it takes to watch them start to finish. I did stumble across one that, as far as I can tell, was filmed in real time: Jon Counts to 1,000,000.
The final 3 hours of counting to 1,000,000 come in part 2 of the video. Combined, they add up to whopping 77+ hours. It’s truly an insane act of video making.
