RIDING WITH STRANGERS

Audio

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:22:00 -0400

Xbox One

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:26:00 -0400

Xbox One

etc.

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:15:00 -0400

etc.

Yahoo Acquires Tumblr.

Mon, 20 May 2013 11:41:00 -0400

Yahoo Acquires Tumblr.:

Marissa Mayer on her Tumblr:

I’m delighted to announce that we’ve reached an agreement to acquire Tumblr!

We promise not to screw it up. Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going. We will operate Tumblr independently. David Karp will remain CEO. The product roadmap, their team, their wit and irreverence will all remain the same […]

Paul BaileyFive trees22 x 22 inches2013

Mon, 20 May 2013 00:23:00 -0400

Paul Bailey
Five trees
22 x 22 inches
2013

Yahoo Board Approves $1.1 Billion Cash Deal to Buy Tumblr

Sun, 19 May 2013 16:34:00 -0400

Yahoo Board Approves $1.1 Billion Cash Deal to Buy Tumblr:

As part of the deal, Tumblr CEO David Karp — who got a windfall of cash from the deal — will stay at Yahoo for four years at least and retain a lot of control over the service, much in the same way Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom does at Facebook. But, as there, Yahoo will undergird Tumblr’s nascent advertising business with its large and established infrastructure.

Would I have liked for Tumblr to forever remain ~~niche and~~ independent and try to make it on their own rather than succumbing to advances by a prehistoric company like Yahoo, who desperately wants to buy eyeballs from young demographic while struggling to stay relevant in the post-Instagram/Vina era? Sure. But who am I to take issues with Karp’s making a fortune on all his hard-work. Sure I’ve spent countless hours curating content on the service and being emotionally invested in the community for past four years. But if David is okay with handing over his baby to a company like Yahoo, it’s his call. And if Yahoo is smart, they’d handle it more like how Facebook is handling Instagram (leaving it alone to operate independently for most part) It might even go better than Facebook+Instagram deal in that I don’t see that many cross-overs between the two entities (unlike facebook, who is slowly poisoning Instagram by adding very ‘facebook / un-Instagram’ like feature like ‘tagging’).

Worse case scenario - Yahoo botches the acquisition, alienates the ‘Tumblr’ community, who abandon ship and it becomes another footnote in a long list of casualties. Which would be quite sad. But for now I’m choosing to be cautiously optimistic.

Note to self: backup the site tonight just in case.

F**k Buttons to release their third album, Slow Focus, on July...

Sun, 19 May 2013 15:17:00 -0400

F**k Buttons to release their third album, Slow Focus, on July 22nd

All I have to say is - about f’ing time.

As far as computers go, this one’s quite strange looking....

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:47:00 -0400

As far as computers go, this one’s quite strange looking. Which is fitting since it’s the world’s first commercially availble quantum computer (made by D-Wave, based in Britist Columbia, Canada).

All the rich kids are getting one.

New York City, 1965 — Joel Meyerowitz / via

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:17:00 -0400

New York City, 1965 — Joel Meyerowitz / via

"The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones..."

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:12:00 -0400

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

- Charles Bukowski (via youmightfindyourself)

Editor’s note: …and then there are those, steps above on the intelligence curve; they feel so confident in their ideas that they are willing to risk everything by betting on them. And all theose doubts from the said intelligent people or the opposing forces from the stupid ones can’t keep them down. Those are the ones that actually change the world.

Sadly, there aren’t enough of them.

anxiety’s door

Mon, 13 May 2013 09:57:00 -0400

anxiety’s door

James Blake, 05/03/2013Terminal 5, NYC

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:39:00 -0400

James Blake, 05/03/2013
Terminal 5, NYC

klavierwerke

Fri, 10 May 2013 16:30:00 -0400

klavierwerke

11:42 pm

Thu, 09 May 2013 12:48:00 -0400

11:42 pm

Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:04:00 -0400

Last of a Breed: Postal Workers Who Decipher Bad Addresses :

By RON NIXON

Inside a plain warehouselike office building filled with rows of cubicles, Melissa Stark stares at the image of an envelope on a computer screen. The handwriting is barely legible and appears to be addressed to someone in the “cty of Jesey.”

“Is that a 7 or a 9 in the address?” Ms. Stark said to no one in particular. Then she typed in a few numbers and a list of possible addresses popped up on her screen. “Looks like a 9,” she said before selecting an address, apparently in Jersey City. The letter disappears and another one appears on the screen.

“That means I got it right,” Ms. Stark said.

Ms. Stark is one of the Postal Service’s data conversion operators, a techie title for someone who deciphers unreadable addresses, and she is one of the last of a breed. In September, the post office will close one of its two remaining centers where workers try to read the scribble on envelopes and address labels that machines cannot. At one time, there were 55 plants around the country where addresses rejected by machines were guessed at by workers aided with special software to get the mail where it was intended.

But improved scanning technology now allows machines to “read” virtually all of the 160 billion pieces of mail that moved through the system last year. As machines have improved, workers have been let go, and after September, the facility here will be the post office’s only center for reading illegible mail.

“We understand that these remote encoding centers were planned as a temporary fix,” said Barbara Batin, the center’s operations manager, using the facilities’ formal name. “They were created and deployed with the knowledge that new technology would eventually put us out of work.”

But for now, this center operates 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. More than 700 workers stare at images of letters, packages, change-of-address cards and other mail, trying to figure out where they are supposed to go. It is not easy work. With software, a knowledge of geography and more than a little intuition, an operator has exactly 90 seconds to move each piece of mail.

When mail-sorting machines around the country encounter addresses they cannot read, an electronic image of the bad handwriting or faded address is transmitted to operators here who view them and try to fill in the missing information by typing in a letter or a number. Once corrected, the information is returned to the processing plant where the mail is sent on to a local post office, ultimately ending up where it is supposed to go.

“We get the worst of the worst,” Ms. Batin said. “It used to be that we’d get letters that were somewhat legible but the machines weren’t good enough to read them. Now we get letters and packages with the most awful handwriting you can imagine. Still, it’s our job to make sure it gets to where it’s supposed to go.”

Over the years, the Postal Service has become the world leader in optical character recognition — software capable of reading computer-generated lettering and handwriting — sinking millions of dollars into equipment that can read nearly 98 percent of all hand-addressed mail and 99.5 percent of machine-addressed pieces.

That was not always the case. In the beginning, people sorted mail. As the volume and variety increased, the post office turned to automation. But the machines could read only about 35 percent of the mail at first and had trouble with handwritten addresses. So the Postal Service set up the centers, using people to supplement the scanners. At the height of the program, in 1997, the centers processed 19 billion images annually, about 10 percent of all mail at the time, the post office said.

In the last year, this center, and the one in Wichita, Kan., that will close in September, deciphered just 2.4 billion images, or a mere 1.5 percent of the mail, the post office said.

Speed is important. Each worker in this nearly football-field-length room is expected to process about 1,200 images an hour, and they average three seconds an image.

“Not everyone can process all the types of mail that we get,” said Ruth Burns, a group leader who sits in the middle of the sprawling room watching a bank of computer screens. “Some people are better at reading handwriting. Some are better at reading faded addresses. It varies.”

Rita Archuletta, who has worked at the center for 16 years, said she worked only on addresses involving letters, magazines and items listed as “undeliverable as addressed.” She does not do large envelopes, for example.

“My supervisor said my speed was too slow on those,” she said.

Ms. Archuletta said that over the years she had seen her share of impossible letters, like the one addressed to the house “down the street from the drugstore on the corner” or one intended for “the place next to the red barn.” Still, she said bad handwriting was the worst. “And most of the bad scribble seems to be coming from people back East,” she said with a smile. “They really can’t write.”

Natalie Jenkins, who started at the facility a year after it opened in 1994, said that while bad penmanship was a problem, addresses in different languages gave her the most trouble.

“We get a lot of mail from San Juan, and it’s in Spanish,” she said. “The machines can’t read it, so we have to. It does get easier after you’ve been doing it for a while. You start to recognize certain things.”

The saddest letter Ms. Jenkins has seen was addressed to God, apparently written by a little girl whose father had just died. “It broke my heart,” she said.

The best letters, Ms. Jenkins said, are those addressed to Santa Claus. They come in without an address and are sent to a processing center in Alaska, where volunteers answer them.

Back at Ms. Stark’s workstation, the image of an extremely faded letter with no discernible address appeared on the screen.

She zooms in. “Is that a ZIP code in the corner?” she asked, staring at the image for a few seconds.

Finally, she hit the reject button. The letter will be placed in a bin back at the mail processing plant where someone else will try to figure out the address by physically examining it.

“There are some things even we can’t read,” Ms. Stark said as another image popped up.

break the spell

Thu, 09 May 2013 10:00:00 -0400

break the spell

tribecafilm: Thanks to PHHHOTO’s mobile GIF-making “booth,” TFF...

Tue, 07 May 2013 15:40:00 -0400

tribecafilm:

Thanks to PHHHOTO’s mobile GIF-making “booth,” TFF 2013 party goers and filmmaker lounge visitors created over 800 animated photos of themselves to share with friends.

Click for more

Hey there buddy

wall of text upper west side, new york

Sun, 05 May 2013 19:48:00 -0400

wall of text

upper west side, new york

The Y Combinator motto, in poster form. / via

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:58:00 -0400

The Y Combinator motto, in poster form. / via

McDonald’s Theory of Bad Ideas

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:39:00 -0400

McDonald’s Theory of Bad Ideas:

Jon Bell:

I use a trick with co-workers when we’re trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonald’s.

An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we can’t possibly go to McDonald’s, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!

It’s as if we’ve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonald’s Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.

This is a technique I use a lot at work. Projects start in different ways. Sometimes you’re handed a formal brief. Sometimes you hear a rumor that something might be coming so you start thinking about it early. Other times you’ve been playing with an idea for months or years before sharing with your team. There’s no defined process for all creative work, but I’ve come to believe that all creative endeavors share one thing: the second step is easier than the first. Always.

So true.