Due to the acquisition of some new entertainment equipment, I’ve decided it’s time to completely reconfigure and consolidate my entertainment center. While I’m doing that, I’m going to ask my good friend Cornelius to jot down some notes as they happen. I’ll return at the end to wrap things up. Cornelius, please introduce yourself…
Cornelius at computer
Hello everyone, that’s me on the right. Josh has asked me to keep a running log of what’s going on as he redoes his entertainment center, and I plan on documenting what I consider to be major events as part of this home project. It’s a dreary, rainy day here in NYC, so he’s under no pressure to get things done by a certain time. Let’s get started:
11:00 a.m. – Josh is taking his usual methodical approach by double-checking the equipment and connections map that he made a few days prior. He’s placed a glass of water near the sofa and has a pad and pen handy, as well as labels for tagging wires. I have a good feeling that this is going to go smoothly.
Continue reading…
Ikea has changed it’s typeface and people are up-in-arms about the change.
Carolyn Fraser, a letterpress printer in Melbourne, Australia, adopts a different metaphor to explain the problem. “Verdana was designed for the limitations of the Web — it’s dumbed down and overused. It’s a bit like using Lego to build a skyscraper, when steel is clearly a superior choice.”
Regarding an online petition that has over 700 signatures:
That may not seem like a lot, but then there weren’t many protests at first to a certain beverage company’s announcement in April 1985 that it would be changing its flagship product. Just three months later, however, New Coke was gone. And that was before Twitter.
Retail sales in NYC have fallen 8-10 percent from 2008, yet Apple has increased 2.5 percent and may be the highest grossing Fifth Avenue retailer.
Apple’s Fifth Avenue emporium probably has annual sales of more than $350 million, topping any of the chain’s other outlets, said Jeffrey Roseman, executive vice president of real- estate broker Newmark Knight Frank Retail in New York. The location is 10,000 square feet, putting its sales per square foot at a minimum of $35,000, based on Roseman’s estimate.
That’s the equivalent of selling one Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan per square foot. Apple may be the highest grossing retailer ever on Fifth Avenue, said Faith Hope Consolo, chairman of the retail leasing and sales division at Manhattan-based Prudential Douglas Elliman Real Estate.
About two weeks ago I was in both Tiffany’s and Apple at about the same time on successive weekdays, and the difference in the amount of people (and people actually buying) was beyond compare. I had no problem browsing every counter on the main floor and the third floor in Tiffany’s, and was constantly asked if I needed assistance. In contrast, every table in the Apple store was jam packed with people, sometimes three deep waiting to play with a Mac or an iPod/iPhone, and the line to purchase general items was 20 minutes long.
Let me make sure you understand exactly what the above means…in the 5th Ave store, if you want to buy a Mac, iPhone, or iPod, you do so at small, dedicated “kiosks” around the main floor; if a salesperson assists you in deciding which third-party radio/iPod dock you should buy for your iPod or whatever else they sell there, they check you out right there with your credit card using a wireless doohicky; the only people standing on the general cash register line are people who are paying cash, or who are buying boxed products and weren’t lucky enough to get help from the roving Apple staff…even with 10+ cash registers servicing the line, it was still 20 minutes.
After my visits to both Tiffany’s and Apple, I bought more Apple stock. The difference between the day it opened and the middle of a major recession was nil.
What would Kind of Blue sound like played through a Nintendo? “Kind of Bloop” attempts to answer that question. And the result? Oh wow.
From the project’s description on Kickstarter:
What would the pioneers of jazz sound like on a Nintendo Entertainment System? Coltrane on a C-64? Mingus on Amiga? For years, I’ve wondered what “chiptune jazz” would sound like, but there are only a tiny handful of jazz covers ever made.
To satisfy my curiosity — and commemorate the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” — I’ve asked five brilliant chiptune musicians to collaborate and reinvent the entire album in the 8-bit sound.
The little metal object that scientists used as the original standard kilogram weight is slowing changing. As a result they’ve had to come up with a new one, as well as a new way to measure it. It’s taken at least 30 years to perfect the new scale, but they think they are five to six years away from finishing it.
Geoff Brumfiel for NPR:
The scale is so sensitive that it can detect changes as small as ten-billionths of a kilogram. “If you pulled a hair out of a person’s head and then weighed them, we could tell the difference,” Steiner says.
Pigeons were seen attacking a baby peregrine falcon. The chick either fell from it’s nest or was abandoned by it’s mother. A man rescued the bird and it’s now recovering in an animal hospital. A few days later comes word of a second falcon chick being attacked by pigeons.
When I was a young kid, I used to think that at some point, when the pigeons have enough babies, they were going to attack all the humans and take over the world. It may be starting.
A cell phone, too close to a stove, may turn it on:
When Andrei Melnikov’s Sony Erickson PDA is within about two feet of the stove, an incoming call will make the Maytag Magic Chef stove beep, and the digital display will light up, indicating that the broiler is on high. Open it up and you’ll see the gas flames streaming out of the broiler’s burners as it begins cooking anything inside it in 500-plus degree heat.
I’m pretty sure this is one of the early attempts of Skynet taking over.
Melnikov says he has spoken with the Maytag company which has promised to send out a repair team and identify the problem.
Hey, they finally found a use for Ol’ Lonely.
New York’s “birth certificate”, a letter dated Nov. 5, 1626 that related recent events in New Amsterdam to the Dutch Parliament, is headed to NYC for visit:
In between reports that some children were born and that summer grains were sown and reaped, the letter discloses that the settlers “have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders.”
This reminds me of The Mannahatta Project, which has an amazing interactive map that shows what Manhattan might have looked like in 1609.
The Big Picture brings us “Hiroshima, 64 Years Ago”. I love The Big Picture, even if some of the images are tough to look at.
Straight out of the “everything is better with bacon” file, someone has made bacon flavored lip balm. I’m flabbergasted that we landed a man on the moon before we made this.
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