Throw a christmas tree in the background and I think we have this year’s christmas card.

Some of my faves:

(Photo by surgery via flickr. Note how Greg Gillis’s laptop is wrapped in saran-wrap)

The Girl Talk show last night at The Palladium was absolutely insane. Once the music started up, it became exactly what it was destined to be, a crazy, frenetic, non-stop dance party, with bump and grind, fist pumping, and just a little bit of metal. People were going absolutely nuts! There were shedding clothes and making out, just dancing like animals. Finally, finally, a show in LA where people actually move and appear to be having a good time. The one exception to this, was a tall guy standing directly in front of us. Despite the absolute chaos all around him, he didn’t even so much as tremble an ass muscle nor give a cursory head-bob. He was an immovable totem in a sea of wild-ass party. Will called him “Igor”, as he was very tall and dressed in black, but I kept imagining him as one of those stone statues from easter island. I danced around him like a maypole, throwing my hands around him as if through my energy I could summon him to motion. No such luck, he remained completely inanimate.

The show was loud, moist, and hot. There were numerous guys in tank tops and cut-off shorts. I first assumed that they were simply annoying hipsters, but later I realized that they were prepared where I was not. You don’t hike in jeans, nor do you wear them to a girl talk concert. Lesson learned – I lost my shirt at some point. When it was all over and the lights lifted, I found myself surrounded on all sides by hipsters and clubber kids, drenched in sweat and confetti. Everyone look like they just had their mind blown and as they streamed out in the cool air, people were still dancing. Now that’s a damn good show.

Several accusations have been made recently that I was or am, or at least am attempting to be “hipster”, mostly in regard to my facial hair or newly sheared haircut. To be clear, I am not a hipster. My facial hair is completely irony-free and my bike has more than one gear.

Tenuously related, yelp has decided that restaurants and bars (perhaps even auto mechanics and barber shops for all I know) can now be tagged as ‘hipster’, allowing you to specifically include OR exclude locations based on their density or ironic mustaches. Why stop at hipster? Why not incorporate all possible subcultures as defined by wikipedia? I’ve never really paid much attention to Yelp’s categorizations, but I’m intrigued by the idea of generating city maps for niche subcultures. Mostly i’m just curious where all the transhumanist bars are.

Designers are also, by training and predilection, inclined to design for the usual, where engineers are taught a kind of rigor that compels them to account for, and overweight, low-probability events.

Spent Sunday hiking in the mountains above Sierra Madre. Ian and I hiked up to Jones Peak via the Mt. Wilson / Bailey Canyon trail. After some seriously knarley weather on Saturday, the skies were clear and so we found our southern california “cold weather gear” and went for a look. The mountain wasn’t terribly impressive as a peak, but the views were quite spectacular. I just love it when we have clouds. It reminds me of home.

The image is a hand-held panorama stitched in photoshop. You wouldn’t know it from the tiny presentation here, but the the final size uploaded to flickr is 43 mega-pixels.

“What kind of music are you listening to?” He said
“Classical” I said
“OOOOOh man”, he said, “you got to be listening to some reggae man”

If Egyptians can demand freedom from dictatorship surely Americans can demand Al Jazeera from their cable providers. When Egypt cuts off Al Jazeera it’s censorship. When U.S. cable providers refuse to show it in the first place it’s “just business.”

–Naomi Klein

I would demand Aljazeera from my cable provider, but alas I have none.

The reporters had begun preliminary work on the Afghanistan field reports, using a large Excel spreadsheet to organize the material, then plugging in search terms and combing the documents for newsworthy content. They had run into a puzzling incongruity: Assange said the data included dispatches from the beginning of 2004 through the end of 2009, but the material on the spreadsheet ended abruptly in April 2009. A considerable amount of material was missing. Assange, slipping naturally into the role of office geek, explained that they had hit the limits of Excel. Open a second spreadsheet, he instructed. They did, and the rest of the data materialized — a total of 92,000 reports from the battlefields of Afghanistan

I’m perpetually amazed at how people continue to use Excel for absolutely everything. I’ve read that this traffic engineer working for the city of new york has modeled the entirety of New York’s transportation system with one gigantic excel spreadsheet. I’ve personally received some truly insane excel spreadsheets which are used to for reports, issue tracking, even mockups of forms. Any attempt to move this data out of spreadsheets has been dead on arrival.