Merde

New Nike+ Running site

Wed, 09 May 2012 17:19:00 -0400

I’ve been testing the new Nike+ Running site over the last couple of weeks. The big news is that the previously Flash-powered site has been totally re-written. The new site goes live in June, but if you’re wanting to see what’s coming this FAQ from Nike has the details.

While I am a fan of the Nike+ iPhone app, the site has long felt neglected and is consistently unreliable. Features like importing your Gmail contacts or searching for/adding a friend work inconsistently or not at all. And Coach is unavailable in the app and on the mobile site making it kind of useless.

I am at once excited and skeptical about the new site. I can’t decide whether it is a good sign or not that the current Goals, Challenges, or Coach features are not being rolled over into the new version. And I can only hope that they don’t remove the color-based levels because I really want to reach black. I guess I’ll find out in June.

Design and impermanence

Wed, 09 May 2012 16:45:00 -0400

I overheard a conversation in the elevator at work yesterday where a guy was talking about how their website is just about to launch, but since the cheap 3rd party vendor they used took so long they already are thinking about a redesign since “the world has changed.”

This reminds me of this crazy thing with MySpace recently where to recover your account you can email them a photo of yourself holding holding up a piece of paper with your profile URL.

The web changes fast enough that looking back on a project that started even a year ago can look so quaint and dated. The guy in the elevator’s company website probably looks neglected and old even though it is launching this week.

"Thinking about users with JavaScript disabled is unhelpful. Sure, some of those exist, but..."

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:34:52 -0400

“

Thinking about users with JavaScript disabled is unhelpful. Sure, some of those exist, but they’ve largely opted into that.

It’s more helpful to think about designing a site to work robustly for the situations in which JavaScript doesn’t successfully run. There could be reasons from aggressive firewalls blocking scripts, to slow or broken network connections, where the user might not get your JavaScript along with the page.

Many browsers halt all JavaScript execution on a script error. All it takes is a badly coded third-party ad on your page, or a typo in your own code to stop all JavaScript on the page from running.

Is it right that your page or app should completely stop functioning at that point? The web is a brittle platform. Things break all the time, but our technology stack of HTML, CSS and JavaScript can be exceptionally robust when used in the right way.

Build your site with HTML. Make it look much better with CSS. Make it work much better with JavaScript. Be prepared that CSS or JavaScript may not load at any point, with the reassurance that plain old HTML has got your back.

Sure, it takes a bit longer. Doing a good job always does.

”

- Drew McLellan killing it on Hacker News

"As I see it, Instagram users have enjoyed an experience that felt like being stuck on a small,..."

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 16:23:19 -0400

“

As I see it, Instagram users have enjoyed an experience that felt like being stuck on a small, hidden island. It was private, initially unknown and thus enabled new social connections with zero embarrassment. And it was also non commercial.

The first breach began with the launch of the Android app, which made Instagram less exclusive in the eyes of iOS users.

The vibe I catch from Instagram veterans is that their island is now sold to a large real estate company, which is going to start building skyscrapers there. Their main fear is probably the commercialization and the privacy settings that are now subject to changes.

”

- Facebook-Instagram Acquisition (April 2012): What explains the negative reaction of Instagram users to their acquisition by Facebook? - Quora

I tried the disputed 75¢ slices of the pizza war today for...

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 14:29:00 -0400

2 Bros.

Bombay Fast Food

I tried the disputed 75¢ slices of the pizza war today for lunch. I have to say, 75¢ is novel, but neither tops my personal favorite cheap slice at 99¢ Fresh Pizza on Lexington and 43rd.

One of the most important factors to trying cheap pizza is going when it is really busy so as to not get a solidified grease chewy reheated slice. The 2 Bros. was super packed and the pizza was pretty fresh. The Bombay Fast Food was not as packed and not as exciting. Their pizza dough was bland.

My snap judgement is that 2 Bros. is better. The Bombay Fast Food slice was fine and given different circumstances I would totally have it again. But since there is a better slice next door, I don’t think I would go there again. Sorry bros.

"My goal is to be more efficient, to have and use less, and to downsize what i already have, so my..."

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 12:15:31 -0400

“My goal is to be more efficient, to have and use less, and to downsize what i already have, so my dream setup would involve having fewer things.”

- An interview with Dan Benjamin

Life is for participating: I saw him just before he pounced,...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:23:00 -0400

Life is for participating:

I saw him just before he pounced, and let me tell you, I was scared to death. He was out of control. I jumped away from him as he grabbed for me, but he caught me by the shoulder and spun me around, and screamed, ‘Get the hell out of my race and give me that race number.’ I tried to get away from him but he had me by the shirt. It was like being in a bad dream. Arnie tried to wrestle Jock away from me but was having a hard time himself and then Tom, my 235-pound boyfriend came to the rescue and smacked Jock with a cross body block and Jock went flying through the air. At first, I thought we had killed him. I was stunned and didn’t know what to do, but then Arnie just looked at me and said, ‘Run like hell,’ and I did as the photographers snapped away and the scribes recorded the event for posterity.

"To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be..."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:40:00 -0400

“To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that’s pretty cool. This doesn’t mean you have to make something. If you learn how to hang glide, or to speak a foreign language fluently, that will be enough to make you say, for a while at least, wow, that’s pretty cool. What there has to be is a test.”

- Paul Graham

"And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is..."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 11:17:00 -0400

“And yet, at the exact moment when an education has never been more necessary, education is increasingly out of reach. From 1980 on, the price of attending a four-year college has risen by 128 percent. While the price has spiked, the quality has tanked. Students at college in 2003 did two-thirds the homework that students in 1961 did. In a survey published in 2011, 45 percent of students showed no improvement in “critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing” after two years of college. You did not read that incorrectly: That’s no improvement. None. And how could the results be any different? Three decades ago, 43 percent of professors were adjuncts. Now, with colleges bloated by older, tenured professors who take up huge slices of academic budgets while teaching crumbs of courses, the vast majority of classes are taught by adjuncts. On college campuses, the supposed hotbeds of liberalism, the young are instructed primarily in the mechanics of crony capitalism.”

- The War Against Youth

"Money is a natural byproduct of doing something valuable – so why not focus on doing something you..."

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 10:06:00 -0400

“Money is a natural byproduct of doing something valuable – so why not focus on doing something you love, that is valuable to you, and I think you’ll be surprised to see how valuable it is to others.”

- Kill the Blockbuster

"If the news business on the web is depressing, contributing to the existential angst that has..."

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 16:36:00 -0400

“If the news business on the web is depressing, contributing to the existential angst that has gripped every established news organization, mobile turns the story apocalyptic: there is no foreseeable basis on which the news establishment can support itself. There is no way even a stripped-down, aggregation-based, unpaid citizen-journalist staffed newsroom can support itself in a mobile world.”

- Mobile and the news media’s imploding business model

The Con of Cons

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:07:15 -0400

The Con of Cons:

On Hour of Pour Jessie Char and Jason Permenter spoke about their hobbies and lack of hobbies and how they’d like to have 3 outside of work. (I’m not 100% sure they ever used the word “hobby”).

So, what do you do on the side?

I watch Netflix and do dishes.

I’ve been thinking and talking about this too much lately and now realize I’m not able to completely articulate what my hobbies are, let alone 3 major ones. Here’s what I have so far, how I’m enriching my life:

Running. I run. I run marathons. This is a totally legit hobby. I do use this as a conversation starter at parties. It does work. Success.
Beekeeping. I want to learn beekeeping. I’m a bit freaked by them, the bees, but Laura has shown me things between the bees and I are totally cool. We recently applied to an apprenticeship for the bees. I’m excited.
… Oh no. There is nothing specific to say here. I have no third.

Is watching basketball a hobby? Maybe my half-assed attempt to learn Spanish? Do either make awesome life stories? Not really, at least not yet. I think this is important and will figure it out.

So, what do you do outside of work?

Fabrice Muamba and how athletes fall

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:10:00 -0400

Fabrice Muamba and how athletes fall:

This weekend the midfielder Fabrice Muamba collapsed on the field during a match. Like Brian Philips, I wasn’t watching the game but found out from Twitter almost immediately.

And this, really, is when things got tricky for fans. What do you do, in an era of instant knowledge, when there’s simply nothing to know? I can only speak for myself, but I doubt I’m alone in this: I spent two hours refreshing Twitter, obsessively reloading the Guardian’s live-blog of the match (which turned into a clearinghouse for news), and quietly freaking out. I hadn’t been watching the match when Muamba collapsed, but thanks to the Internet, I heard the news almost immediately, followed the crisis as it unfolded, and now felt absurdly unmoored. My feelings were, I realized, the least important things in the world at that moment, but I was foolishly desperate for news. Again, I don’t think I was the only one.

I kept refreshing my Twitter stream thinking that next tweet was going to be the one with the update. But everyone I followed was thinking and feeling and saying the same thing I was. There was no new information. For an excruciating amount of time.

This sort of pause is rare in my life lately. Read click refresh ⌘-tab. I don’t meditate on one item for a given amount of time. Watching this story unfold gave me pause, I felt frustrated knowing so little.

Something you should do, but mostly for me to remember

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:22:00 -0500

I want to remember the smell of running in Prospect Park right now. After christmas everyone hauled their christmas trees down the street and piled them up around the exits of the park. I thought this was weird until I saw the parks department turning them all into mulch. The scent of everyone’s christmas trees is so sweet in the cool January air. It smells so piney, but also deeply like apples. Sweet and crisp. Running after work and after dark in the cool night coming up on sweet patches is so damn pleasant. What’s the word? Intoxicating.

San Diego, 1998

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 23:49:00 -0500

San Diego, 1998

"The design team must feel that it has both the authority to make product decisions and the..."

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:10:00 -0500

“The design team must feel that it has both the authority to make product decisions and the responsibility for the outcome of those decisions.”

- An Important Time for Design

"I saw Nirvana perform and The Breeders opened for them. Kurt came out and apologized that they were..."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:14:00 -0500

“I saw Nirvana perform and The Breeders opened for them. Kurt came out and apologized that they were not the Breeders. He said he wished he could be as bad-ass as Kim Deal. A guy said that on stage about a woman at the height of his fame. He was hanging around with Riot Grrrl Kathleen Hanna from Bikini Kill who spray painted, ‘Kurt smells like Teen Spirit’ on a wall, which is where he got the name for that song. He was quoted as saying, ‘The future of rock belongs to women.’ Nirvana often had the girl group Shonen Knife open for them. At first, audiences got angry and violent – as the ‘jocks’ in the audience didn’t want to see chicks in a band. Kurt helped change the culture because he walked it like he talked it. He brought women in front of his audience. He wrote things on his album liner notes (‘what are those?’ you ask – shut up) that said, ‘If you’re sexist and hate women, don’t come to our shows.’”

- Jen Kirkman, comedian: What I Would Have Said About Eddie Brill on NPR

"People who really just want easily-reproducible shit for free will always find a way to get it, and..."

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:38:00 -0500

“People who really just want easily-reproducible shit for free will always find a way to get it, and any publisher is far better off working on ways to make sure that customers can legally get what they want as easily as possible with the fewest restrictions. That should be the lesson that media moguls take away from iTunes, but to them the lesson is, ‘make sure all digital video content outlets are crippled in some way and we won’t have another iTunes.’”

- Coyote Tracks: The enemy of my enemy

"The problem is that at roughly 50 gallons per person per year, our consumption of soda, not to..."

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 11:55:00 -0500

“The problem is that at roughly 50 gallons per person per year, our consumption of soda, not to mention other sugar-sweetened beverages, is far from moderate, and appears to be an important factor in the rise in childhood obesity. This increase is at least partly responsible for a rise in what can no longer be called “adult onset” diabetes — because more and more children are now developing it.”

- Is Soda the New Tobacco?

"You do not do this by leveraging social media, or making content “sticky,” or in any number of other..."

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:10:00 -0500

“You do not do this by leveraging social media, or making content “sticky,” or in any number of other cynical, trendy ways that seek to exploit a group of people instead of supporting them. Rather, you keep your people close by crafting narratives around the values they hold dear—and the best way to do this is to embrace the value of the editor.”

- Babies and the Bathwater by Mandy Brown for Issue № 1 of Contents Magazine