1.31.2010
1.30.2010
1.29.2010
1.28.2010
1.27.2010
1.26.2010
new blog
anyone want to contribute to my new blog collective?
tremble tremble
just email me and let me know if you want to contribute.
///////diana
1.25.2010
lightlane
LightLane
Gold Award
Category: Leisure & Recreation
Design: Evan Gant, Alex Tee, Altitude (U.S.)
Bike lanes have proven to be an effective method of protecting cyclists on congested roads, yet they can be prohibitively expensive to install. LightLane provides an alternative. Using a laser, a rider projects a crisply defined virtual bike lane onto the pavement, giving drivers a familiar boundary to avoid. With this wider margin of safety, bikers will regain their confidence to ride at night, making the bicycle a more viable commuting alternative.
http://www.lightlanebike.com/
1.24.2010
1.23.2010
1.22.2010
The Sculpture that Perpetually Sells itself on eBay
Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.
If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.
http://www.caleblarsen.com/projects/a-tool-to-deceive-and-slaughter/
via skate borden
1-22-10
1.21.2010
1.20.2010
1.19.2010
Titles ... a proposal
this is a proposal. shall we all start adding titles to our blog posts? why do i suggest this?
4 reasons:
1) it creates a link so that the individual post can also stand on it's own (to be emailed, etc)
2) it makes it easier to follow the comments back to the post. otherwise we don't know what post the comment was made for when it comes to our email accounts.
3) it makes it easier to search for and find older posts that we might want to locate.
4) it creates more trails back to our blog, www.a-n-t-e-n-n-a-s.com (which will generate more traffic from people doing google searches).
1.18.2010
'presented by david lynch and directed by werner herzog' i think we are contractually obligated to post this on a-n-t-e-n-n-a-s
1.17.2010
Usher
1.16.2010
1.15.2010
1.14.2010
Okay Guys!
Back a project named "Uncategorizeable" in the 2010 First Annual Kickstarter Awards by clicking above!
1.13.2010
1.12.2010
Why Isn't Jocelyn An A-N-T-E-N-N-A-S Contributer?
1.11.2010
Röyksopp
1.10.2010
1.09.2010
selp selp ... there comes a time
this one might strain the machinery. if it doesn't load automatically, wait for it to completely load, and then refresh the page.
1.08.2010
1.07.2010
The Third & The Seventh from Alex Roman on Vimeo.
all cgi!!!! crazy! as he recommends on his vimeo page, prob best to go see it in hd and fullscreen on vimeo
1.06.2010
1.05.2010
1.04.2010
Readability ... Get it NOW!!!
READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.
You wind up with a simple, magazine-like layout, presented in a beautiful font and size (your choice) against a white or off-white background with none of this red-text-against-black business.
You occasionally run into a Web page that Readability doesn’t handle right — no big deal, just refresh the page to see the original. But most of the time, Readability makes the world online a calmer, cleaner, more beautiful place.
Go forth and install it.
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
2010 Post Drive!
It's a new year and a new decade! It's time for setting new goals and overcoming past shortcomings. That's why we are starting today with our 2010 Post Drive! We need just 1046 more posts in 360 days! That's just 2.9 posts a day! Imagine the difference you'll make in the lives of our 2 subscribers! "Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much" -Hellen Keller
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8439495.stm
David Simon's Must-Read Piece from the Washington Post
In the halcyon days when American newspapers were feared rather than pitied, I had the pleasure of reporting on crime in the prodigiously criminal environs of Baltimore. The city was a wonderland of chaos, dirt and miscalculation, and loyal adversaries were many. Among them, I could count police commanders who felt it was their duty to demonstrate that crime never occurred in their precincts, desk sergeants who believed that they had a right to arrest and detain citizens without reporting it and, of course, homicide detectives and patrolmen who, when it suited them, argued convincingly that to provide the basic details of any incident might lead to the escape of some heinous felon. Everyone had very good reasons for why nearly every fact about a crime should go unreported.
In response to such flummery, I had in my wallet, next to my Baltimore Sun press pass, a business card for Chief Judge Robert F. Sweeney of the Maryland District Court, with his home phone number on the back. When confronted with a desk sergeant or police spokesman convinced that the public had no right to know who had shot whom in the 1400 block of North Bentalou Street, I would dial the judge.
And then I would stand, secretly delighted, as yet another police officer learned not only the fundamentals of Maryland’s public information law, but the fact that as custodian of public records, he needed to kick out the face sheet of any incident report and open his arrest log to immediate inspection. There are civil penalties for refusing to do so, the judge would assure him. And as chief judge of the District Court, he would declare, I may well invoke said penalties if you go further down this path.
Delays of even 24 hours? Nope, not acceptable. Requiring written notification from the newspaper? No, the judge would explain. Even ordinary citizens have a right to those reports. And woe to any fool who tried to suggest to His Honor that he would need a 30-day state Public Information Act request for something as basic as a face sheet or an arrest log.
“What do you need the thirty days for?” the judge once asked a police spokesman on speakerphone.
“We may need to redact sensitive information,” the spokesman offered.
“You can’t redact anything. Do you hear me? Everything in an initial incident report is public. If the report has been filed by the officer, then give it to the reporter tonight or face contempt charges tomorrow.”
The late Judge Sweeney, who’d been named to his post in the early 1970s, when newspapers were challenging the Nixonian model of imperial governance, kept this up until 1996, when he retired. I have few heroes left, but he still qualifies.
To be a police reporter in such a climate was to be a prince of the city, and to be a citizen of such a city was to know that you were not residing in a police state. But no longer — not in Baltimore and, I am guessing, not in any city where print journalism spent the 1980s and ’90s taking profits and then, in the decade that followed, impaling itself on the Internet.
In January, a new Baltimore police spokesman — a refugee from the Bush administration — came to the incredible conclusion that the city department could decide not to identify those police officers who shot or even killed someone. (Similar policies have been established by several other police departments in the United States as well as by the FBI.)
Anthony Guglielmi, the department’s director of public affairs, informed Baltimoreans that, henceforth, Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld would decide unilaterally whether citizens would know the names of those who had used their weapons on civilians. If they did something illegal or unwarranted — in the commissioner’s judgment — they would be named. Otherwise, the Baltimore department would no longer regard the decision to shoot someone as the sort of responsibility for which officers might be required to stand before the public.
As justification for this change, Bealefeld, in a letter to the City Council, cited 23 threats in 2008 against his officers. Police union officials further wheeled out the example of the only Baltimore police officer killed as an act of revenge for a police-involved shooting — a 2001 case in which the officer was seen by happenstance in a Dundalk bar, then stalked and murdered.
Bealefeld didn’t mention that not one of the 23 threats against officers came in response to any use of lethal force. Nor did he acknowledge that 23 threats against a 3,000-officer force in a year is an entirely routine number; that the number of such threats hasn’t grown over the past several years, according to sources within the department.
And union officials were comfortable raising the 2001 case without being forced to acknowledge that the officer in that instance most probably would have been killed had no newspaper ever printed his name; he had testified in open court against the relatives of those who later encountered him at the bar and killed him. So the case has scant relevance to the change in policy.
The commissioner was allowed to stand on half-truths. Why? Because the Baltimore Sun’s cadre of police reporters — the crime beat used to carry four and five different bylines — has been thinned to the point where no one was checking Bealefeld’s statements or those of his surrogates.
On Feb. 17, when a 29-year-old officer responded to a domestic dispute in East Baltimore, ended up fighting for her gun and ultimately shot an unarmed 61-year-old man named Joseph Alfonso Forrest, the Sun reported the incident, during which Forrest died, as a brief item. It did not name the officer, Traci McKissick, or a police sergeant who later arrived at the scene to aid her and who also shot the man.
It didn’t identify the pair the next day, either, because the Sun ran no full story on the shooting, as if officers battling for their weapons and unarmed 61-year-old citizens dying by police gunfire are no longer the grist of city journalism. At which point, one old police reporter lost his mind and began making calls.
No, the police spokesman would not identify the officers, and for more than 24 hours he would provide no information on whether either one of them had ever been involved in similar incidents. And that’s the rub, of course. Without a name, there’s no way for anyone to evaluate an officer’s performance independently, to gauge his or her effectiveness and competence, to know whether he or she has shot one person or 10.
It turns out that McKissick — who is described as physically diminutive — had had her gun taken from her once before. In 2005, police sources said, she was in the passenger seat of a suspect’s car as the suspect, who had not been properly secured, began driving away from the scene. McKissick pulled her gun, the suspect grabbed for it and a shot was fired into the rear seat. Eventually, the suspect got the weapon and threw it out of the car; it was never recovered. Charges were dropped on the suspect, according to his defense attorney, Warren Brown, after Brown alleged in court that McKissick’s supervisors had rewritten reports, tailoring and sanitizing her performance.
And so on Feb. 17, the same officer may have again drawn her weapon only to find herself again at risk of losing the gun. The shooting may be good and legally justified, and perhaps McKissick has sufficient training and is a capable street officer. But in the new world of Baltimore, where officers who take life are no longer named or subject to public scrutiny, who can know?
In this instance, the Sun caught up on the story somewhat; I called the editor and vented everything I’d learned about the earlier incident. But had it relied on the unilateral utterances of Baltimore’s police officials, the Sun would have been told that McKissick had been involved “in one earlier shooting. She was dragged behind a car by a suspect and she fired one shot, which did not strike anyone. The shooting was ruled justified.”
That’s the sanitized take that Guglielmi, the police spokesman, offered on the 2005 incident. When I asked him for the date of that event, with paperwork in front of him, he missed it by exactly six months. An honest mistake? Or did he just want to prevent a reporter from looking up public documents at the courthouse? (Attempts to reach McKissick, who remains on administrative leave, were unsuccessful.)
Half-truths, obfuscations and apparent deceit — these are the wages of a world in which newspapers, their staffs eviscerated, no longer battle at the frontiers of public information. And in a city where officials routinely plead with citizens to trust the police, where witnesses have for years been vulnerable to retaliatory violence, we now have a once-proud department’s officers hiding behind anonymity that is not only arguably illegal under existing public information laws, but hypocritical as well.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about what will replace the dinosaur that is the daily newspaper. So-called citizen journalists and bloggers and media pundits have lined up to tell us that newspapers are dying but that the news business will endure, that this moment is less tragic than it is transformational.
Well, sorry, but I didn’t trip over any blogger trying to find out McKissick’s identity and performance history. Nor were any citizen journalists at the City Council hearing in January when police officials inflated the nature and severity of the threats against officers. And there wasn’t anyone working sources in the police department to counterbalance all of the spin or omission.
I didn’t trip over a herd of hungry Sun reporters either, but that’s the point. In an American city, a police officer with the authority to take human life can now do so in the shadows, while his higher-ups can claim that this is necessary not to avoid public accountability, but to mitigate against a nonexistent wave of threats. And the last remaining daily newspaper in town no longer has the manpower, the expertise or the institutional memory to challenge any of it.
At one point last week, after the department spokesman denied me the face sheet of the shooting report, I tried doing what I used to do: I went to the Southeastern District and demanded the copy on file there.
When the desk officer refused to give it to me, I tried calling the chief judge of the District Court. But Sweeney’s replacement no longer handles such business. It’s been a while since any reporter asked, apparently. So I tried to explain the Maryland statutes to the shift commander, but so long had it been since a reporter had demanded a public document that he stared at me as if I were an emissary from some lost and utterly alien world.
Which is, sadly enough, exactly true.
1.03.2010
1.02.2010
1.01.2010
Nielson releases most played singles of the decade:
CHR/Top 40: "Yeah" / Usher featuring Ludacris & Lil Jon / 416,267 spins
Hot AC: "Drops Of Jupiter" (Tell Me) / Train / 338,749 spins
Alternative: "Last Resort" / Papa Roach / 221,767 spins
Rhythmic: "Low" / Flo Rida featuring T-Pain / 206,864 spins
Album Rock: "It's Been Awhile" / Staind / 189,195 spins
Urban: "Drop It Like It's Hot" / Snoop Dogg featuring Pharrell / 169,511 spins
Urban AC: "Think About You" / Luther Vandross / 147,818 spins
Gospel: "Never Would Have Made It" / Marvin Sapp / 92,603 spins
Smooth Jazz: "Pacific Coast Highway" / Nils / 29,328 spins
2009 Post Drive
