Category: linkblog

“Here’s what Beethoven’s Ninth felt like on Friday, with Lorin Maazel conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Imagine that you gave someone a fancy sports car, and they drove it around for a while without realizing that it had more than one gear, and then made up for it by repeatedly climbing up and down all six gears—reverse and neutral included—for twenty minutes.” Guerreri is in full force in this review. For the record, though, that opening verse was only a mezzoforte.

Maria Cirino, Veracode investor, is profiled.

FREE LIVE PIXIES EP. Y’all.

Nice Christmas Lego plans.

Sounds a little more staged than the 2004 reunion tour, not that that’s a bad thing. But. Mission of Burma won’t be opening for them this time out.

Opening with the b-sides sounds like a good reason to go to my first show since Neko Case’s “Fox” tour.

I may have to check out this application. Tired of forgetting to edit my photos until much later.

Nice alternative for working with pork chops.

Explains a lot about how I work.

I like this — looks nice and background-tasky, which is how I like my vegetables. Plus: rosemary.

Photoshop techniques for taking isolated elements out of composite illustrations.

Shades of Nouveau Vague.

Wu-Tang Clan album covers in the style of Blue Note. Nice.

“… the Tanglewood Festival Chorus delivered a rousing and focused performance, with less visceral intensity than Michael Tilson Thomas requested from them at Tanglewood in August, but with all the control and dexterity Maazel required. At certain climaxes, they positively saturated the hall with sound.”

Best comment: “Apple doesn’t look at the source code, they only have access to the binaries. It can be extremely tricky to guess what a program does based on the binaries.”

When IE6 withers away to nothingness, I hope I’m still alive to dance on its grave.

I wouldn’t mind having one of these, but $500 is a bit pricey for my blood.

“…exit polls conducted by Edison Research on Tuesday showed that support for Mr. Obama had diminished only slightly in the state since his victory here in 2008. The polls suggested that many of Mr. Obama’s voters stayed home on Tuesday, allowing Mr. McDonnell to win on strong support among white men and independents and among voters who say they are very worried about the direction of the nation’s economy.” In other words: turnout turnout turnout.

I’m looking forward to seeing this. Anything that roughs up Mickey and brings back his edge is good by me.

More nice home office stuff.

This is what the gay marriage initiative problem comes down to for me: “individual rights should not be subject to democratic vote. Majorities should not be able to take away the rights of minorities.”

Awesome: White House Iron Chef!

Looking forward to playing with some of these. I’ve often thought this constellation of small apps is one of Flickr’s big strengths; nice to see them all in one place.

A real home office setup for two in 10×12. Pretty awesome.

Someone remind me why letting this be negotiated in secret is good for national security, the ostensible reason for doing so.

I have no patience with antivaccination parents for reasons like this. If you don’t get your children vaccinated, you endanger everyone else’s.

It’s not definitive, but Krugman’s chart of world industrial production gives some intellectual support to the idea that we’ve pulled back from the brink.

Interesting notes about signup pages (customer acquisition via conversion forms).

Favorites: “a lamentation of Morlocks,” “a murmur of the possessed,” and “a delectation of nymphs.”

Oh yeah. Digital paint for easy home renovation planning.

Heuristic binary patching based on observation of an attack.

Brilliant review of how color design conveys mood, emotion, and story through a classic children’s show–just in time for Halloween. Good read for designers.

This was my question–what’s the security context of the PayPhrase concept? Seems like a phrase plus a PIN isn’t too much easier to remember than a username and password, but it would be a lot easier to break a four digit PIN than a proper password.

Good tips for getting good photos from the iPhone 3GS. I can already tell that the colors on the iPhone camera are much more saturated, almost Lomoesque, compared to the original model. I’m having fun taking pictures with it.

No such thing as too much Burma.

Heh. Scalia gets an operatic "lap dance" in the Kennedy Center's production of Strauss's "Ariadne auf Naxos."

Does giving private carriers the ability to prioritize Internet traffic constitute a national security issue?

Matthew Guerrieri writes about the early popularity of Beethoven in Boston–championed by the Transcendentalists, along with Swedenborg and other hippies.

Multitouch comes to the Mac desktop interface — in a mouse. Nice solution for older laptops too. RIP Mighty Mouse.