Posts Tagged ‘tech’

Bookmarks for Jan-Feb 2010 [Google Reader}

Bookmarks for Jan-Feb 2010  [Google Reader}

Bookmarks from Jan-Feb 2010 [Google Reader]
(just catching up, after moving my bookmarks from delicious to google reader)

  • Life, liberty and the pursuit of sanity – every thing you read in the mainstream media is true” “they call you sheeple” lol
  • DJ TechTools – “Little did G.C. Coleman know that his 5-second drum solo was going to spawn and influence multiple genres of music over the following forty years. In this first edition of DJ History, we are going to roll back the clock, open up DJ class and explore the mysteries of the Amen break, which has became a pivotal part of the dance music landscape. G.C. Coleman was the drummer for funk and soul outfit The Winstons’. In 1969 they released the single “Color Him Father,” which won the band a Grammy and broad critical acclaim. However, It was the B-side to the hit named “Amen, Brother” that would lead to the future evolution of dance music for decades to come. “Amen, Brother” was a quickly recorded B-side for The Winstons’ debut single.”
  • McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet? – “Could It Be That the Best Chance to Save a Young Family From Foreclosure is a 28-Year-Old Pakistani American Playright-slash-Attorney who Learned Bankruptcy Law on the Internet? Wells Fargo, You Never Knew What Hit You.”
  • What is Google Wave? | Business Center | Macworld – “Google describes Wave as “what e-mail would look like if it were invented today,” in the world of instant messaging, wikis, and online forums. But while the initial idea may have been to reinvent e-mail, in practice Wave is more akin to Google Docs than it is to Gmail. For example, how many times have you tried to develop a document through e-mail, with all those criss-crossing message threads clogging your inbox? Wave seeks to do away with that, by providing a single, hosted copy of a conversation that everyone can edit and discuss.”
  • BLOG.REPORTERWARSTORIES.COM: 1973: The Yom Kippur War; On The Benghazi Express; Meeting Idi Amin; Getting Strafed; Lunch with the Highjackers -”one of my favorite blogs. a lot of great behind the scenes shop top of “the story behind the story”
  • Expiration dates mean very little. – By Nadia Arumugam – Slate Magazine -”There’s a filet mignon in my fridge that expired four days ago, but it seems OK to me. I take a hesitant whiff and detect no putrid odor of rotting flesh, no oozing, fetid cow juice—just the full-bodied aroma of well-aged meat. A feast for one; I retrieve”
  • A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace – “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
  • National Geographic Magazine – NGM.com – “Yet Dharavi remains unique among slums. A neighborhood smack in the heart of Mumbai, it retains the emotional and historical pull of a subcontinental Harlem—a square-mile (three square kilometers) center of all things, geographically, psychologically, spiritually. Its location has also made it hot real estate in Mumbai, a city that epitomizes India’s hopes of becoming an economic rival to China. Indeed, on a planet where half of humanity will soon live in cities, the forces at work in Dharavi serve as a window not only on the future of India’s burgeoning cities, but on urban space everywhere.”
  • LA Eastside » The Mariachi-Oke Experiment con Trio Ellas – “Mariachi Plaza has been home to many troubadours, seeking to serenade the ears of passersby with their songs for sale. Across the way, this tradition has held true in the local neighborhood bar, Eastside Luv, a familiar and favorite spot of mine and many, away from the “Los Angeles” of late but with an added interactive twist to los Canciones de su Padre. For several months now, the barra monument to many things Mexican and Mexican American culture has been hosting “Mariachi-Oke!”  Yes, it is what it sounds like, and it is the first and third Sunday of every month. Patrons step on to the stage and attempt to belt out the ballads of Beltran, Negrete, Gabriel, and Fernandez without fear and hopefully, without forgetting the lyrics.  There are no bouncing balls highlighting the sing along words; it’s a sink or swim policy that ESL holds, which has filtered out the amateurs, but not always the hard of hearing.”
  • The Find: Magic Wok in Artesia – latimes.com – “Magic Wok is a porcine palace, a restaurant where the pillars of Filipino cooking are fortified by all things pork. Kids chomp on shards of pig skin as crisp as potato chips, grandparents leisurely ladle hunks of pork from sour tamarind soups — the homey restaurant went whole hog long before quivering cubes of pork belly cropped up on happy-hour menus and bacon became an almost de rigueur dessert.”
  • My Roger Ebert Story – Roger Ebert – Deadspin -Sir, Mr. Ebert, this is Will Leitch, an editor at the Daily Illini. I’ve had a bit to drikn and am going to just ask. There is an old story that you had sex on the EIC desk. Is that true? Everybody wants to knwo. Sorry for this.Best, Will”
  • The Find: The Slaw Dogs in Pasadena – latimes.com – “The Slaw Dogs is reimagining the humble hot dog with offerings such as a chicken Caesar salad dog, a Thai slaw dog and a Oaxacan dog.”
  • Los Angeles – “On a recent afternoon in the Eastside neighborhood of Lincoln Heights, Fay Green stands in the hallway of her apartment complex, which sits just feet above the bumper-to-bumper traffic of the I-5 freeway. A soft-spoken black woman, she lives with her five kids and one grandson in an urban planner’s idea of perfection: the dense, “Avenue 26″ master-planned community, touted by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the city’s Department of Housing as an environmentally smart “transit-oriented development” in the city’s core, efficiently served by light rail.  From the outside, the stylish-looking village of 156 condos, called Puerta del Sol, and 378 other apartments squeezed between Avenue 26 and the thundering I-5 gives off a Crate & Barrel vibe. But Green’s four-bedroom unit, in the building dubbed Tesoro del Valle Family Apartments, is regularly dirtied by a heavy film of what she calls “dust.” She explains, “I clean the place up, and in two or three days, I have to wipe again.”
  • Peter Gabriel’s Scratch My Back is a most curious creation | Vancouver, Canada | Straight.com -”The new Peter Gabriel album—and what a rare phrase that has become!—is a most curious creation. An eclectic collection of covers from a fellow known for his original songwriting, it reimagines radio hits as modern-art music, full of shimmering orchestral effects and ethereal mood swings.”
  • The Mozart effect: Studies of music’s effect on children – latimes.com -”Even the author of the 1993 study that set off the commercial frenzy says her group’s findings — from an experiment that had college students, not babies, listen to Mozart — were “grossly misapplied and over-exaggerated.” Psychologist Frances Rauscher, along with the rest of the field studying music’s effects on the brain, has long since moved on to explore the effect of active musical instruction on cognitive performance.”
  • Well, This Employment Graph Is Just Terrifying – “This graph shows employment declines at the same chronological point during America’s last six recessions. Guess which one represents the current recession. Go ahead, guess. [New York Times(Thanks, Dan!)”
  • Los Angeles subway shots and Hollweird, CA – “i walk these all the time and have never seen them this way. great eye”
  • The New Commandments | Culture | Vanity Fair – “Thus we are fully entitled to consider them as a work in progress. May there not be some old commandments that could be retired, as well as some new ones that might be adopted? Taking the most celebrated Top 10 in order, we find (I am using the King James, or “Authorized,” version of the text):”
  • is there a trail? [Flickr] – “my flickr feed is randomly posting photo’s from this summer”

Bookmarks for December 19th to 27th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks for December 19th to 27th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from December 19th to December 27th

  • Los Angeles Eat+Drink – Drowning, Not Eating – page 1 – “Tortas cubanas are almost as common as burritos in Los Angeles. Mexico City–style pambazos rule the world of street food. The muscular cemita Poblano commands a fleet of trucks extending as far as the Westside. But the king of Mexican sandwiches is the mighty torta ahogada — drowned sandwich — a mass of bread and sauce and meat that is less a foodstuff than a way of life. You do not nibble at a torta ahogada; you dive straight into it, trusting that you will come out alive. I had always thought that roasted goat was the emblematic dish of Guadalajara, but tortas ahogadas joints there outnumber birria parlors at least 20:1…”
  • Four New Images by Street Artist Banksy… “Four new images by the elusive street artist Banksy have surfaced over the weekend, with one seemingly attacking global warming sceptics. Banksy graffiti. Photo: Londonist.com The pieces follow the Copenhagen summit. Photo: londonist.com The latest designs were discovered by londonist.com along the banks of Regent’s Canal. It found the first beneath Camden Street Bridge – “almost in the back yard of the British Transport Police building”. The second and third pieces were etched under and next to the Oval Road Bridge in the direction of Primrose Hill. The most provocative simply has the words: “I don’t believe in global warming”, with the writing gradually disappearing into a canal.”
  • “Alt-Classical”: Is This the Future? “Hot on the heels of James MacMillan’s red-hot piece in these pages calling Emperor’s New Clothes on Pierre Boulez, plus Dilettante Music’s digital composer-in-residence contest, and Norman Lebrecht’s poll of the living composers creating the most durable work (John Adams is no.1, then Part, then Reich), here’s more contemporary food for thought. Greg Sandow of Artsjournal’s blog about the future of classical music has run a post about the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s two new composers-in-residence. They are Mason Bates and Anna Clyne. Not likely to be familiar names if your view of new music is simply what the BBC Symphony Orchestra…”
  • Richard Lainhart: Puremagnetik interview dec 2009“The Ondes Martenot is a very expressive electronic instrument – Maurice Martenot, who invented it, was a cellist, and wanted an electronic instrument that could be played with the same degree of expression as a string instrument. Oraison is a piece I’ve always loved – I first heard it years ago as a student – and when I got the Buchla/Continuum system, I realized that the Continuum would let me play the piece myself, as it’s a superbly expressive controller, with the advantage that it’s polyphonic, unlike the original Ondes. So I spent some time transcribing the piece from the original score, then spent a lot more time practicing it. The Buchla let me program a sound that was similar to the Ondes, but with even more expression in the timbre control, and that’s what I used for my version. So, my own realization is a kind of analog-digital homage to the original – analog in the sound-producing domain, but digital in the control domain.”
  • The Pushbutton Web: Realtime Becomes Real – Anil Dash “Pushbutton is a name for what I believe will be an upgrade for the web, where any site or application can deliver realtime messages to a web-scale audience, using free and open technologies at low cost and without relying on any single company like Twitter or Facebook. The pieces of this platform have just come together to enable a whole set of new features and applications that would have been nearly impossible for an average web developer to build in the past”
  • Orson Welles and His Brief Passionate Betacam Love Affair – Orson Welles – Gizmodo“In January 1985, the phone rang. The caller announced that he was Orson Welles and that he wanted to have lunch with me. Thus began one of the most extraordinary and bittersweet adventures of my life.” Sometimes the journeys we take through this life begin and end in the most unexpected ways. My encounter with Welles in the last days of his life centered on a common interest: Sony’s new one-piece camcorder, the Betacam. It had just come to market and Welles, always the genius filmmaker, had big ideas for what he could do with one. With Welles there were no limits. “You can’t do that” wasn’t in his vocabulary. This was a short, but very passionate story