Thursday, 10 May 2012

Digital Litter

3 Surprises from my recent Pandora listening

I’ve been listening to more music via Pandora lately. To be accurate – I’ve been listening to a Less than Jake & Might Mighty Bosstones seeded, late-90s ska station.

The Mighty Mighty Bosstones get better with age.
I really dig Social Distortion much more than I remember
Ska-punk covers of ska-punk tunes are delightfully meta (e.g. Linoleum from Streetlight Manifesto)

Give it a listen

Off

by garrick Comments Off

“Perhaps one of the biggest advancements technology can make in our lives comes when we realize the power of simply turning it off for a while.” – James Shelley

(ht patrickrhone)

Personally, I keep my phone not in my pocket, but in my bag with the rest of my connectivity gadgets. When it’s charging on the wall, there’s a pretty good chance its in Airplane mode and I’m elsewhere.

When the telephone was first introduced, it was a synchronous medium. Today – with voicemail, text messages, and the like, it is much more of an asynchronous medium. Giving us the power to use it on our terms.

Flash Mob / Day Job

by Garrick van Buren Comments Off

Wednesday, 9 May 2012

Everything Was Breakin’

by garrick Comments Off

Neal Conan: “You had solar panels (on your sailboat) for electricity.”

Matt Rutherford: “I did, but they broke.”

Neal: “They broke?”

Matt: “One by one.”

Neal: “I think you had a Kindle for reading books.”

Matt: “I did. It broke in a storm.”

If there’s a better betrayal of the weakness of our modern, connected, age – it is this story. The tools we are so entranced by are quite fragile and weak. A stark contrast to the relentlessness of our own will to survive.

Monday, 7 May 2012

CD-ROMs Part 2

by garrick Comments Off

“And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app. We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit. I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital. Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica.” – Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review.