infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

• megapixel comparison and maximum print size charts
  This chart and explanations is useful for understanding how much of an image you can squeeze out of your camera.
  (tags: photography useful design)
• YouTube, in a New Bubble
  Dan Gillmor suggests Google’s purchase of YouTube indicates the technology industry – or at least the online consumer space – is in a bubble once again.
  (tags: TVontheWeb google business Web2.0)
• Blog Maverick: I still think Google is crazy
  Mark Cuban was skeptical about the rumors that Google would buy YouTube. Now that the acquisition has been announced, he’s stil wondering if intellectual property issues will bring the project down.
  (tags: TVontheWeb Web2.0 google copyright intellectualproperty business)

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I want to get a post up today, so this blog doesn’t descend into nothing but del.icio.us linkdumps. Unfortunately, I’ve got a lot going on with school right now, and few things seem to deserve much of my bloggy attention when I have two papers due this week and a class to manage. So, I’m going to drop an unordered list of thoughts that I don’t care to defend.

• I agree with Mark Cuban that Google’s acquisition seems kind of foolish. Yeah, YouTube attracts a lot of eyeballs, but Google already has a video-sharing service, and, if Google keeps YouTube as a separate business unit, as some observers speculate, they’re not exactly buying engineers to improve the Google Video experience.
• I forget how different the Web experience is for people who have desk-jobs than it is for grad students or freelancers. I try to plow through my RSS feeds and bookmarks as efficiently as possible, but conversations with old friends are reminding me of clock-watching browsing.
• WordPress templates suck. I’m OK with the PHP-hacking paradigm, but the way that CSS is used in nearly every single one I’ve used makes them brittle and difficult to read. When I started hacking this template, I wanted to create a nice, clean implementation without any unnecessary styles or tags, but I haven’t found the time and I’ve lost the motivation.
• Kubrick, the default WordPress template, is poorly organized and uses a lot of brittle type sizes and ugly fonts. It looks nice if you only change the banner image and don’t mind Microsoft fonts, but if you start changing around the CSS, you’re giving yourself some headaches. WordPress tries hard to make the server adminstration side easy with their “five-minute installation.” It’s too bad they can’t do the same for customizing the presentation.
• Ugh, this is one of those weeks when getting everything done seems impossible.

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• Internet Pinball Machine Database: Gottlieb ‘Punk!’ Images
  Weird “Punk!” pinball machine from 1982.
  (tags: punk awesome cheese silly)
• Break.com: Smells Like Teen Spirit
  A high-school orchestra performs the Nirvana hit in this amateur video. No fair: the coolest thing we ever got to play in high school was “Caravan.”
  (tags: music video education)

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• Internet Archive: Showdown in Seattle
  I was looking for videos from the N30 protests to show in class today, Students are snickering…
  (del.icio.us tags: economics environmentalism archive indymedia citizensmedia labor history video)
• Screen Spanning Doctor
  Oh, how I wish someone had told me about this utility before. It uncripples the GPU on consumer-grade Apple hardware, allowing you span the screen across multiple displays and crank up the resolution beyond 1024×768.
  (del.icio.us tags: hack OSX useful)

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• Cultural Studies: Special Issue on Intellectual Property
  The contents of this journal issue are available for free download online, thanks to the publisher.
  (tags: intellectualproperty academic copyright freeculture)
• The Guardian : Tesco takes on might of Microsoft with cheap own-brand software
  The British supermarket chain is planning to sell an office suite for casual users.
  (tags: business)
• Free Font Manifesto
  A project to encourage type foundries to produce a few “free as in freedom” fonts. There are some nice fonts for download on this page, but I wish they had more sans-serif faces.
  (tags: typography font freeculture intellectualproperty)
• Treasure City Thrift
  “Treasure City Thrift is a collectively run non-profit thrift store designed to raise money for small local grassroots community groups.” Chicon and 12th is a pretty scary intersection, but I’ll have to check this place out.
  (tags: austin thrifting anarchism)

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Although “Keep Austin Weird” advocates point to locally-owned businesses as a source of Austin’s weirdness, it was TXDOT who was making the city weird back in 1970. I just ran across an old story from Texas Highways magazine that details how the state transportation installed Astroturf at the MoPac/2222 interchange. These forward-thinking transportation engineers rolled out the space-age technology to reduce maintenance costs and improve the appearance of the intersection, which was no less ugly in 1970 as it is today. According to the site where I found this gem, the one thousand square feet of Astroturf “accumulated dirt and oil, garbage stuck to its oily surface, and the bright green rapidly became a nasty gray color.”

Texasfreeway.com has plenty more interesting historical photographs of Austin roads. I’m particularly fascinated by the shots of East Avenue, which I-35 followed, once the state decided to pull a Robert Moses and keep “undesirables” on the east side of town. It’s a pity we couldn’t have kept what looks like a lovely boulevard and had the freeway follow Airport Blvd instead.

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• Central Scrutinizer: “Web 2.0 ‘exit strategy’” badges
  (tags: Web2.0 business design humor)
• subversive cross stitch: Truthiness!
  Here’s a Stephen Colbert-themed cross-stitch pattern.
  (tags: TV fandom DIY craft humor)

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