Seattle.BloggersPub

I have always had a good memory — some friends even call me Rain Man, though I’ve forgotten who they are. This elephantine memory isn’t necessarily a strength, because I’ve come to understand that the best use of my brain is not to tuck things away.
The most helpful idea that I have adapted from David […]

The internet was buzzing last night about the fact that Pownce has thrown the doors wide open to let anyone register on the site. They also released a new version of their AIR desktop client which lets you reply right from the app and pops up notifications when you get a message from someone.
I obviously […]

I find that ideas are best flowing when I am in a regular routine of doing daily pages. Daily pages might not be the right name in my case — perhaps weekly pages, or even fortnightly pages, would be more suitable. I’ll go ahead and stick with daily as a reminder that they are worth […]

There comes a time in every point-and-shooter’s life when he or she wonders if there is more to photography than a palm-sized block of aluminum stowed away in one’s pocket. The ultracompact point-and-shoot has come so far in the last ten years that it’s tempting to write off DSLRs as largely irrelevant to most […]

“You’re such an amateur!”
Even if jokingly, these words are often spoken to let us know that our efforts aren’t top notch. It’s too bad, really, because there is something beautiful about the genuine strivings of an amateur.
Not too long ago, someone pointed out to me that the word amateur shares the same […]

As I’ve been playing around with Firefox 3 Beta 2, I’ve noticed that it no longer seems to remember the last window size and location after a shutdown and restart in a maximized state. So if you size the browser window to something like 800×600 on your 1024×768 desktop and center it, if you maximize the browser, shut it down and restart it, when you attempt to un-maximize it, it doesn’t go back to 800×600 in the center of your desktop, but rather switches to a size only slightly smaller than the size of the desktop. It’s pretty annoying when you’re used to switching back and forth between fully maximized and a very specific size and position when it isn’t maximized, so I’ve written up Bugzilla bug #413022.

As a side note, it appears that my other recent bug, Bugzilla bug #411095, which involves an overly pesky blocked popup icon, may have been fixed. I’ll have to try and verify that with a nightly build soon.

“We each have to say it, to say it in our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn’t what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical […]

I find this both wildly perverse and perversely intriguing:

Ecological economist Robert Costanza… and his team of researchers have already released one study claiming to have commoditized the world’s biosphere. The total value: $33 trillion…

There’s a big part of me — the mountain-climbing, Edward Abbey-reading part — that finds this simply appalling. The natural world is so astonishing and beautiful that I can’t stomach the thought of putting a monetary value on it. Then there’s the other part of me — the pragmatic, Sightline-researcher part — that tells me that we already put a monetary value on nature. We just don’t do it systematically; and we often to do it in order to exploit rather than conserve.

Even though $33 trillion is more than the combined world GDP, and even though the researchers believe the estimate to be conservative, there’s still something dissonant about putting a price on what feels priceless. Or, is it really the best way we have to quantify, and therefore protect, natural systems? After all, prices have a way of clarifying in a way that few things can.

Costanza will be speaking in Seattle next Wednesday. I doubt I’ll be able to make it, but I’d love to hear what people think.

Last night I blogged on ZDNet about SmallWorlds, an virtual world built entirely in Flex by the very talented team at OutSmart. I wanted to throw up a blog post just so people could see it but I spent most of my time in the game (although not decorating my pad as you’ll see when […]

On Monday, I posted about the hardware I use in my workflow. Today, we’ll tackle software. One of the best things about being a Mac user is the vibrant community of independent software developers. There are affordable programs that have been coded to help with just about any task or project you can think of, […]