Fake Steve Jobs: “…a great deal of what I’ve developed over the course of my career has been aimed at enabling people to avoid other human beings.“

It seems clear to me that this is an underlying principle of both computer demand and design since well before the microcomputer revolution. Mediated social experiences which are rendered brittle and disposable are the primary selling point of the technology.

NYT: “safety experts say the influx of electronics is turning cars into sometimes chaotic — and distracting — moving family rooms.”

Who, I say, who will provide me with a little EMP keyfob that nukes the DVD of lane-drifting fool ahead of me or alters the windshield-mounted, blindingly bright GPS navsystem such that the shortbus-promoted driver ahead turns off?

America awaits!

Mid-City residents finish their rebuild: Bart and Christie are finished with their post-Katrina rebuild. The Times-Picayune rightly chooses to celebrate the event with not-terribly-subtexted images of fecundity and fertility, Christie being pregnant and the twain the very personification of a hoped-for rebirth of the Crescent City.

It should be noted that New Orleans remains a place with such deep-rooted dysfunction as to boggle the mind, and that Bart and Christie’s neighborhood remains plagued by gun violence and, like much of the city, abandoned and half-destroyed buildings. For all of Bart’s chipper attitude and the Times-Picayune’s boosterism, the couple’s choice is one which at a minimum requires personal bravery and epic quantities of positive thinking.

I corresponded heavily with Bart in the aftermath of Katrina and what I thought at the time remains true: as goes New Orleans, so goes the nation. If post-Katrina New Orleans can effectively transcend our shattered and oligarchically burdened means of governance and commerce, so can the rest of the country. If New Orleans fails, so will the rest of the country.

Bart and Christie have chosen to work for the renaissance of New Orleans, to work to save and cherish the American heart. They are both patriots and heroes, and I feel sure either would be discomfited by my take on this. I admire their choices.

Party CAUCUS: The word and its history.

My summary: despite the greco-latinate spelling and first recorded use in the diaries of one John Adams, ain’t nobody whut knows whar it come from, ‘ceptin that it’s 100% Amurrkin, and thar’s them what say it’s a word we ‘uns come to borry fum the Algonkians er other percursory native types hereabouts.

Among that them, it should be noted, is the linked article’s author, someone better qualified to judge the evidence than I, I’ll warrant.

Dan Sporer is the Cuckoo Clockologist. Some of the clock oddities are truly spectacular.

Treo Games pointed out Crosswords, an open source Scrabble clone, which I am pleased with!

Apple //c: 20-year-old new stock, an eBay score. Mmmm.

Cooper’s Law: A person’s ability is inversely proportional to the complexity of their email signature.

MAPfrappe uses Google Maps to conduct various comparisons.

I had been thinking how physically close we are to Vancouver BC and wondered how the distance from Seattle to Vancouver is by comparison to Northern European distances.

No doot aboot it – it’s closer for us than it is is for Parisians and Londoners.

NYT on the Vytorin fiasco.