Spilling gas on your shoes after you fill your car seems like just a small annoyance. But it happens to everyone, and apparently all that wasted fuel adds up to about half a billion liters of fuel lost every year. An epidemic this simple mesh cap promises to solve.
I had this exact idea yesterday, reminiscent of the popular 39 drops of solder anecdote about Rockefeller. Like most of my good ideas, someone has beaten me to it by a few years. It’s criminal that these aren’t required on every gas pump in the country.
Author/illustrator David Weitzman included Ed as an apparent easter egg in his book “Superpower”, and later dedicated “A Subway for New York” to him too.
“Big” Ed Rutsch was a close family friend, an accomplished archaeologist, a storyteller, and a giant in both stature and personality. He died twelve years ago today.
I was in my early twenties, and not mature enough then to fully appreciate the impact Big Ed had on the world, and on all of us around him. It’s so obvious to me now though…I can draw a line from Ed, alongside my parents, to much of what I value in life: friendship; humility (but also pride); craftsmanship; an appreciation for hard work and the people that do it.
When he died, a Yahoo Group was setup for his many friends to share their Big Ed stories. Because everyone has a Big Ed story.
A mutual friend, Bill Sandy, also posted his eulogy there—it captures all the things I loved about Ed. I’m sharing it here to archive it (and am slowly archiving the other group messages as well)—I’d hate for it to disappear someday.
Big Ed Rutsch was the ultimate Jersey Boy. When National Geographic needed a story on New Jersey, writer Jim Hartz started out with Ed: “Ed is a Native of New Jersey, an archaeologist dedicated to preserving the structures that embody the history of the industrial revolution in the state. He is a great bear of a man, 300 pounds and more, streetwise with brass knuckles opinions on everything”.
Ed then talked about an industrial stretch of Turnpike skyline and said “This is the place people love to hate, the part of New Jersey that turns so many people off. But this is where you find the real current and juice of the state. I know all the jokes about New Jersey. This place doesn’t have to apologize. New Jersey produces. It hustles. It’s tough.”.
Ed was the kind of Jersey boy that people loved to love. He was hooked into the current of where ever he was, but especially so on places like Chemical Beach, or the great IA tours. Ed was not everybody’s idea of an archaeologist. But, like the Garden State he loved, he did not have to apologize to anybody. He hustled, he was tough.
Over the last 20 years I got to work with Ed at sites throughout New York and New Jersey. He was my boss, landlord, friend & teacher. On one of our first digs together, I reintroduced him to my old friend Patty. Ed was loyal, honest, and straightforward. Ed and his team at HCI routinely planned to lose money on specific projects in need of detailed historic preservation studies. The projects Ed helped reads like a New Jersey travel brochure: Atsion, Whitesbog, Long Pond, Paterson, Cooper Mill, Metlar House, Delaware and Raritan Canal, Morris Canal and Liberty Park to name a few. He also explored less well known places, like Route 3, Route 21, Route 7, Fish House Road and the Dundee Canal.
The discovery of New York’s incredible African Cemetery was due to Ed’s detailed search plan. He never got credit, and he did not care. Although he stood to profit if the cemetery dig continued, he was an early and strong advocate for ending the dig and preserving the site. The Plymouth Rock for American Blacks is how Ed put it. A place as important as the Statue of Liberty is how the city’s expert described it. During the course of the project, Ed’s idea that archaeologists should be paid a living wage led to increased wages statewide.
Ed became famous in the early 1970s, when he was able to stop an interstate that would have been bad for what is now the Great Falls landmark. In the late 1990’s Ed was able to return to work again in his beloved Great Falls Historic District in Paterson. Ed claimed he had simply outlived his opponents.
Because of Ed, we have a better understanding of who we are and where we come from. This knowledge strengthens our efforts, not just in historic preservation. Ed has taught us to have the courage of our convictions. Ed has outlived his opponents bigtime.
Ed was always looking for a “clubhouse”, some comfortable place where all his friends and family could get together and celebrate. This will do nicely.
The Messy Business Of Reinventing Happiness is a behind-the-scenes look at Disney’s MagicBand rollout, wherein they endeavored (and, in large part, succeeded) to replace tickets, hotel room keys, credit cards—even airport x-ray machines—for the 17 million people that visit the park every year.
Iger planned to pump nearly $1 billion into this venture, called MyMagic+, a sweeping plan to overhaul the digital infrastructure of Disney’s theme parks, which would upend how they operated and connected with consumers. At the core of the project was the MagicBand, an electronic wristband that Iger envisioned guests would use to gain entry to Disney World and access attractions; make purchases at restaurants; and unlock their hotel room doors. It would push the boundaries of experience design and wearable computing, and impact everything from Disney’s retail operations and data-mining capabilities to its hospitality and transportation services.
We just spent a week at Disney World with the kids, and I was really impressed with the MagicBand experience. Everything just works—sometimes too well: frictionless payments-on-your-wrist paired with Disney’s infamous merchandizing prowess ($12 balloons!)…my bank account never stood a chance.
As of August 30th 2015, users will no longer be able to create new Pipes. The Pipes team will keep the infrastructure running until end of September 30th 2015 in a read-only mode.
Sad, but not unexpected—Pipes is a quirky product, and from the beginning it felt destined to be short-lived. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did, especially given Mayer-era Yahoo hasn’t been shy about sunsetting services. Still, it was an endlessly useful tool for some of us jack-of-all-trades digital media nerds.
Just as with code, one can devise an architectural view of how enterprise selling works. And like code, it is best to approach the process of selling using an architecture, rather than just diving in and writing code.
Clear and simple: the reflected images in pictures might disclose information that you wouldn’t be willing to share, such as your location or other personal details. If you don’t want to disclose your location, eliminate reflections by choosing a better angle or simply turning off all of the lights inside the room (including the TV) before taking the picture.
Under the “sunrise” rollout, which dot-sucks registry Vox Populi is obliged to carry out, trademark holders are given first rights to buy domains with their trademarks in. Typically, this costs companies the usual registration fee plus an additional sunrise charge that ranges from $15 to several hundred dollars.
Dot-sucks however intend to charge $2,500 for such names and has also put a list of similar names under a “premium name” program that would see companies have to pay $2,500 per year to get hold of their brand names, even if they don’t opt to register it during the special sunrise period. What’s more, the company intends to charge ordinary consumers just $9.95 for a dot-sucks domain.
I missed this when it originally made the rounds: Lindsey Green suggests that Mad Men’s conclusion may mimic the real-life story of D.B. Cooper, a Draper-esque gentleman who hijacked a plane in 1971 for $200k ransom, and then parachuted out never to be seen again (or even be definitively identified, for that matter).
It’s a fun read, and would make a fitting ending for Don as a character—except, I don’t think he’s motivated enough by money to do it for ransom, and there are less conspicuous ways to disappear (which he’s been able to do once already, by the way).
I’m using Twitter’s search API to grab recent tweets containing “mrk.tv” and cycling through them randomly. You’ll probably see some repeats because of Twitter’s rate limiting, and also a lot of streams that are already over. I probably won’t fix that because I’ve already spent too much time on this stupid idea.
And since it’s the breakout app! at SXSW this year, I added a filter to only include streams tagged #sxsw. This one gets much more interesting at night :)
Yesterday, legislators failed to save Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center (right down the road from me in Goshen, N.Y.) despite proposals that were actually more economical than destroying it and rebuilding.
Michael Kimmelman posits that the decision may not have been for the reasons usually cited—the building’s Brutalist aesthetic, and current state of disrepair—but instead that legislators hate the building because “Rudolph’s design was about openness, transparency, accountability. It was thereby a daily rebuke to how legislators ‘now run the county’.”
The NYT has published another article on our little town—this one features Pennings, the local favorite craft beer bar/landscaping supply/garden center/apple orchard/petting zoo/ice cream stand/farmer’s market. We love this place, and basically live there from April through November.
Piles of digitised material – from blogs, tweets, pictures and videos, to official documents such as court rulings and emails – may be lost forever because the programs needed to view them will become defunct, Google’s vice-president has warned.
Thank you Vint Cerf for validating my neurotic back-up procedures and compulsion to hoard old hardware.
Nice article from the Times on my sleepy little town, out here in New York City’s hinterlands. Some solid recommendations in there, for anyone passing through.
In the course of business I make a lot of introductions, and in turn, I also get introduced to a lot of people. Often that’s nice: people need things that I have, and I like to share. Great synergy!
But sometimes it can be annoying, and these helpful WordPress bloggers will tell you why. You should listen to them and be less annoying:
The water hyacinth is a purple-flowered floating plant that’s native to the Amazon, and is popular, at least in the northern United States, with man-made pond owners—it’s pretty, provides oxygen and shade for fish, and acts as a natural water filter. I sold thousands of them through my summer job in high school.
The plant is also a particularly aggressive invasive species in warmer climates, because it reproduces at a staggering rate (doubling its population within two weeks)—overtaking entire lakes or waterways, preventing water flow, killing native species, and wreaking all sorts of havoc in the process.
In the early 1900s, Louisiana Congressman Robert Broussard introduced a plan to fix not only that problem, but a national food shortage as well: hippos.
Louisiana Congressman Robert Broussard introduced the “American Hippo bill” to authorize the importation and release of hippopotamus into the bayous of Louisiana. Broussard argued that the hippopotamus would eat the invasive water hyacinth that was clogging the rivers and also produce meat to help solve the American meat crisis. Former President Theodore Roosevelt backed the plan, as did the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Washington Post, and the New York Times which praised the taste of hippopotamus as “lake cow bacon”.
Needless to say, the bill didn’t pass—they lost by one vote.
A few months ago I started running. I was a bit overweight and generally feeling sluggish and creaky after a summer/lifetime of being pretty sedentary. So I put on the sneakers I bought last time I tried to pick up running regularly and…just started doing it, lest I overthink it and wind up on the couch researching all the exercise gear I need and whoops, I’m back where I started.
I’ve been using Nike+ to track my progress. This is what my first run looked like—pretty pathetic:
And only three months later:
This was a personal record for distance and time—the weather was crummy, otherwise I think my pace could have been a bit quicker.
I’ve run almost 200 miles since that first run and have lost 17 pounds, hitting my (admittedly arbitrary) goal weight exactly three months from when I started.
Three months ago the idea of running for an hour without stopping felt impossible. The human body is a crazy, remarkably adaptable machine.
Open source is really good at creating products. Almost any commercial software package or product like Word, Excel, Windows, or Photoshop has a great open source equivalent. However, open source has been less successful at creating services. Where’s the open source version of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Gmail, or Craigslist?
I (unsurprisingly) think the answer looks a lot like WordPress and Automattic, with a combination of distributed and centralized systems complementing each other.
Adam Engst has nice love-letter-as-product-review for BBEdit, my go-to text editor since I started using a Mac regularly in 2001, on the occasion of version 11’s release.
I’ve tried Textmate, Coda, Sublime, and probably a dozen others, and always come back to BBEdit. Aesthetically it’s maybe not as polished as the rest, but I’ve yet to find anything that matches its power while keeping the UI still very simple and out-of-your-way.
I’ve really enjoyed my Sonos wireless speakers since getting a couple Play:1s earlier this year. They sound wonderful, and there’s just something really neat about walking around the house and having music follow you from room to room. We’ve been listening to a lot more music together as a family, as a result (the kids’ recent favorites: The Beatles, and regrettably, Pitbull—although my three year old singing Timberrrrr at the top of her lungs is amusing).
But while the hardware is great, I find the Sonos apps largely frustrating to use—they’re only lightly-integrated with iTunes, and overall are just poorly designed and unintuitive to me.
Enter AirSonos, a Node.js project that adds Apple AirPlay support to your Sonos devices. You’ll need to install Node and the AirSonos package, and run the whole thing from the command line—none of which is particularly challenging (I got it running in about a minute)—but once that’s done you should be able to broadcast to Sonos natively from any of your devices.
What can Publishers Learn From This? A literal interpretation: SUBLIMATE YOUR IDENTITY ENTIRELY, EVERY MONTH, because nothing else works, and the next PlayBuzz of Viral Nova could appear tomorrow and just totally house you out of nowhere.
