Restaurants, residential power, water and gas, medical treatment (particularly in emergencies), manicures, pedicures, haircuts, (some) public transportation, (some) prostitutes…

Makes me wonder what the underlying thread is among all of these services. Any others to add?

It surprises me that so many transactions happen through simply trust. I’ve also seen some of these situations become awkward, like when a disheveled person gets asked to show that they have the money in advance. What’s the advantage of conducting services this way? Would paying for a meal at a sit-down restaurant in advance be so weird? Can or does this translate into the web world somehow?

I’ve now lived in Seattle for one year, so I thought I’d write up a little list of things I have learned about Seattle in my short time here.

Things people in Seattle apparently like:

• Knee-high boots
• Roundabouts
• Not knowing how to properly use roundabouts
• Subarus
• Outdoor activities (camping, hiking, climbing, kayaking)
• Nice sunglasses (which seems odd, given the weather)
• Complaining about their not-that-terrible weather
• Not carrying umbrellas
• Making it known to you that they don’t carry umbrellas
• Galoshes (which seems contradictory, given the umbrella thing)
• Fighting gentrification that has already happened
• Having a selection of 23 craft beers, even though they’re all the same variety
• Using turn lanes to merge into traffic
• Condos!
• Mediocre coffee

Feel free to add more in the comments!

And here’s hoping you haven’t been following me this whole time. I thought about doing a nice retrospective like Jason, but I don’t save much of anything for nearly ten years, let alone digital files that anyone can still open. For a nostalgic trip, we’ll have to visit the Wayback Machine.

1999-2002

This, and all the linkblogging I was doing before I owned the domain of Magnetbox was done by hand, because that was the way we liked it. Now get off of my lawn.

But do you know what’s even more awesome? By doing this half-assed retrospective, I found through Wayback links which actually worked (which are rare this far back) something I thought I had lost forever:

Yes, this my friends, is my online journal which I stopped in the year 2000 after getting tired of doing it for three years. Ugh, I’m a fucking nerd. If you click the screenshot into the Wayback Machine and go aaaall the way down to the bottom you will see my first entry, from March 21, 1997:

“Work. Watched TV.”

Get out your Twitter patents kids, because I was doing pointless small updates no one cared about 11 years ago! By hand, in HTML table rows! Yow. Anyways, let’s move on.

2002-2005

This was my old-timey western theme. It was meant to be mirrored by a futuristic design that you could switch to, but that never got made.

2005-2006

This was a rather stark departure, but every few years a get a burning itch to redesign my site, and this was done in the matter of a few hours.

2006-present

This is what you’re currently looking at, which is a complete theme which I made to coincide with moving over to WordPress from Blogger. This design has received some pretty amazing response, but if you can’t tell by my track record, I will soon tire of it, and I promised to give it away when I’m done with it.

This may be sooner than later, because now that I’ve got a mini-blog over on Tumblr (The Triumph of Bullshit) and a micro-blog (again!) over at Twitter, I’ve been mulling about how to redesign and recombine everything into one big happy family. Stay tuned.

Anyways, thanks for visiting.

Two recent finds on the Web made an instant connection in my mind, because it contained three things that interest me: technology adoptions, what’s cool, and drawing conclusions that may not exist. Take the New York Times’ excellent Timeline of Technology adoption and the equally excellent Timeline of Cool, put them together, and start making crazy observations!

For example, I found it interesting that at the two times that the automobile had its largest jumps in adoption rates, surrealism and pop art were popular. Notice the juxtaposition of the air conditioner and Woodstock? (Was the clothes dryer responsible for the rise of soul music?) How the popularity of film noir and crime fiction went up as radio adoption exploded? Feel free to make your own crazy theories in the comments.

Here is an excerpt from Future Shock, by Alvin Toffler about victims of future shock (a personal perception of “too much change in too short a period of time”) that I found super interesting, mostly because of the corollaries to particular people and industries today:

An unknowing victim of future shock, The Denier sets himself up for personal catastrophe. His strategy for coping increases the likelihood that when he is finally forced to adapt, his encounter with change will come in the form of a single massive life crisis, rather than a sequence of manageable probems.

A second strategy of the future shock victim is specialism. The Specialist doesn’t block out all novel ideas or information. Instead, he energetically attempts to keep pace with change – but only in a specific narrow sector of life. Thus we witness the spectacle of the physician or financier who makes use of all the latest innovations in his profession, but remains rigidly closed to any suggestion for social, political, or economic innovation. The more universities undergo paroxysms of protest, the more ghettos go up in flames, the less he wants to know about them, and the more closely he narrows the slit through which he sees the world.

Superficially, he copes well. But he, too, is running the odds against himself. He may awake one morning to find his specialty obsolete or else transformed beyond recognition by events exploding outside his field of vision.

A third common response to future shock is obsessive reversion to previously successful adaptive routines that are now irrelevant and inappropriate. The Reversionist sticks to his previously programmed decisions and habits with dogmatic desperation. The more change threatens from without, the more meticulously he repeats past modes of action. His social outlook is regressive. Shocked by the arrival of the future, he offers hysterical support for the not-so-status quo, or he demands, in one masked form or another, a return to the glories of yesteryear.

Finally, we have the Super-Simplifier. With old heroes and institutions toppling, with strikes, riots, and demonstrations stabbing at his consciousness, he seeks a single neat equation that will explain all the complex novelties threatening to engulf him. Grasping erratically at this idea or that, he becomes a temporary true believer.

The Super-Simplifier, groping desperately, invests every idea he comes across with universal relevance – often to the embarrassment of its author. Alas, no idea, not even mine or thine, is omni-insightful. But for the Super-Simplifier nothing less than total relevance suffices. Maximization of profits explains America. The Communist conspiracy explains race riots. Participatory democracy is the answer. Permissiveness (or Dr. Spock) are the root of all evil.

Although it may be ironic that this may be super-simplifying, I find it interesting that I can quickly think of lots of specific people or entire industries that embody each of these characteristics almost fully. Feel free to use the comments space to make your own connections. And if you haven’t read the book, I highly suggest it.

I am totally intrigued by a few facts, particularly about places I’ve lived, such as:

• Seattle, a city known for its cloudy and rainy weather, buys more sunglasses per capita than any other US city.
• Minnesota, a state known for its cold and snowy weather, has the most golfers per capita than any other US state.

Are these simply cases of supply and demand, where the scarcity of something causes the people take fuller advantage of the thing when it appears? Is this just simple irony, or is there another term for this? Anyone have any other examples, or any theories or explanations?

If you came here from Daring Fireball and wish to leave comments on this weblog’s gimmickery, visual conceit, or other general Mac nerdery, here is an open thread for comments.

I ran across this idea known as “end slating” while reading the trivia tidits for the movie After Hours, and instantly became intrigued at the idea. Here is the snippet from imdb:

A technique known as “end slating” was used to capture Paul’s reaction as he enters the nearly-vacant Club Berlin. Right before filming the shot, Griffin Dunne went to a bar around the corner, ordered drinks for the customers, then ran out without paying. The scene opens on him after this had just happened off-camera.

I really like the general idea of this: capturing a person during or after something particularly fearful or extraordinary. I wonder if this has other practical purposes beyond filmmaking, like perhaps interaction design (since, in theory, it is a designed interaction). Any thoughts or ideas? Although it is mentioned in this imdb entry, the term has no other mentions on the web, which seems kind of odd.

I know nobody looks at web sites any more because there’s RSS feeds, but like I mentioned before, I was just using something out the box to start, and felt it my duty as a web designer to create something myself eventually. Plus I got called out for using Hemingway recently, and it actually kinda helped kick me in the ass to do something about it. Thanks, Ben.

If it’s not obvious, the design is based on the concept of declassified documents, and was brought on by the idea of actually starting a blog which would announce newly declassified documents and comb through them for interesting tidbits. I soon realized that I would never be able to put as much time into that as it would take, so I just took the design and put it to this. (By the way, I would still love it if someone made a blog about declassified documents. You’ll get a free design out of the deal if you do!) I already discovered a happy accident as I was making it: I personally love the way the page transforms into a more censored document as you follow the links. It’s also terribly easy to scan for new content because of it.

Anyways, I’m sure this is wrought with CSS and template problems, since I basically made it in a day with little prior knowledge of WordPress templating, but feel free to note your thoughts, suggestions, problems, &c. in the comments.

I’m sure you all have heard of “Snakes on a Plane”, right? Best movie concept ever. This screenwriter told an excellent story about being offered to help work on the script, including these two paragraphs which completely made my day/week/month:

Now out of both loyalty to the sacred bond between studio and screenwriter and also a serious desire to keep getting hired in this town, I will not give away any of the plot details of SNAKES ON A PLANE. But know this. As the great Sam Jackson would say: There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane.

What else do you need to know? How the snakes get on the plane, what the snakes do once they’re on the plane, who puts the snakes on the plane, who is trying to get the snakes off the plane…This is not for you to ponder. There are snakes on the plane. End of fucking story.