Two Cents and a Thousand Words

Now that the press has grown the courage to actually question our government, look what happens:

“You try to follow their money. And that’s exactly what we’re doing and the fact that a newspaper disclosed it makes it harder to win this war on terror.”

People saying, “Hmm, maybe we should have some say in what the people who we elected to run our country do all day,” also makes it harder to win the current common noun war.

“Congress was briefed and what we did was fully authorized under the law,” Mr. Bush said. “We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America. What we were doing was the right thing.”

I’ve got a recommended reading selection for everyone in Washington. It’s short, but it’s really good from start to finish. It’s even got a sequel that’s equally riveting.

Ze pegged it on his latest episode:

Snow also stressed the Treasury Department’s transparency regarding the program, noting “we’ve never denied it.”

The Treasury Department has also never denied an annual dog-ball licking contest. Nor has it denied that their employees are forced to walk around naked with Mickey Mouse towels wrapped around their necks like capes.

How can we accurately elect the right people to lead us if we don’t even know what they’re doing all day?

John Lasseter, Pixar chief creative executive, speaking on a Charlie Rose interview on why animators would choose to work at Pixar:

Pixar is a place more than anywhere else in the world that they can get creative satisfaction. We try to give these artists a project that they can be proud of for the rest of their careers. That’s one; that’s a big thing – I know, cause I’ve worked in a lot of places where I was working on kind of garbage, and it’s hard to work. Secondly, in working with these people, I try so hard, even if it’s the smallest task, to give them a little bit of creative ownership, let them figure out how to do it; I don’t tell people how to do it, so that is a really important reason. And the most important thing, is that at Pixar we have a lot of fun… and I think it shows in the film.

I think that can easily be extrapolated to the entire creative industry. Lasseter’s a brilliant guy.

As an added bonus, a quote from that Apple/Pixar guy in the same (1996) interview:

Charlie: Am I going to come back and interview you in five years and find out you’re in some in other business and you’re not in the entertainment business and you’ve found some other well to go fish in?

Steve: Y’know, I tend to stay where I start until someone kicks me out.

• There’s a baseball team in Boston that’s making a heck of a lot of money on merchandising.
• The Downeaster has gotten more popular.
• Micro and nano caches (see 7th row down) are hard to find.
• There’s a really cute duck in the Boston Public Gardens named Mallory.
• Crosswalk signs should not sound like sparrows.
• The Purple Cactus has really good (and healthy!) Mexican food.
• If you want a single experience that will cover a lot of American history, visit or even drive through Lawrence, Massachusetts. You might even pick up some Spanish.
• If you’re a person who has never been away from a 96.9% white state, visit Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts for an amazing immersion in diversity.
• Staying up for 20 hours straight when you drive for four and a half, ride a train for five and a half, and walk in a big city for probably 3 or 4 just doesn’t work.
• Some risks are definitely worth taking. (”The remedy is the experience … I won’t worry my life away“)
• Being in the city for a day is as therapeutic as taking a long vacation. Or maybe it’s just having nothing to do and someone to do it with.
• A day trip, though short, can be one of the few best trips of your life.

Thanks, Melody.

Tomorrow I continue my Boston explorations. This time is a little different, though – no camera, no real plans… hopefully it’ll just be some free time to explore, have fun, and enjoy the rain, if the meteorologists are right.

I’ve had four digital cameras since I received my first one in 1999, and lately I’ve been averaging a new camera approximately every year and a half. I bought my PowerShot A60 [Amazon] in October 2003, and I bought my wonderful Canon EOS Digital Rebel 300D [Amazon] in September 2004.

While the Rebel’s been working extremely well for me, my A60 unfortunately started to misbehave late last year. Since then I’ve wanted to buy a new compact camera; the Rebel is amazing, but it’s really hard to take to a concert or on a casual trip. I love products by Canon, and yesterday I decided to buy a 6-megapixel camera – the new PowerShot SD600 [Amazon] – with a 1GB memory card. With a free trial to Amazon Prime, I’ll probably be getting it on Tuesday.

This is going to be fun.

Have you ever really taken a look at what you throw away? Chances are pretty good that there are some useful things that anyone could find in your garbage can; in fact there are entire cultures based around the treasures you can find in trash. One very simple, close-to-home check can really reduce the size of the bag you consider to be junk. I call it my Three Step Trash Check.

Before you throw a piece of “garbage” away, ask yourself these questions.

1. Can I reuse it? If you can use it for another purpose, that’s the best case scenario. Plastic and paper bags can often be reused multiple times to hold various stuff. Plastic, glass, tin, and steel containers – sour cream, cottage cheese, peanut butter, coffee – can be rinsed and can be used as good storage for little things that would otherwise end up in a pile somewhere. Consider even reusing good tissue and wrapping paper. It might even save you some money.
2. Can someone else reuse it? If you’re lucky, someone else might pay for an item’s reuse. If not, think of who else may benefit from having the item to use. Take clothes to Goodwill or a second-hand resale shop. Try to sell the old toys or electronics you have on eBay. Donate items that might be helpful for crafts to local schools or organizations. Look around; there are people and organizations in need around you.
3. Can you recycle it? The final check’s effectiveness may surprise you. Most locations (at least where I live) have easy recycling facilities or pickups for newspapers, corrogated cardboard, tin, glass, #2 plastics (milk jugs), and bottles (around here, worth $0.05/each). Often facilities may exist for other items in a place you travel every couple of months; think about having a box in the corner for your next trip there (I recycle paper and paperboard in Orono, for example). If you own your own land, consider starting a small compost pile for your food scraps.

The check isn’t that painful, really, and after a while it seems automatic. I’ve been amazed by the amount of trash I’ve spared from the landfill. Depending on where you live, reducing your trash load could even save you some money. Personally I think that any monetary benefits are outweighed by the chance to give your materials another life.

Down: Picasa Web Albums [blogged here]. C’mon, guys, Flickr’s got a good thing going. Leave it to them.

Up: A new version of Google Earth and KML support built into Maps (this allows you to type in a URL for a dataset, and it will plot the points on a map). And ohmigah, geocoding in the Maps API [all blogged here]. I’m literally shaking in development glee… is that a bad thing?

My friend Kelley posted a link to this video on her blog:

This little video is full of gems like this:

“New media I think is a very broad term that means a lot of things to me…”

In other words, as Kelley points out, nobody really defines it.

At the beginning of almost every UMaine new media course, students are asked to define the term “new media”. It’s sort of a challenge and a running joke all at the same time. Providing a concise, concrete definition for “new media” is next to impossible; it’s sort of like trying to define “art”.

Most of the people in the video look at new media from an angle: the current “new media” methods of advertising, the latest technology, and in general what people are interested in at the moment. I shook my head for a lot of the video; some of it is just wrong. New media is meant to be a dynamic field; Kelley’s boss Marc actually does the term some justice by mentioning that “new media, the term, is evolving all the time.”

In short the video kind of angered me.

There is hope, though. C.C. Chapman has a wonderful podcast entitled “Managing the Gray“; its focus is new forms of digital and new media marketing. I think C.C. does a great job explaining how there are new arenas for marketing opening up almost every day.

Over the last few days I’ve been working on the first application built on the second version of my personal development environment. I really like how the environment is working so far; it’s a quick startup when building a project, and it doesn’t really ever slow down.

The first application is the justinrussell.com Video Viewer, a section of this site that tracks some of my favorite videos from YouTube. It’s easy for me to update, so hopefully there will be new videos often! It allows you to view the videos without leaving this site.

As always, please send any bugs or questions to me.

Among the components of the environment are Matt James’s DataObjects and Validator suites. They really, really, really speed up development.