Manso

gobiernousa: Descripción de la foto: cementerio de veteranos en...

Fri, 24 May 2013 14:20:41 -0700

Descripción de la foto: cementerio de veteranos en Arizona

Este lunes 27, Día de Conmemoración a los Caídos, recordemos a los hombres y mujeres que sacrificaron sus vidas sirviendo al país.

Bien hecho. GobiernoUSA.gov on Tumblr is already off to a really good start.

americastestkitchen: WHY HOMEMADE FRIES ARE WORTH...

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:34:29 -0700

americastestkitchen:

WHY HOMEMADE FRIES ARE WORTH IT.

Fantastic usage of a gif.

35 (2nd swim of 2013. 1/2 mile with Danny who is great. I’d...

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:09:59 -0700

(2nd swim of 2013. 1/2 mile with Danny who is great. I’d asked last night him if he wanted to swim today at 5:30 and he didn’t know I meant PM. He actually got up and texted me at 5:15 AM. What a guy! The board said the water was 65F and it felt great – not cold at all. Huge swell. Low visibility in the water because it was overcast and gloomy.)

Photo

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:07:18 -0700

I received two beautiful works of art from Shannon today. The...

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:36:01 -0700

I received two beautiful works of art from Shannon today. The painting is from my baby girl and the photograph is one of my favorites by Dusdin Condren. ❤❤

hallywoods: One of the best things I’ve read this week,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 22:14:10 -0700

hallywoods:

One of the best things I’ve read this week, Christopher Solomon’s brilliant article, A Case For Getting Far, Far Away.

“We spend our days trying to be big. In the middle of nowhere, though, we can surrender to smallness again and instead find where we fit in the landscape. Out there, where there’s nothing, is where there’s the most to learn.”

Pictured: Mount Laguna, in Eastern San Diego County, shot this Spring. It was about 35 degrees that morning.

"Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:12:05 -0700

“Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada.”

- A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

990000: Happy Birthday Moz! bbook: It’s Morrissey’s Birthday!...

Wed, 22 May 2013 15:14:55 -0700

990000:

Happy Birthday Moz!

bbook:

It’s Morrissey’s Birthday! Here Are His Six Best Looks

A good hair appreciation post.

Making Mass Tools from Pro Tools

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:57:16 -0700

dbreunig:

The new XBox isn’t for hard core gamers.

The new Flickr isn’t for professional photographers¹.

The most recent Final Cut isn’t for filmmakers.

To make pro tools into mass tools you need to take a step back. You need to prune features only used by a relatively smaller population of professionals. You need to ignore the cries from your most loyal customers and focus on the future. Only once you’ve built a beachhead of new mass users, casual users who are more numerous but pay less, you can start training these users towards the features you once cut. Or take advantage of the clean slate and head somewhere new, where you couldn’t previously go with only the pros for support.

Perhaps the most famous pro tool to mass tool shift was the iMac and OSX. Jobs and company ignored the cries from pro audio users who clung to OS 8 and 9 to keep latency down. The challenger brand was diluted and refocused by partnering with Microsoft and Thinking Different. The floppy drive, ABD ports, and expansion cards were pulled from the final product. Many who had clung to Apple through the 90s protested. But Apple kept their heads down, focused on new users, and grew towards the digital hub.

For products with saturated user bases the first step towards a brighter future is painful. It will be fun to watch how Yahoo, Apple, and Microsoft fair.

This article is ridiculous and hand-wringing. I’m linking to it for Mayer’s comments and to illustrate the fear of mass tools. ↩

I like that Drew recognizes that making mass tools is indeed the way toward a “brighter future.” I’m fascinated by the tension between power users and “the masses,” and how it reveals the complex relationship between power, freedom, and democratization.

Power users – or hackers – often frame their complaints about missing features in terms of freedom. When the iPad debuted, Alex Payne made this incredible statement:

The tragedy of the iPad is that it truly seems to offer a better model of computing for many people – perhaps the majority of people.

Such tragedy boggles the mind.

As Drew has explained well, tools made for most people require focus and ease of use that usually fail to satisfy power users. The upshot of this is that more people have power to do more things, which diminishes the need for professionals. It’s a distribution of power and freedom from elites to the masses. It is, indeed, democratization.

"I think we should prepare ourselves for all kinds of new religions based around the idea of a..."

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:35:40 -0700

“

I think we should prepare ourselves for all kinds of new religions based around the idea of a planetary soul. As in a single web of electronic neurons around the globe, connecting all sentient beings. The Noosphere will go from a hypothetical speculation by a Catholic priest to an outright competitor to the Catholic faith.

[…]

There will be dogma. Thou shalt use the internet this way or that. Or do not use it this way or that. Don’t go here, or release that. Or you’ll be excluded from its constant goodness. Cut off! Can you image growing up in 50 years wholly dependent on the exo-mind, and then being excommunicated?!!

”

- Kevin Kelly

"[…]Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time,..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:43:45 -0700

“[…]Facebook, having already swallowed up enormous chunks of discretionary media consumption time, has its old-school media counterparts chasing after “Likes” as if they were cocaine being dispensed in a lab rat’s cage.”

- Paul Ford

"The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of “Random Access Memories”..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 10:30:30 -0700

“The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of “Random Access Memories” repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard. Daft Punk engages the sound and the surface of music so lovingly that all seventy-five loony minutes of “Random Access Memories” feel fantastic, even when you are hearing music you might never seek out. This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?”

- Sasha Frere-Jones: Daft Punk’s puzzling new album.

—

The answer is absolutely not.

americasgreatoutdoors: The Moon rising over the valley in...

Tue, 21 May 2013 08:13:03 -0700

americasgreatoutdoors:

The Moon rising over the valley in Yosemite National Park.

Photo: Manish Mamtani

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:57:25 -0700

"You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:12:35 -0700

“You do not merely want to be considered just the best of the best. You want to be considered the only ones who do what you do.”

- Jerry Garcia (via vastandgrand)

"Interestingly, the Measured Voice website describes the solution as providing a “distraction-free..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:43:36 -0700

“Interestingly, the Measured Voice website describes the solution as providing a “distraction-free environment.” Despite working in Measured Voice for months, that aspect never occurred to me. And now I realize it’s a great benefit. It eliminates the “shiny object” aspect of the Twitter stream.”

- Kelley Kassa, in Measured Voice: A New Tool for your Social Media Activities

Yessss. I choose to accept this as high praise: the app was so simple and straightforward that the person using it only noticed it in retrospect.

That’s what I aspire to: people who say my software “just works.”
(via globalspin)

First female Afghan pilot graduates. Afghan Air Force 2nd Lt....

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:08:45 -0700

First female Afghan pilot graduates.

Afghan Air Force 2nd Lt. Niloofar Rhmani walks the flightline at Shindand Air Base, Afghanistan prior to her graduation from undergraduate pilot training May 13, 2013. Rhmani made history May 14, 2013 when she became the first female to successfully complete undergraduate pilot training and earn the status of pilot in more than 30 years. She will continue her service as she joins the Kabul Air Wing as a Cessna 208 pilot.

I made salted caramel coffee ice cream. It was my first time...

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:27:26 -0700

I made salted caramel coffee ice cream. It was my first time making salted caramel or coffee ice cream. I fused this salted caramel ice cream recipe with this coffee ice cream recipe to make it. It’s very good, but maybe a little too good. I need to tone it down.

A few lessons:

This was a very yolk-heavy recipe (5 yolks), and it’s too rich and custardy as a result. The above tiny scoop is about all I’d recommend anyone eat because it’s so rich. I think I’ll go with three whole eggs next time.
I used French roast coffee beans and probably steeped them too long (put them whole into the warm milk/cream/caramel mixture and left them covered for an hour). The flavor is good, but too intense. Gives you coffee breath. For the next batch, I’ll use a medium roast, grind them, and steep for less time.
Making salted caramel is easy. Just leave the heat low and keep stirring. It will probably work as a nice replacement for sugar in many ice cream recipes. The trick is to make it first, and then slowly pour in the milk and cream to blend it in. If you go too fast, the milk’s coolness will harden the caramel, which makes it take forever to blend.

"Procurement is slow because Congress and governments around the world have embedded so many..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:58:38 -0700

“Procurement is slow because Congress and governments around the world have embedded so many safeguards and administrative procedures to make it objective, unbiased, fair, effective, incorruptible, that what you end up with is an intricate system that only business insiders and administration officials understand. For that very reason, that system is inherently anti-competitive. You have to be a Beltway insider, or a version of those characters in other countries, to do business with government.”

- Juan Pablo Giraldo sums up how procurement defeats itself.

peterfromtexas: Ronald Reagan wearing sweatpants while flying...

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:01:56 -0700

peterfromtexas:

Ronald Reagan wearing sweatpants while flying on Air Force One