Archive for November, 2008
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
Madden ‘92 Ambulance
Madden ‘92 for Sega Genesis has to be one of my favorite games of all time. The best part, of course, comes when a player is injured and the ambulance comes on the field to retrieve them, running over all other players in its way.
No Comments » - Posted in General, Technology by Rick
Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
Xbox Live upgrade and upgrading your hard drive
I just downloaded the new Xbox Live update, and it brings some significant updates. Most important for me are the ability to stream Netflix on demand movies through the Xbox 360 to a TV and the ability to copy games to the hard drive for faster loading times. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there’s a [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General, Technology by Rick
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
The iPhone is the new radar detector
The Times technology blog has a story about a couple new iPhone apps that help you beat police speed traps by having users report their locations. Of course, the success of such an application depends on network externalities, i.e. having enough people reporting speed traps to increase the number of users who. . . etc. Nonetheless, this [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General, Technology by Rick
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
McCain’s leaker is a hoax
The McCain aide who leaked the line about Sarah Palin thinking Africa was a country is not a McCain aide and he’s not really anything that he claimed to be. I think this is awesome. The guys who created this character should definitely get some more work. Read the full story at NYTimes.com.
No Comments » - Posted in General, Technology by Rick
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Google is the answer to the problem we didn’t have
Jason Zengerie has a very good profile of Malcolm Gladwell in this week’s New York Magazine. Gladwell has been receiving a lot of press lately in advance of the publication of his new book, Outliers. Most of it is as fluffy as the critics who assail Gladwell. But Zengerie’s piece is actually well-written and pulls [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
Ricky Opaterny’s NYTimes.com piece on business school
Last week, I published a piece on Marci’s blog about my decision to return to school for an MBA.
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
Michael Lewis on the end of Wall Street
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’m certain that Michael Lewis’s article in the current issue of Portfolio, The End of Wall Street’s Boom, is worth your while.
In the two decades since [I wrote Liar's Poker], I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
Amazon’s best 100 books of 2008
Amazon has posted their picks for the 100 best books of 2008. The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher claims the top spot. Honestly, I wasn’t planning to read this novel, but now I am. I find that one of Amazon’s most useful features is that it helps me discover new books better than most physical [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, Save Kepler's by Rick
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
GarageBuy lets you sort eBay search results by number of bids
GarageBuy is an application for OS X that let’s you search, browse, and bid on eBay listings. It’s the only way I’ve found so far to sort eBay search results by the number of bids on each listing. This is often a useful way to bring the good stuff to the top.
[...]
No Comments » - Posted in General, Technology by Rick
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
iTunes and Netflix are like books
As Tuesday’s publication of 2666 nears, New York Magazine has a piece about the continued importance of big, Pynchonian books, comparing their flexibility to that of current digital media. Yes, it’s a bit of a stretch, but still…
It bears remembering that a book, no matter how long and complicated, doesn’t require you to read it all in [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General, Technology by Rick
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
Photoshop for real
From Flickr, here is a real life version of the Adobe Photoshop desktop.
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Rick
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Jonathan Lethem on Roberto Bolaño, or the best novel of the year?
In this weekend’s New York Times Book Review Jonathan Lethem offers high praise for Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, which comes out in the U.S. on Tuesday. Based on the review, it looks like 2666 will vie with Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland for the title of the best book of 2008. Lethem writes:
“2666” is as consummate a performance as any 900-page [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Jeffrey Sachs on the financial crisis
In a recent post on the Financial Times site, Columbia University Jeffrey Sachs economist proposes some steps that the international community can take to limit the damage:
First, the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan should extend swap lines to all main emerging markets, including Brazil, Hungary, Poland and Turkey, [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Lit crit and the financial crisis
This week’s issue of the New Yorker has a piece by John Lanchester about books related to the financial crisis. He is the only journalist, so far, to draw an analogy between developments in the financial markets and philosophy and cultural criticism. For that, I take my hat off. In the high point (for English majors) of [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Friday, November 7th, 2008
The Republicans should steal Howard Dean’s playbook
Over at The Daily Beast, Ana Marie Cox conducts an interview with John McCain’s Chief Strategist, Steve Schmidt. His comments seem to suggest that the Republican party would be better off trying to run a national operation and not concede the coasts.
The party in the Northeast is all but extinct; the party on the West Coast is [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Rick
Friday, November 7th, 2008
Briefly, Roger Angell on voting
Perhaps, lost among all the post-election analysis is Roger Angell’s beautiful post, Rite, over at NewYorker.com about his experience at the ballot box, which concludes:
A cloud of smugness enfolds me as I hit the street, exactly the kind of feeling that’s pretty well kept me out of churches. But why resist? I believe in this. It’s been [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Baseball, General by Rick
Friday, November 7th, 2008
Shorty is TinyURL for your own domain
Many people use TinyURL to shorten long URLs for sending in emails or posting online. I recently discovered Shorty, which provides a tinyURL-like service on your own domain. So, you could have URLs like yourdomain.com/s/keyword redirect to any URL on the web. It’s fairly easy to set up and you can even track how many [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General, Technology by Rick
Thursday, November 6th, 2008
Professors don’t influence students’ politics
The Times published a story this week about studies showing that the prevalence of liberal professors has little effect on students’ actual political views. What does matter? Friends and family. And what I found interesting about the article was that a line from a CUNY professor that brought the discussion back to something that actually [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General by Rick
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
We will be back with more content once we are rested
For now, there is this:
No Comments » - Posted in General by Rick
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
The New Yorker digital edition in the wild still disappoints
After having posted previously that the New Yorker digital edition would be a letdown based on my experience at the New Yorker Festival, I had a chance to try out the digital version on its Monday launch this week. The nice thing about the reader is that it caches the page previews, which allows you [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in General by Rick
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
Tiger Woods still won’t endorse Barack Obama (and it’s election day)
The Independent features some blurbs from prominent black artists and athletes about a possible Obama presidency. What I found especially striking is the contract between the quotes from Tiger Woods and Alonzo Mourning, which appear back-to-back in the article. Woods seems bent on not saying anything provocative and offers the vaguest, most uncontroversial praise of [...]
No Comments » - Posted in General by Rick
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
NYRB on the election
The previous issue of the New York Review of Books features a series of takes on the current election season from some of the Review’s frequent contributors. Joan Didion, of course, stole the show for me. She frames the current election in a contrarian light:
. . . what seemed striking about the long and impassioned run-up to [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Books, General by Rick
Monday, November 3rd, 2008
Zadie Smith on Netherland vs. Remainder
Zadie Smith’s essay in the current New York Review of Books pits Netherland by Joseph O’Neill against Remainder by Tom McCarthy, using the books to represent opposing views on the state of the novel. She writes:
All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the [...]
