Monthly Archives: December 2014

Raising a glass to @AtwatersBakery

No sooner do I publish Let’s bring the cortado / piccolo to America than I discover it has already arrived at Atwater’s in Baltimore: And here’s how it’s featured on the coffee menu: @AtwatersBakery at Belvedere Square Market was already … Continue reading

Posted in Business, Culture, Family, food, Geography, Places | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Let’s bring the cortado / piccolo to America

There are ideal ratios of coffee and milk, if you don’t want the flavor of either to fully prevail. To me the closest to the ideal ratio is what in Spain and Peets they call a cortado, some elsewhere call … Continue reading

Posted in Culture, food, Geography, Personal, Photography, Travel, VRM | 3 Comments

After-Christmas Free Tab Sale

I just ran across a pile of tabs from November. (Different browser, different pile, both thanks to OneTab.) Here they are:  FlightAware MiseryMap  AWC – ADDS Turbulence  A Call to Israeli Engineers! Adtech Is Not For You. | Aleph  Newsies, techies … Continue reading

Posted in Links | Leave a comment

Giant Christmas Eve Used Tab Closing Sale

Here ya go, all free. (If I had time to turn the URLs into text, I would, but I don’t. Merry Christmas, ya’ll.) Above-and-Beyond Responses: Part 1 | Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (has some thoughts by yours … Continue reading

Posted in Links | 1 Comment

We’re all going to need clothes

In the physical world we know what privacy is and how it works. We know because we have worked out privacy technologies and norms over thousands of years. Without them we wouldn’t have civilization. Doors and windows are privacy technologies. So are clothes. … Continue reading

Posted in Business, Culture, Future, Life, Past, Personal, Personal clouds, problems, Technology, VRM | 2 Comments

Listening to Serial? Remember the West Memphis Three.

On Saturday I invited Serial listeners to recall the Edgar Smith case. Smith got away, literally, with murder. He did it by convincing the media and the public (and to a lesser degree the courts) that he was innocent man, … Continue reading

Posted in Broadcasting, Culture, Journalism, Law, Life | 2 Comments

Listening to Serial? Remember the Edgar Smith case.

I’m now four episodes into Serial, the hugely popular reality podcast from WBEZ and This American Life. In it reporter Sarah Koenig episodically tugs together many loose ends around the murder of Hae Min Lee, a Baltimore teenager, in 1999. … Continue reading

Posted in Broadcasting, Journalism, News, Past, Personal, Strange stuff | 1 Comment

Is perfectly personalized advertising perfectly creepy?

The uncanny valley is where you find likenesses of live humans that are just real enough to be creepy. On a graph it looks like this: So I was thinking about how this looks for advertising that wants to get … Continue reading

Posted in Business, Ideas, problems | 3 Comments

Latest Linkpile

I thought today I wouldn’t let the list of open tabs get too long, since I spent most of the time working on stuff that’s not especially webfull. But here we are. A Call to Israeli Engineers! Adtech Is Not … Continue reading

Posted in Links | Leave a comment

There goes the fire season

Got big rain today in Santa Barbara, and across all of California, or so it appears: Rainfall records were broken. As expected, there were mudslides. One friend going to Malibu was smart to avoid the Pacific Coast Highway. The drought … Continue reading

Posted in Geography, Geology, history, infrastructure, Photography, problems, Santa Barbara, Science | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment