jon smajda

Ping Pong. The Next Big Thing:

Three filmmakers, Jonathan Bricklin, Bill Mack and Franck Raharinosy, have teamed with Andrew Gordon, a former investment banker, to open a 12,800-square-foot table tennis and social club on Park Avenue near Madison Square Park. The filmmakers became accidental promoters when they put a table in their loft office for their own amusement a couple of years ago. “People would come over all the time to play us,” said Mr. Mack, 35. “Our then-girlfriends got tired of it and made us limit it to one night.” That night became an unexpected hit, attracting the likes of Owen Wilson, Salman Rushdie, 50 Cent, the Beastie Boys, Jimmy Buffett and as many attractive people as there were lightweight hollow balls. They decided to build on that success and convert a former Mattress King into a large club. Spin New York will open in March.

Back in the day, my friends and I would spend countless hours in our basement playing ping pong. I like to think I was a decent player. If grad school doesn’t work out, maybe I’ll just move to New York and turn pro.

(via eszter)

An article in the Strib on the covert infiltration of local anarchist group in the run-up to the RNC:

On Aug. 31, 2007, Marilyn Hedstrom, who appeared to be in her early 50s, walked into a run-down store-front where anarchists hung out on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis. She introduced herself as Norma Jean. Asked by a man at the Jack Pine Center why she was there, she said she had issues with President Bush and the Iraq war. “I told him I was interested in helping the cause and interested in participating in the protesting,” she later wrote in reports reviewed by the Star Tribune. What she did not tell him is that she was a deputy sheriff for the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office. [...] The sheriff’s investigation cost about $300,000, Fletcher said. He’s asking the city of St. Paul to reimburse his office from $50 million in federal funds for convention security.

Their findings? They made “occasional references” to damaging property, but emphasized not hurting people, most of the meetings consisted of boring, practical things like finding places to stay and there was lots of internal disagreement between anarchists (I know, anarchists disagreeing!). I mean, you could spend $300,000 and violate civil liberties to learn this, or you could read anything ever written about how such groups work. Jeesh.

(via jesse)

Tim O’Reilly saying interesting things about Twitter:

In many ways, Twitter is a re-incarnation of the old Unix philosophy of simple, cooperating tools. The essence of Twitter is its constraints, the things it doesn’t do, and the way that its core services aren’t bound to a particular interface. It strikes me that many of the programs that become enduring platforms have these same characteristics. Few people use the old TCP/IP-based applications like telnet and ftp any more, but TCP/IP itself is ubiquitous. No one uses the mail program any more, but all of us still use email. No one uses Tim Berners-Lee’s original web server and browser any more. Both were superseded by independent programs that used his core innovations: http and html. What’s different, of course, is that Twitter isn’t just a protocol. It’s also a database. And that’s the old secret of Web 2.0, Data is the Intel Inside. That means that they can let go of controlling the interface. The more other people build on Twitter, the better their position becomes.

O’Reilly also talks about how a large number of Twitter users use Twitter to update their Facebook status, which is exactly what I do. In fact, if you just look at my Facebook page, it looks like I’m fairly active on Facebook, until you realize that almost every thing in my profile is pulled into Facebook from other services like Twitter or this blog (via Wordbook). Thanks to the demise of Scrabulous, I pretty much only go to Facebook any more to approve friend requests and respond to people who comment on my Twitter status inside of Facebook instead of in Twitter.

I’m not sure what a Facebook that tried to untie its data from its interface like O’Reilly recommends would look like though. But an even more interesting thought experiment is this: what about a Facebook-like social networking system that works like laconi.ca, a Twitter-like piece of software where the data itself is decentralized on individual instances of the software but where the social networking & communication can occur across each instance. This gets around both the centralization of interface, but also the centralization of data, which is really a much bigger problem!

You can make QuickTime record audio (and video) without paying for QuickTime Pro! Open up Script Editor and…

tell application "QuickTime Player"
	new audio recording
end tell

Just save it as an application for frequent use. I’ll give you one guess how to record a movie. [1]

Or, if you prefer the command line:

osascript -e 'tell application "QuickTime Player"' -e 'new audio recording' -e 'end tell'

You learn something new every day…

Footnotes

1. I was going to give you two guesses, because they don’t pick the obvious word, IMHO, to describe said visual recording, but that last sentence was a hint! [↩]

Uggen directed me to this promotional video for the Yngwie Malmsteem Tribute Series.

I had to watch this part like five times:

“I think this is from biting, actually. (Bites guitar.) In fact, I know it is.”

Update: I had the clip embedded, but it was set to autoplay, which is annoying. I tried to add a parameter to to the embed code to turn this off but failed.

Contexts is featured in the Minnesota Daily today. One correction:

For the podcast, Smajda interviewed the author of a fall-issue article about why people choose to vote and asked the author what his opinions were on the outcome of the presidential election.

I did not interview anybody: Jesse and Arturo are the on-air talent and they do the interviewing. For the Contexts Podcast (also in iTunes) I’m just a lowly audio engineer, webmaster and “crack research team member.”

If the Matrix ran on Windows:

(via donncha)