Interesting insight by Matt over at 37Signals:

Want something to blow up? Tell the world about it on a Tuesday morning. Avoids the Monday avalanche people face and gives you the rest of the week to get play …Want something to fade away? Tell the world about it on a Friday afternoon. It’ll fade into the weekend.

This backs up what appears to be the case on Daily Exhaust:

UPDATE: My brother brought to my attention the unfortunate choice of words Matt at 37Signals decided to use in his post in light of next week’s upcoming anniversary. It should have been more obvious to me, considering I was there.

I’ve had this post waiting to be written for a few months now. Luckily, the time that has elapsed since the articles I’m referencing have been written haven’t made this post any less relevant. Note that the Wired article I reference has since been updated by their editor due to a lot of reader feedback.
I understand when you’re writing for the media, it’s temping to inject your headlines and article titles with a lot of hyperbole. Depending on who your employer is, many times it gets you more hits (and more money).
I came across this article on Wired.com back in February, Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone.
Pretty bold title …was it true? The writer, Brian Chen cites out-of-whack pricing plans, high and complex standards of users and lack of a TV tuner as the larger hurdles Apple is up against.
Fair enough. I am well aware that Japan has pioneered in many technology markets (but not necessarily innovated) and are far ahead of us in many respects.
But a few months later I came across this article at Electronista, iPhone dominates Japanese smartphone market.
They write:

The iPhone is currently the best-selling smartphone in Japan, at least at retail, according to a recent survey. Gathered by research firm BCN, data from 2,300 stores shows the 8GB iPhone 3G as the most popular smartphone, followed by its 16GB sibling.

and:

The Japanese iPhone is carried by Softbank, which is said to have adjusted its plans to make the product cheaper in terms of fees and hardware. The iPhone may also be benefiting from a relatively static local market, which has little incentive to develop new features beyond items like better cameras, sharper displays and mobile TV.

Now the Wired article was written 26 Feb 2009, and the Electronista article was written on 3 Jul 2009. What I can surmise from these two articles is either:
A) Brian Chen at Wired.com is full of shit and the Japanese don’t hate the iPhone
or
B) Consumer opinion of the iPhone has changed dramatically in the 5 months since the Wired article was written due to Softbank’s ‘adjustments’ mentioned in the Electronista article. Consumer opinion changed so much so that they went uout and bought enough iPhones to make it the #1 smartphone in Japan.
If B) is the case, that’s a pretty impressive 360 degree turn in consumer opinion.
Whatever the case may be, always try be well-informed on news – be it political, technological, social or artistic.

For the last 4 days I’ve been in Chicago for my company’s (Roundarch) annual summer event. Since my flight back to NYC wasn’t until Sunday, I decided to visit the the Art Institute of Chicago. Having not been there before I wanted to see how well their claim of ‘being one of the largest collections of Impressionist artwork’ held up.
Truth be told, their collection is amazing, but being the weirdo I am, I became distracted with an object I kept seeing in various rooms of the museum:



As I took a closer look at the device, I realized it was used for tracking humidity and temperature over a large span of time using a needle to register fluctuations on a large spool of paper like a seismometer (for tracking earthquake activity).
How friggin cool.
I did some quick digging and found the company who makes these hygrothermographs, Oakion.

Bryan has some great new missiles up on his site, including this Scud:

Humankind has a finite existence on the earth. In order for that existence to become indefinite, something that is no longer bound by the rules of our solar system, we must make a second home away from the comfortable confines of the earth. This isn’t science fiction. It’s basic logic.

One Giant Leap And Then…Nothing

Craig Moffett from Bernstein Research on the iPhone-AT&T relationship (via ZDNet):

Apple has radically tilted the strategic playing field away from the network operator in favor of the device manufacturer …Remarkably, Apple has so thoroughly stolen the customer relationship – who would argue that Apple iPhone customers’ first affinity is to the device rather than to the network – that the network is not only irrelevant, it is rather a source of derision.

and:

Apple’s direct-to-consumer end run around the wireless industry is in many ways simply a repeat of its brilliant negotiation with the music industry at the dawn of iTunes back in 2001. Less than a decade later, Apple has managed to capture considerable value from the music industry as it sells ever more iPods.

This isn’t a new discovery, but I love how long it takes big business to see the error in their ways.
I also hate the irony in the fact that the ‘phone’ part of the iPhone is the weakest link in my owning an iPhone.

So Google has a browser called Chrome, and they’ve decided to call their new operating system Chrome as well.
Hmmm.
Gizmodo responsed to this today, ‘Android, Chrome OS Relationship Confusing Everyone, Including Google‘.
John Gruber responds more specifically to the wack-ass nomenclature:

A web browser is very different from an OS, even if the OS only runs the browser. Google themselves recently conducted a survey that suggests that most regular people do not understand at all what a “web browser” is. If regular people are confused about what a browser is, it’s a good bet they’re even more confused about what an “OS” is. Calling them both “Chrome” isn’t going to help clarify the matter.

This reminds me of Amazon’s recent ‘Kindle’ iPhone app.
Wait, I thought that white, e-ink device on my desk was a Kindle? Now, if I don’t have a Kindle, I can still have a Kindle (on my iPhone)?

Art tends not only to discover the truth but to exaggerate and finally distort it. And, maybe in this distortion lies the essence of art.

• Matthew Nowicki
  via NOTCOT

I wacked most of my information on my Facebook account and then deactivated it today.
I don’t find Facebook that useful anymore.
Ok, I never found it useful, but now I find it just plain annoying. It might be that I’m all growns up and have evolved my digital self. Or I could just be turning into a grumpy old man. Probably a little bit of both.
The status updates from my friends and my “friends” have been driving me postal lately. Most are updates in their lives. I guess this is good and appropriate, but I’ve been hitting the “See Less” link on my friends more and more, so my homepage feed is a tiny subset of all my friends.
My brother Mark published a great book a few years ago on the art of the away message, ‘Where There’s a Will, There’s Away… Messages: A 21st Century Guide to the Art of Absence‘. He wrote it in reference to his instant messaging methodology (back when we posted our status on AIM), but it’s just as relevent to the world of Twitter and Facebook.
Mark’s thoughts on posted his actual life status:

…Now there are two reasons I chose NOT to post Away Messages like those. Ever. The first is out of consideration to any onlookers; it’s boring. And the fact is, no one really cares where I am at any given time, they just want something to do while they’re bored or distracted. So I thought, “Why not give people something to read? Entertain them!” So I got into the habit of creating a new Away Message every day. I never repeated a Message. And each one had to be interesting in some way, so that there was a payoff for checking it. Clever, witty, funny, curious, ironic, familiar… as long as it was a nice diversion for all of 10 seconds, it was fair game.

Take some notes people, this isn’t just a plug, it’s good advice.

Is the internet awesome?

NYTimes.com: The Case for Working With Your Hands
On the fruits of our labors:

Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive.

On focus:

Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

I’m 32 years old and I still have trouble sitting still at work.
And on taking responsibility and having some balls:

A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain …So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions.

The Beasties are getting old, but they still got it.
From the Jimmy Fallon Show, May 25, 2009:

UPDATE – I switched out the broken YouTube link for a Hulu link. Their performance of Whatcha Want kicks in at around 19:30.

hood, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

As someone who graduated from a very tough design program, Jack Moffett’s advice on disowning design rings true:

It can be devastating to have a project that you spent a lot of time on and thought was decent be ripped to shreds by your professor and peers. It is, however, a necessary experience. One must not only learn to accept it, but embrace it—welcome it, knowing that it will make the end result better. To do this, you have to disown the work, and see it as something other than yours.

On a slightly exaggerated level it calls to mind Alec Baldwin’s epic scene in Glengarry Glen Ross:

You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can’t take this — how can you take the abuse you get on a sit?! You don’t like it — leave.