When did Flickr change from being a place to share photos of cats into a place to find really technically exceptional photography? Rarely is there anything particularly revolutionary; lots of beautiful sunsets, dappled afternoon light, long-exposures smoothing the movement of water, fast-exposures freezing the movement of water, macro shots of flowers and urban settings evocative of lonliness. Nice pictures. But these are often quite wonderful take collectively, sometimes stunning images reflecting remarkable skill and incredible moments of luck.

Reload this page a few times to see what I mean:
Flickr: Explore interesting photos

I’ve used a My.Yahoo! page as my default home page for about a decade. There’s nothing particularly special about it, just a few news feeds, weather and stocks. Yahoo! recently started a beta redesign of the My.Yahoo system, and in the process they broke the old one. None of the content on the old page is updating now.

The new design feels clunky, but then Google’s portal thingie feels slapdash. Take your pick. Getting used to this is going to take a while, if I don’t just go roll my own with MooTools…

Poking around the new pages with FireBug (hands down the greatest browser add-on and web development tool ever, really) I found some strange stuff in the My.Yahoo page. Can someone explain why this seemingly random 1.2mb image is being sent? Feivel? Huh? As far as I could tell, it’s not random, but the query string prevents caching. The only thing I can think of is some sort of  bandwidth test.

Whatever it was, before I could publish this the image stopped being sent. Good thing I saved a copy. I guess.

This thing should totally be on a geek shirt.

I just deleted most of my bookmarks.

I’ve been meaning to do that for a while, mostly because I barely ever use 99% of them, but they’re also something people notice when using someone else’s computer. I didn’t have anything embarrassing , but there were a lot of really dated links and general clutter. Most of the time I just hit Google first anyway.

Some notables:

• News folder containing 62 bookmarks to various newspapers and tv news stations. Totally obsoleted by the rise of blogs and RSS.
• All sorts of little JavaScript bookmarklet scraps with various incredibly descriptive names like “js”, “yt”, “break google”, “test”, “script inject”, etc.
• A link to a wonderful Ruby tutorial I read several years ago, now a book.
• Instructions for applying gzip compression to all pages of a site with php and htaccess. Used once last summer, reduced Ben’s bandwidth usage by 80%.
• A link to Everything2, which was a lot of fun in the pre-Wikipedia 90s but I hadn’t visited since sometime in early 2001.
• Links (several defunct) to indexes of Logical Fallacies, from back when I wasted time arguing on the Internet.
• I’m keeping the blogs folder for now. I would really like to go through that and see what I used to read, who I remember and what I now find appalling. There’s 61 blogs in there, I’m really only checking a small handful these days and generally just type their urls directly.

Update: it took a few days to get used to where the stuff I kept was. This stuff had been there so long that I was just clicking the middle of the bookmark bar out of habit, a week later it’s still throwing me off to have different words up there.

So apparently the NYC Department of Health has shut down Blue 9 Burger. Too bad, they’d only just turned that place around.

I used to like the burger there as a late-night option, a sort of California ex-pat drive-thru reminiscence. However I stopped going a few years ago. Declining food quality wasn’t the main reason, it was an insultingly stupid staff. The miscreants they had working there were just horrible, I decided that any place willing to hire morons like that wasn’t getting my money and deserved to go out of business.

This January, for some reason (coincidentally the four year anniversary of my first visit), I decided to give them another try. Amazingly, they’d fired everyone and hired a completely new crew with a decent work-ethic. The quality of the food was as good or better than when they first opened.

The place was never especially clean, but I’ve seen far worse and gotten sick at far better. More amazing though, that the Dept of Health has all this information online now. Bloomberg’s New York is all about transparency.

Found via East Village Idiot.

Update: Blue 9 was back open after about a week. The burger I had the other night was again better than they’ve made in several years. No discernible differences I saw in the kitchen or anywhere else except the new juicer they got from this omega vrt350 review.

A great quote I recently stumbled across but I need to keep reminding myself of:

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

—Brian Kernighan

Another fantastic quote attributed to Mr. Kernighan that applies to making most anything:

“Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.”

Many other useful insights here: Basics of the Unix Philosophy Scroll down to the rules and extend these beyond just Unix or programming.

Since this was all rooted in Unix, here’s a document I wish I’d read before first wading into the OS X terminal way back when: Learn UNIX in 10 minutes.

Over the past few months I’ve been forming something of a theory on mass hysteria and how the sudden rise of interconnectivity on a global scale has distorted opinions and led to many instances of closed thought and conclusions based on incomplete data sets.

One example that came to mind this afternoon was how it’s now possible to exist entirely inside of one ideology. Everything one reads can originate from a like ideology. This is more possible than ever because of the way information coagulates online. Blogs with similar beliefs link to one another, social networks and influence leaders create balkanized communities. These communities exist as thought-overlays across society, ignoring geographic boundaries.

Another byproduct is the ability to organize gatherings and protests on a scale unimaginable to those limited by a printing press or xerox machine. A few years ago flashmobs were regularly gathering hundreds of people at random locations with virtually no advance notice. Apply that same principle to any given political cause and you end up with demonstrations orders of magnitude larger than anything before. The organizers of those causes then believe their mission and themselves to be significantly more right than their predecessors. This builds on the first idea too, those same organizers existing wholly within their self-selected ideological gardens, seeing anything beyond their walls as a threat or evidence of their own self-righteousness.

What we’re most at risk of losing is the ability to understand and rationally challenge dissenting views.

Humanity as a whole wasn’t really ready for what the Internet and global connectivity has given us. But one of the great lessons of history is that humanity is never ready, we always get blind-sided by advances and then cobble together a future from the leftover shards of what once was.

A few years back, before Noemi was born, Lila and I trekked out to the Prospect Park Zoo to meet our friends Paula and her daughter. They’d recently moved to Brooklyn, but when we first met they were living on 13th street, literally across the street from our front window.

Walking around near the prairie dog mound, Paula said she had the craziest thing happen to her, and that I’d never guess what it was.

“What,” I said, “You have an identical twin?”

Paula’s jaw dropped while her eyes seemed to focus somewhere 30 or 40 feet past my head. “Yes, How’d you know?”

I didn’t, I was being a smartass. An accidentally and uncannily intuitive smartass.

Paula was adopted as a baby separately from her identical twin sister. Neither knew anything of the other’s existence until that day in 2004 when they’d somehow discovered each other.

Unfortunately, we’ve sort of lost touch, or at least haven’t seen each other in a long time. I don’t remember all the details of Paula’s story, but I just noticed that her book, written with her twin sister, is available for pre-order on Amazon: Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited. My copy is reserved, I’ve been waiting to read this for three years.

Here’s hoping this makes it to Oprah. And I’m sending Paula an email now.

Update: Paula and Elyse’s site: Identical Strangers