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If you are looking for the website of Matthew Katz, this isn't it any more. I'm over at my new domain. Mine, all mine!

Lost Photos of NYC

Sam works for the New York City Store now as Marketing Manager.

There is a book signing tonight at the City Store that I'm going to go to. Eugene de Salignac was the official photographer of NYC bridges for thirty years at the beginning of the 20th century. His work was carefully filed away in the archives and forgotten about. Recently, Michael Lorenzini found 20,000 glass plates of Eugene's and published them in "New York Rises - The Photographs of Eugene de Salignac".



I suggested to Sam that she tell the Dead Programmer about the signing and he's coming! I'm excited - Michael's writing is some of my favorite - it's always a pleasure when he updates and I see something new in my feedreader.

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GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself

GWEI - Google Will Eat Itself
They subscribe to Google's AdSense program and serve ads.
As the ads earn money, the money is automatically used to buy shares of stock in Google (GOOG).
Anyone who visits the site can become a shareholder in their corporation (GTTP Ltd - Google To The People Company). Therefore we all become shareholders, in effect, of Google.
They calculate that they we will fully own Google in 202 years.
Sweeeeeeet.

This feels distinctly like art to me.

Phone is now back on!

Phone is now back on!

Give me a ring!

Dream

We're in Columbia, South Carolina, throwing a large dinner party. It's in a very big house, like my parent's house but bigger and unfamiliar. Some of the guests have arrived, and it's nice time as we wait for the rest to arrive. It's getting later and later and the last guests have not arrived.

I walk down to a central shopping area like 5 Points to see where our guests are. The streets are empty of the shoppers, strolling couples, and teenagers that usually pack this place. Instead, in some of the windows are people who look off. They are in the shape of people, the right bits, but they are lumpy or lopsided, like straw dolls. They are distorted like poorly made puppets and they stare out of the windows with skewed eyes that don't blink or look around.

I am too scared to investigate or go into the shops, and I return home to tell my people what I've seen and to protect them.

When I get home, we figure out that there are aliens among us, that they have begun infiltrating. They begin as appliances and small home electronics. These aliens understand the general shapes of things, but not their purpose or uses. Their larval forms are crude approximations. So one might begin as a television, but not understand that the screen should be smooth and square, not wavy or slanty. A toaster might have too many slots or the slots might be too small. Things might have too many knobs or other suspicious features. When the appliance has grown large enough, it can shape itself as a person.

Given that I've seen a large pedestrian area already taken over, it stands to reason that these must grow quickly and that they must be harmful to people.

We find a cable box sitting on top of a television that has no LED's on the front and isn't plugged in. When I move towards it, the cable box skitters away, dragging its power-cord tail behind it. It scuttles towards a couch and I leap towards it, bashing it with a poker or baseball bat. Smashed, it is full of tightly compacted meaty muscle and guts. My guests and I begin searching the house for other aliens.

A man who looks like Robert Stack is at the party, a hard-bitten WWII veteran who tells us that we are all going to die. We aren't organized enough. If this had happened during his generation, the party would have split up into organized squads and scoured the house top to bottom, starting at the attic and sterilizing it. Then they would have secured it militarily and made sorties out to find other people and begin killing every alien.

Instead, we are going to eventually try to negotiate with them, or understand them. This is going to get us killed. Understanding is for when you've already won and are dealing with harmless remnants.

This Robert Stack guy is a bastard, but he feels right and we feel doomed.

Get my Wallet for Free

If you like the wallet I posted about in November, good news.

I stumbled across an instructable about how to fold your own Tyvek Wallet.


It's not as nice, but it's also not as twenty bucks.

BOCCE: Old Dirty Barristers Almost Win It All Again

We're good. I know it. We only lost one game this season, and that one was in the finals against our arch-rivals BocceLism. They get to have the threepeat championship and we get to be second place for the second season in a row.

Next season we will have to go Tonya Harding on Lism.
Photos of our crew flamboastin and toastin when I get em.

Math Everywhere: How Many People at a Good Party?

Doing some last minute shopping for Sam and ran across Apartment Therapy's post on Party Density.

Seems like they've got it down. I'm having a dinner party on December 25th, I'll have to check the math for the space...

The unanswered question, of course is how many people you should invite to achieve good density of people who actually show up. One strategy of mine is to make my invitations personal if possible rather than sending out a mass evite. People I like will tell me if they are coming or not and I know what's going on that night.

I don't throw barnstormers in my living space anyway. I'd rather throw them at other people's apartments and pay for food or liquor and they provide the space and the cleanup the next day.

NASA being slowly dismantled

Thought my pals might want to read this entry I found from Bruce Sterling about the Planetary Society's campaign to fight for the mission and budget of NASA . It was bad enough when this administration removed "to understand and protect the Earth" as a primary goal of NASA. It just gets worse, and because there isn't a clear bodycount, it isn't going to be big news.

Go check out that article and then maybe give the planetary society a donation and sign their petition. I'm going to give them $20 and sign the petition. If you email me what you've donated, I'll also match what you've donated.

Vail Vacation

Snow Waves, originally uploaded by snarkhunt.

Finally broke down and went to the hoity-toity Vail with some fellas.

Vail is really swank, really huge. We definitely went too early in the season because the legendary back bowls are packed snow. Coming here mid February when the bowls have been filled must be incredible and I'd be willing to go back here for a trip during that season. Even though we were here in the early season we were able to get some really good soft runs in through the trees.

Also - for the future - there are real, honest cliffs here that you can jump off of. I did not, because I am not that nuts.

In Praise of Lost Time

Here's a common sci-fi trope. A character is obsessed with the future and science and all the advantages it could bring. This blinds that character so that they don't see that they are losing their essential humanity.

Moral: All that dirty stuff that is unpleasant is also part of what makes us human.

I don't buy it. My cube mate Yoni said to me a few days ago, "You'll miss your body when it's gone." I don't buy it. It seems to me that we can definitely point out the things that we don't want any more of that are essential bits of humanity. Lets get rid of them even though they are essential bits of humanity.

Example: I just got 2 wisdom teeth pulled. How's that for some unintelligently designed hardware? I didn't stay awake for the procedure, even though that might have contributed to my character, even though those moments were mine, and they might have changed who I am...

I didn't want those pain-filled uncomfortable moments. I'd rather trade them for other moments or just turn them down flat. And, thanks to the modern miracle of general anesthesia, I didn't have to have those moments. Next, we've just got to nail down the details on the recuperation.

Bocce: Old Dirty Barristers Undefeated

My Bocce team, the O.D.B. is undefeated going into the championships.



This is the season that we win it all!

Design: Wallet

I got a new wallet. It's made out of Tyvek, the stuff that FedEx pouches are made out of. It's waterproof and unrippable. It's also paper thin and light and I love it.
It looks like an Airmail envelope.


Full, it is smaller than my old leather wallet is.



Fits all the stuff I need, plus, I've added a tiny tiny little wallet pen so that I'm never without a pen. It's already come in handy once.

That tiny silver thing in the middle is a wallet pen.
I love this wallet. It is beautiful and lovely and inspires me with how well designed it is.

Snow Trip: Crested Butte Colorado

Brian and I are looking for good folks to join us for a new years-ish trip to Crested Butte. Dates aren't firm yet. If you are interested - get in touch.

Concert: Marisa Monte

Tuesday night I went out with Nate and Claudia to go see Marisa Monte, a Brazilian singer-songwriter. I understood none of the songs, but it was very good music - chilled out stuff with lazy beats and happy melodies.

The staging was sparse but very effective. A few lightboxes, a platform, a few lights on movable booms and a spot. That was it, but it allowed for so many different moods.

Sometimes it suggested a warm homey room, sometimes a night out at 3 am when it's just you and the moon, sometimes a city night under streetlights... I wish I had pictures that turned out well.

I was also pleasantly suprised that when I googled Marisa Monte, the first result was a link for more info on Google Music - what's all this? Those guys keep indexing all of the world's information in new ways!

Great news for you - more work for me

I've made the switch to blogger beta, mainly because I love tags.
The tags are up there on the upper left corner, and I'll be going through the old posts and making sure things are tagged appropriately.

Why is this good for you, my loyal handful of readers?
As Jen W put it, I have an awful lot of "weird whacked out computer programmer drama that flies over her head". She's a pal of mine who doesn't care one whit about that stuff.
I've got good news for you, Jen. Now you can only see stuff related to me and my pals.
Change your bookmark to point to just my posts tagged "pals".

And there are some programmer types who frankly couldn't care less about what a nice time I had snowboarding. They want to only see my developer stuff.

There you go. Get the stuff you like from me without the stuff you hate.

I'll be toying around with the template a little bit over the next week or so to make it my own again after switching to this new format.

Call Nightline!

My friend Nikki pointed out the MIT Nightline for me and neither of us can get over how good this idea is. I love the idea of a number in your phone that you can call for anything. It's staffed with volunteers.

I think you could set up a non-MIT version of this based off of free labor.

Step 1. You sign up and list what you can be called about. "I can talk to people about finances, computers, snowboarding, general whatevers"

Step 2. You sign up for a time that calls can be relayed to you. "I volunteer for 6-7 pm this wednesday."

Step 3. You are now able to call in about any problem and get someone to talk to.

Your cost is mainly the servers, bandwidth, pbx system and phone time.

The trick is to balance the commitment that folks have to give versus the demand.

I think a good name for it would be to steal from Warren Ellis the name "Global Frequency".

Bocce Season Begins

Old Dirty Barristers is representing in the Floyd Bocce Tournament. Last season we came in second, this time we are going for the gold. Training will begin immediately in our firm's training camp.
I popped our games in google calendar if you'd like to come out and cheer for the future champions.

If you've got a google account, you can subscribe by clicking this button:.
Other stuff, you'll probably want the iCal address.

BOCCE: Old Dirty Barristers Almost Win It All

My bocce team, the old dirty barristers, came in second place in the FloydNy bocce tournament.

Here's a little video from saturday's game:


Matt Scott Places it on the pellino on Vimeo

Robbed: NYC bites back.

Lots of nice stuff happened today. My bocce team (Old Dirty Barristers) won our game and we are in the semifinals. I attended drupal camp over at the polytechnic and it was great. (Drupal looks great and really easy btw - I think I'm going to create a new site on it.)

It's also my buddy Angie's birthday on the 13th, so that's nice. I went to her party, went upstairs, then we both came down to check out her new bike and mine.

Her's had two more wheels than mine did. For once, I didn't pull the front wheel off and lock it and back wheel through the frame to a fence. I got punished for it and someone used those quick release levers to help themselves to two new bike tires.

I guess I'll be making a trip to the bike shop on Mother's day.
--edit: I didn't. Instead I went and kicked ass in the floyd bocce tournament.

Tags:

• nyc
• bycicle
• brooklyn