Rick Webb dot net

Drone Life on Flickr.

thisistheverge:

WSJ: Yahoo’s board approves $1.1 billion all-cash Tumblr acquisition

That is a pretty imaginative screenshot. 

lizstless posted a photo:

thisistheverge:

The Classics: Lush, ‘Spooky’

British band Lush’s first full-length album, Spooky (4AD, January, 1992) is a relic of a past which no longer exists, but which incessantly reminds you that it once did. You hear its reverberations in predecessors like Black Tambourine and in successors like Wild Nothing. What ties them all together is a dialogue, a certain way of looking at the world, which has everything to do with the tone, the sound, the feel, and often nothing to do with actual meaning. The meaning is conveyed in the delivery. 

Been listening to this a lot again lately. Been thinking back to the Spooky tour, and Lush’s first show ever in the US, at Nightstage. I used to be upset about the direction Lush took later, with Ladykiller, et al, but now I really like it. They could see further than I. 

“Pascal suggested that one ought to believe in God because if God exists, it will have been the correct choice, while if God turns out to not exist, little harm will have been done by holding a false metaphysical belief. Does optimism really affect outcomes? The best bet is to believe that the answer is “Yes.” I suppose the vulgar construction “Kirk’s Wager” is a workable moniker for it.”

- U MAD??? Evgeny Morozov, The Internet, And The Failure Of Invective | The Awl

slicingeyeballs:

July 15, 1956 — May 18, 1980

lizstless posted a photo:

““I managed over 12,000 people at Groupon, most under the age of 25. One thing that surprised me was that many would arrive at orientation with minimal understanding of basic business wisdom. ”Haven’t you read any business books? Good to Great? Winning? The One Minute Manager?” I’d ask. ”Business books? Not really our thing,” was the typical response. I came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation.””

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For Real, Ex-Groupon CEO Andrew Mason Is Releasing An Album Of Motivational Music | TechCrunch

I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS. 

johndarnielle:

To the left of Nick Cave’s left foot, at the lip of the stage, looking up in reverent, fevered wonder, right cheekbone partially obscured by a power supply: it’s John Darnielle, 16 years old, loving his life for at least the next 35 minutes and probably until at least 2 a.m.

“Mr. Obama also expresses exasperation. In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought.”

-

NYTimes.com.

“going Bulworth”

(via nedhepburn)

DO IT.

DO IT.

DO IT.

(via apoplecticskeptic)

SERIOUSLY. God. Please. PLEASE.

“Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Come on! It’s been no one has gone before since 1987!

“The Tumblr app for Glass allows you to receive updates from your Tumblr dashboard, and you can adjust the frequency with which you receive those. It also lets you post all kinds of content, including text, images and video.”

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Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, CNN And Evernote Apps Coming To Google Glass Today | TechCrunch

Beware of Benedict Cubercats distracting you while driving. 

Bentley Bear. 

The first time I used a remote control

The first time I put on a walkman on and walked down the street

The first time I recorded a sound on my mac and played it back

The first time I played a synthesizer

The first time I used a cordless phone

The first time I tapped a BASIC program out of A+ magazine into my Apple II

The first time I dialed into a BBS

The first time I saw an Osborne 1 suitcase computer

The first time I flew a remote controlled plane, or sailed an RC ship

The first time I programmed a VCR

The first time I played an NES

The first time I used a sequencer

The first time I bought a CD

The first time I saw the Apple //’s amazing full color HGR2 graphics. 

The first time I programmed turtle graphics to make something beautiful

The first time I wrote a PASCAL program

The first time I saw a font on a Mac

The first time I saw a camcorder

The first time I saw Sim City

The first time I used Photoshop

The first time I chatted with a stranger on the internet, a man in Finland 

The first time I saw a piece of film come out of an imagesetter, from a Mac

The first time I used Quark

The first time I saw a Powerbook

The first time I saw the actual faders move on a mixing board

The first time I saw the cover of Wired magazine

The first time I used a color laser printer

The first time I saw a Heidelberg digital press print something without film

The first time I bought a cell phone

The first time I saw Steve Jobs walk on stage and show the world the iMac

The first time I saw my computer play four simultaneous tracks of audio

The first time I saw a digital camera

The first time I saw an autotune filter

The first time I saw the world wide web

The first time I paid for something with my ATM card

The first time I saw a video on the internet

The first time I saw Napster

The first time I used a computer on a porch with Wi-Fi

The first time I wrote a song on a computer

The first time I got something delivered to my house from Kozmo.com

The first time I used a remote car starter

The first time I bought something on eBay I had been looking for for ten years

The first time I used GPS

The first time I ripped a CD

The first time I saw a TiVo

The first time I travelled with an MP3 player and rocked out in the Sahara

The first time I IM’d someone from my phone, a T-Mobile Sidekick

The first time I saw the amazing AJAX that was Google Maps

The first time I played music on my phone

The first time I IM’d someone a file

The first time I saw Livejournal

The first time I saw an iPod

The first time I used Zipcar

The first time I met someone in real life that I only knew on the internet

The first time I blogged asking a favor and a kind stranger came to deliver

The first time I watched a Roomba clean a floor

The first time I saw Minority Report

The first time I used Dodgeball

The first time I saw Flickr

The first time I logged into Facebook

The first time I learned about Ruby on Rails

The first time I played an Xbox game with some kids across the planet. I lost.

The first time I downloaded a movie

The first time I checked in on Foursquare and people magically show up

The first time I connected my computer to the 3G network

The first time I saw Daft Punk

The first time I logged onto the internet on an airplane

The first time I bought a book on the Kindle

The first time I videochatted with my girlfriend

The first time I blogged something that a “real news publication” picked up

The first time I heard about AWS

The first time I saw a Tesla roadster

The first time I saw an iPad mini

The first time I took a picture of a check to deposit it in my account

Magic. 

““Here’s a current example of the challenge we face,” he writes in the book’s prelude: “At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 14,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only 13 people. Where did all those jobs disappear? And what happened to the wealth that all those middle-class jobs created?””

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Jaron Lanier: The Internet destroyed the middle class - Salon.com

I like Jaron Lanier a lot, but this illustration as some sort of evidence of the internet hollowing out the middle class is, forgive me for saying so, idiotic. A child could figure out where those jobs went. 

1) Instagram SHOWS the photos. We have to include all of the people who work on the cloud that supports that. 

2) Kodak made cameras and film. Cameras are still being made - even moreso. At the very least, we should include the current #1 camera maker’s employees. At this point, that’s apple. Fifty thousand employees. Pro rate it to only the apple devices that have cameras, ignoring their mac business. 30,000 employees. 

3) The film business still exists. It was just lost to Fujichrome, who still makes film and has over 30,000 employees. This has nothing to do with the web, but rather something called “Globalization.” 

The internet didn’t kill a single job in photography. There are more cameras now than ever. There are still tens of thousands of people making film. 

Take the market cap of JUST these three companies - facebook, apple, fujifilm, and we’re looking at $500 billion market cap, and nearly 90,000 employees. 

Think that’s unfair? Canon has nearly 200,000 employees. Nikon has 24,000. 10,000 more than Kodak. Shit, ZEISS has 24,000 employees. 

Never mind every single camera in an android phone. 

Those jobs went overseas, and they went to computer companies, Mr. Lanier. They still exist. The internet didn’t kill a single one of them. 

“

Cooper Union says that the current occupation of the president’s office “has created a poisonous and dangerous atmosphere that can potentially destroy the school forever”. No one in the administration is going to come out and say explicitly what that means, so let me translate it into English for you: they’re saying that the more noise Cooper’s students make in protest at the tuition decision, the more likely it is that New York City is going to decide that it wants its property-tax revenues back, and that Cooper Union, without free tuition, is not a worthy enough cause to justify an effective $18 million per year public subsidy.

If Cooper loses its PILOT payments, then that really would be financially devastating for the college, and it would at that point be effectively forced to liquidate the Chrysler asset, whether it wanted to or not. It seems to me that Michaelson is using Stewart to help lay the groundwork for such an eventuality, and is trying to make the case that selling the Chrysler Building land is not such a dreadful thing to do after all.

”

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Are Cooper Union’s finances fixable? | Felix Salmon

Oh god, it’s just going to get worse. 

team-joebama:

Pew Research Center, via Ezra Klein’s post “Joel Stein is wrong about millenials in one chart” (spoiler: this is the one chart)

Klein also links to Elspeth Reeve’s rebuttal of the notion that millenials are entitled, which has this killer portion:

Entitled, arrogant, spoiled, preening — those are the alleged signature traits of Millennials, as diagnosed by countless magazine writers. Those traits curiously align perfectly with the signature traits of a rich kid. Have you seen your intern on Rich Kids of Instagram? If so, he or she is probably not the best guide to crafting the composite personality of a generation that fought three wars for you. 

as well as a bunch of other killer stuff.

I also can’t help but think that boomers find millennials arrogant because millennials look at a boomer’s lifestyle and choses, wrinkle their noses and say “um, no thanks.”

How Cooper Union’s Endowment Failed in Its Mission - NYTimes.com:

Tuition may or may not be inevitable at this moment, but everyone that got Cooper Union to this point should be fired.

“By the first of May, the plates were gone, revealing chalk inscriptions in Sol Moscot’s hand, instructing the workmen where to put each sign. The plates will move to the new store, along with as much of the upstairs clutter as can be carted across Delancey Street — the ancient wooden drawers with handwritten markings on them, the papier-mâché heads used to model frames.”

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Moscot Is Making a Big Move, Across the Street - NYTimes.com

This is kind of terrifying for me, that Moscot’s moving. But it’s only across the street. It’ll be interesting and weird to see all their old stuff in a new space. 

lizstless posted a photo: