Places
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Discovering Raditaz
Read here about Raditaz, which I hadn’t heard about before. It’s a competitor to Pandora. Some differences: unlmited skips, no ads, geo-location. I started out by setting up three “stations,” based on three artists: Lowell George, Seldom Scene and Mike Auldridge. I’m on the Mike Auldridge station now, and guess what comes up? Dig: Not… Continue reading
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Happy to have been there
That’s what many thought when they first saw the poster for Hassle House, in Durham, North Carolina, back in ’76 or so. As soon as any of the posters went up, they disappeared, becoming instant collectors’ items. At the time, all I wanted was to hire the cartoonist who did it, so he could… Continue reading
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What I’d like to say on the subway
When I was young, New York subways were dirty, noisy and with little risk of improvement. But, even if the maps weren’t readable (as with this 1972 example), there were lots of them. Now the subways are much nicer, on the whole, and being improved. But there is now a paucity of maps. In fact,… Continue reading
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Happy birthday, Grandma
Among friends and relatives there is an unusual concentration of birthdays in November. For example, the 12th, 13th and 14th are birthdays of my wife, my daughter (plus Chris Locke and JP Rangaswami) and my grandmother, respectively. That’s Grandma Searls, on the left. Born in 1882, she would have been 129 years old today. She… Continue reading
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Circular quoting
So I’m writing about financialization. Kevin Phillips‘ prophetic book on the subject, Bad Money, is open on my desk. (He published it in early 2007, in advance of The Crash.) But it doesn’t contain the definitional quote that I need. So I turn to Wikipedia. There, in the Financialization entry, we are treated to this… Continue reading
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Truly public radio
My favorite town in Vermont is Rochester. I like to stop there going both ways while driving my kid to summer camp, which means I do that up to four times per summer. It’s one of those postcard-perfect places, rich in history, gracing a lush valley along the White River, deep in the Green Mountains, with… Continue reading
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Remembering Hurricane Bob
Got an interesting email from sister Jan, retired Commander with the U.S. Navy, who was stationed in Newport when Hurricane Bob hit in 1991. With her permission, here it is: It was almost exactly 20 years ago that I rode out the direct hit Bob made on Newport. As I recall, Bob had flirted with… Continue reading
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Now it’s NYC’s, Philly’s and DC’s turns to get clobbered
@marklittlenews (mark little) tweets, Soaked to the skin but awed beyond words by explosive lightning storm that just engulfed Manhattan #Kapow So I looked at the map and saw that there’s a line of strong thunderstorms in a line from New York to Washington. Quite a show. Of JFK, Flightaware says, John F Kennedy Intl… Continue reading
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Storm over Boston
So here’s the storm happening right now over Boston: Also watching lightning strikes on Lightning Finder, as well as out my window, before I go outside for a better view. Check out FlightAware‘s view of KBOS (Logan airport) flight activity map: You can see flights avoiding the storm as it approaches the airport, which is… Continue reading
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Bruce Elving, professor of FM radio
I just learned from Dan Kelly that Bruce Elving passed away last month. Details are thin, but here’s a short list of links: Scott Fybush’s Northeast Radio Watch Augut 8 issue A facebook “public figure” page Bruce’s own Facebook page An obituary in Media Confidential Notice in the Worldwide TV-DX Association site Bruce and I were frequent… Continue reading
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Curing the commercial Web blues
Last week we spent a lot of time here, in Venice: The triangular marble plaza on the edge of the Grand Canal of Venice is known informally as Bancogiro, once one of Italy’s landmark banks, and now the name of an osteria there. The plaza is part of Rialto Mercado, the marketplace where Marco Polo… Continue reading
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Venice in a glass
That was shot (and enjoyed) here, at Banco Giro, a triangular plaza by the old marketplace. This was roughly where The Merchant of Venice was set, where Marco Polo did his business and where Luca Pacioli learned about and then shared with the world the essentials of double-entry bookkeeping — in a form that hardly changed over the… Continue reading
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The bigger picture
Since writing What if Flickr fails? six months ago, my photography has dropped way off. I still shoot, but not as much. And I don’t upload as much to Flickr as I used to. It’s not one thing, but in a way it comes down to that. First, I’ve been writing a book, which I’ve… Continue reading
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Why I love flying
Air travel has taught us to hate flying, and that’s a huge bummer, because flying is just freaking amazing. Yesterday I flew from Rome to Brussels, in a window seat on the right side of the plane. I knew if we were lucky, we’d see the Alps, as well as other geographic and geological wonders.… Continue reading
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Overlooking Detroit
Got my first good clear look at Detroit and Windsor from altitude on a recent trip back from somewhere. Here’s a series of shots. What impressed me most, amidst all that flat snow-dusted spread of city streets, a patch of grids on the flatland of Michigan and Ontario, flanking the Detroit River and its islands, was… Continue reading
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Royal pains
The Royal Wedding isn’t my cup of tedium, but olde blog buddies Eric and Dawn Olsen will be covering the show for The Morton Report, so I urge you to follow it there. I’ll do my best as well. Not speaking of which, I am old enough to remember the last Royal Wedding, which happened… Continue reading
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Overlooking Chicago
I know Chicago well — from the air. I’ve flown in and out of O’Hare countless times, always enjoying the view from my window seat. I’ve also flown over Chicago a lot, en routes from cities east and west. And I’ve shot a lot of pictures, which I usually used to put up on Flickr;… Continue reading
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World Wide Catacombs
What started as plain old Web search has now been marginalized as “organic”. That’s because the plain old Web — the one Tim Berners-Lee created as a way to hyperlink documents — has become commercialized to such an extent that the about the only “organic” result reliably rising to first-page status is Wikipedia. Let’s say… Continue reading