service notice

• The Past

• About

This site is maintained by Stewart Butterfield: stewart@sylloge.com

And it is powered, in part, by Blogger.

most recently

  Wonder what it looks like to spend a late evening talking to Michael Fergusson? In the style of 26 photographs of a woman holding various pony tails, here is a large gif movie (185K) to help you learn what it looks like to listen (alternatively, here is a smaller but not as good version, 77K). It also give you some small insight into the layout of my living room.

  Over 10 months now, but I'm not giving up hope yet. And I still want to read that book ...

Thank you for ordering from Indigo.ca. You have 1 orders in process.

Order Number: 402599021 Your express order was placed on Saturday, September 25, 1999. Shipping Address: An old work address and old mobile number. Your order is being shipped all at once. You can review the status of your order below:

Quantity		Item		Order Status
1		The Media Equation: How People Treat Computers, Television, & New Media Like Real People & Places (REP) by Byron Reeves , et al. | Paperback | May 1998 Usually ships within 48 hours. List Price: C$23.95 | Our Price: C$19.16 | You Save: C$4.79 (20%)

perjantai, heinäkuu 28

  LET'S TALK ABOUT ME FOR A WHILE

This picture was the most requested at a recent showing of my pictures which I took of myself in the mirror with my new camera (with one out of one attendees requesting a copy of the image). Now, you can have your own copy of the untouched 550K file straight from the camera. Here are some suggestions for its use:

• Put it in a frame that has "The Person I Most Admire" written across the top in cursive script. Hang in your living room.
• Tape a copy to the inside of your locker door.
• Use a printed copy as the practice space for signing your name as : "[YOUR NAME] Butterfield"
• Put a copy into a time capsule to surprise and delight your descendants.
• Use it as your desktop/wallpaper/background.
• Use as gift paper for very special gifts.

I had lunch today with one of the most prominent venture capitalists in the world (nice guy). Plus some other people.

The price of my integrity was up 11/32 today (+ 5.29%) on relatively light trading.




tiistai, heinäkuu 25

  Consider the set of those people who will be attending Simon Fraser University's Web Design Workshop and the set of readers of this post: the probability that the intersection between these sets is non-empty is vanishingly small, but I feel compelled to mention that I'll be doing the session on usability on Wednesday anyway. Funny time for me to be doing it, since I am at my most contrarian w.r.t. usability ever. I'll still try to give the students their money's worth but I don't think I can tow the standard usability line any more.

  I am now confirmed to be speaking at the Doors of Perception conference in Amsterdam this coming November 11-13. The theme for Doors 6 is "lightness" and aside from the 5k (which does go very well) I'm not sure what I want to talk about.

Thinking about it this weekend, I started off Socratically: What is the opposite of lightness?

Darkness? (Not in this context.) Heaviness? (Perhaps, but doesn't seem exact). Since I have been slightly preoccupied with the notion of inefficiency (as a requirement for progress: material, technological, intellectual, etc.) I am tempted to stretch that to fit and talk about Inefficiency as the Opposite of Lightness. I'd love to tap your brains on this, but I'll formulate it a little better first.

  I finally got a digital camera (I don't remember the last time I owned a camera of any description). Once I get it all figured and tested out, I'll write a review. So far I like it —it allowed me to record yet another newsbox message without actually pulling the paper out of the box (to take it home and scan it) and thus deprive others the joy of random street communications.

  I'm walking from Stadium Station back to the office, stopping here and there to snap pictures on my new camera, fairly spaced out. Suddenly I noticed little guy walking briskly towards me in a lane of traffic, shirtless, blood all over his face, screaming "Help! This guy robbed me! Help!" over and over while pointing to big guy (who was well over six and a half feet tall) walking towards me on the sidewalk. Big guy was not interested in all the attention and as we passed each other, he started to veer off in the grass, away from the street, looking around nervously.

I was a little bit dumbfounded and looked back over my shoulder just when big guy decides to make a break for it and runs out into the middle of the street where the lights had just changed. He narrowly missed the first car in the first lane, and ends up rolling over the hood, action movie-style, onto his feet and into the next lane with little guy and some third, medium-sized guy in pursuit (unclear whether medium guy was a hero from the onlookers or somehow involved in the fracas). The traffic behind them had already stopped at this point and big guy tries to open the sliding side door of a van in the next lane over. Thankfully (for the driver) the door is locked, big guy can't get in, and the van speeds away.

The next car (just behind the van) starts to accelerate and little guy and medium guy are just about caught up to him, so big guy decides to lunge for the passenger side door. The window is open and big guy manages to get his hand inside the window-frame but at this point the car is already moving. Big guy holds on tight and lets himself get dragged by the car which quickly gets up to 30 or 40 kph. His hands slip down to the corner of the window frame, his torso flat against the rear door and black jean covered legs dragging along the asphalt, knees rubbing against the spinning wheel. He's yelling "Hey! You're dragging me! You're dragging me!"

As they get right along side me, I can see the panic on the driver's face: he plainly doesn't want to be dragging this guy, but I'm sure he didn't want to stop and let this guy get into his car either. (During the 5-10 seconds that have elapsed so far, I reached for my phone to call the cops, but then I saw a building security guard who was already talking to them on his walkie-talkie.) The car turns left and I was sure that big guy was going to get dragged underneath it on the corner but he didn't. I couldn't see what was happening for a second, but I was still walking and when I got to the corner, I saw big guy running in front of a bus, which stopped. He smashes the door open but little guy and medium guy are already there. Lots of shouting, lots of onlookers by this point, hard to tell what's happening.

And just then I get the important phone call I was waiting for. Shit. "Um, hello?" I hate watching this kind of stuff, but I was still reluctant as I walked away and got into the conversation. Oh well.

But the punchline is that I had the camera in my hand the whole time. It didn't even occur to me to get off a few shots (let alone use the handy movie mode which records sound as well). So I missed it. Damn, I need to work on those photog reflexes.

  Well, thank the original developers of HTTP servers for referrer logs. Cosma hisself wrote back to me passed on another QWERTY-related link: the abstract for The Standard and Dvorak Keyboards Revisited: Direct Measures of Speed which claims a 4% speed advantage for Dvorak . This isn't much of an argument in favour of the market failure spin as far as I'm concerned though — the retraining time and equipment purchase costs required to acheive the 4% advantage would certainly counteract the gains (in just about any instance I can imagine): the essential point is that both practices are local maxima on the typing-speed fitness landscape (there are far better systems for using your body to produce text). Or maybe I'm wrong ...

* * *

This way to more.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
Someday to get its own home.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.