karlo.org

Walking down Prince Street this week I noticed that the Vesuvio Bakery, with its memorable green color scheme, has closed down... I don't know how long ago this happened but it's sad to see a small business like this disappear. Hopefully they won't be replaced by a Starbuck's, Pinkberry or some fashion boutique. This photo is from 2005.

Wordle.net is a fun little Java utility that turns any block of text (or, as in the case above, my RSS feed) into a beautifully rendered word cloud. Lots of fun to play with and coincidentally adjacent to some work I've been doing lately with my new project (more on that later.) Wordle gives the best result if you tell it to block out common words in the language you're submitting (for English, "if, and, but... etc.").

[via The Morning News]

If you have a Facebook account you can go here to see the new profile page design. I understand what they're trying to do with it - focus folks on user activity rather than static profile boxes - but I think they're going to take a lot of flack for it.

It's very much like FriendFeed or Tumblr - which is great for people who spend all day posting little tidbits for everyone, etc. But a lot of Facebook users are much more casual net users who are using it as a substitute homepage. By removing all of the application boxes that users had been employing to customize their profile, Facebook is disrupting one of the reasons why it's become so popular.

I've always thought of FB as "blog light" - the next step in the evolution from HTML to MoveableType/Wordpress to Typepad and finally to Tumblr/Twitter. Each has respectively reduced the barriers to entry for users. FB takes it even further by basically bringing your real world friends right to your "blog", which is what most private individuals want anyway (you're not posting photos of kids for random Internet readers, you're posting them for Aunt Ida.)

Application developers are going to feel particularly slighted as well... their profile boxes, which users used to be able to place wherever they wanted on their profile page, have now been relegated to the "boxes" tab, a virtual interface ghetto. Facebook says this is because they wanted to isolate the sometimes unruly interfaces of 3rd party apps, but that's kind of a weak excuse -- after all, it was users choosing to put these applications into their profiles and use them, so obviously the interface issues weren't causing that many problems.

(Part of the lesson here is how difficult it is to remodel a product once it's released to the public. The people who have adopted it were the ones that liked how it was laid out, even if it wasn't optimal. Going to a new, better layout isn't always going to get the response you might expect, although sometimes it does.)

Update: It seems like different people see slightly different layouts in the new system, but there are similar comments regardless... as seen on another blog talking about the new UI.

Another one of the Holga shots from Vietnam. I didn't take a ton, and a lot of them were on the underexposed side. But I have to say that relative to the number of frames I took, there were a good number of fairly interesting images.

I'm working my way through scanning a few of the film shots I took with the Holga while in Vietnam. The exposures aren't exactly what I'd want them to be (I'd hate to be trying to print these on photo paper.) Still, even for just these few photos, it's a blast -- the images are a lot more organic, and it's just a welcome change of pace from digital shots. Makes me want to pull out a small 35mm rangefinder and try shooting that for a while.

"If I were locked inside the bathroom all day, I'd swallow the shampoo, too. Although most animal-behavior problems are believed to have genetic roots, their expressions are typically triggered by the unnatural lives that people force their pets to lead."

The NYT has a great article for this weekend's magazine section on pharmaceuticals for pets. Dog diet pills may be a joke, but other pharmaceuticals are definitely merited; it's unfortunate though that some people will choose pills as a shortcut for proper training, exercise and discipline.

As for Mochi, he stays off the drugs. That leaves at least one kind of small object that he doesn't continually have in his mouth...

I just bought a new monitor for the first time since 2000. I had a great 16" SGI LCD I bought when they got out of that business -- $600 for what was a $3000 monitor at the time. But it was getting obvious that it was time to replace the old screen, so I bought a Dell 27" UltraSharp Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor to replace it. It's a $1000 but when I did the math on the cost per hour of my last LCD it was obvious that I get my money's worth -- it came to less than $0.06 per hour or so, roughly.

So far, it seems to be pretty good -- but I'm having a bear of a time trying to get it even moderately calibrated. A lot of reds and oranges, in particular, seem to be wildly flourescent - the Firefox logo is a primary offender. If I can't find a way to get the color under control (short of buying a calibrator) I'm going to have to return this monitor and get an Apple 23" Cinema Display or something else with more reasonable color performance.

The worst part is that Dell makes a big deal out of the color accuracy of this monitor on their web site. But then they don't really provide any great guidance on getting it calibrated properly.

"Should the applicants decide to apply again, they must make appointments using our on-line appointment system."

- Debra Heien, chief of the consular section for the U.S. in Nigeria

Three West African bushmen recruited to build an authentic mud-hut village at the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia were denied visas because they are too poor and inarticulate. Consulate officials noted that the bushmen (who were recruited specifically for their knowledge of how to build traditional native mud housing) could not demonstrate a bank account and e-mail address, mortgage, or lease agreement that would demonstrate residence in Western terms, and they could reapply using the consulate's web page.

I'm guessing they're probably not heavy web users. But who knows.

So a few days after my post on the need to remake Windows from the ground up, this:

"Painfully visible are the inherent design deficiencies of a foundation that was never intended to support such weight. Windows seems to move an inch for every time that Mac OS X or Linux laps it.

The best solution to the multiple woes of Windows is starting over. Completely. Now."

NYT: Randal Strauss, "Why Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air"