Clay Shirky’s essay on Amazon and the book industry is so full of great lines, it’s hard to pick just one. The fact that any bookseller ever “runs out” of a book is now ridiculous. In the twenty-first century, not being able to correctly stock or distribute a product whose main ingredient is information suggests …
Continue reading “Book publishers, infused with aggrieved privilege ”
Easily check the status of your service request without going through the clunky website or fighting a CAPTCHA: NYC 311. This works best with a plugin like JSONView.
I suggested that we hold this meeting in a SCIF, because they wanted me to talk about top secret documents that had not been made public. The problem is that I, as someone without a clearance, would not be allowed into the SCIF. So we had to have the meeting in a regular room. This …
Continue reading “Bruce Schneier briefed congress on the NSA”
[P]roofreading is the hallmark of caring. I cannot write an email or add a Facebook update without subjecting my words to tedious revision. If I send a story to a magazine with a missing period or uneven spacing, I feel as if I may as well have submitted a dirty pair of underwear. —Jessie Ren …
Check out parra bellum labs, the RNC’s new innovation group.
Following Eric’s instructions, I switched paulschreiber.com to https. I then had to get rid of the pesky mixed-content warnings. Most were pretty straightforward — I had a few JavaScript files and images that used absolute URLs and HTTP; I switched them to use HTTPS. However, my flickr badge presented a problem. (It’s bothering some other …
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, …
After biking to DC, I needed a way to get my bike back to New York. There were a few options: Ship it (FedEx Ground would be best) Take it with me on a bus Take it with me on a train Have someone drive it back Since I was already taking the train myself, …
Let’s imagine in for a moment what it would be like if everything the government can share publicly were made public as it happened. If every law, report, inspection, regulation, enforcement action, budget and meeting that we should be aware of is actually made available online and in real time. It would be nothing short …
Continue reading “Ellen Miller’s brilliant vision for open government”
Belt shopping is a pain. It’s often difficult to find something you like — in my case, as plain and free of ornamentation as possible — and that’s reasonably priced. The value of the time spent looking is often more than the cost of the belt. Next time you find a belt like this, buy …