A few of my shots from the past month or so here in LA.

While I’m still in my honeymoon phase with Reggie Watts, Gizmodo just posted a great piece on the gadgets he uses.
Reggie says:

I like simple, well-made, well-designed things. That’s the thing that makes me happiest. Then the thing that makes me least happy is something that is not designed well. It could be anything, like a parking garage or a really small drinking fountain, because it’s like why go through the effort and not do it right? It’s really annoying.

And this nugget stood out for me:

While Reggie is very clearly a gadget guy, his music is about the music, not the gadgets. “I’ve just always been fascinated by using technology as a tool to enhance creativity,” he says, “Not to replace it, but to enhance it.” You can hear it when he plays. The musical worlds he creates aren’t about how fast he can push a toggle or twist a dial; if it doesn’t serve to make it better, more beautiful, funnier, or more powerful, he doesn’t use it. He keeps his music as tight as he keeps his kit.

Sounds like Reggie believes computers are like a bicycle for our minds.

Daily Exhaust hit 10,000 unique visitors this month.
I’d like to continue this trajectory.

Quote from Reggie Watts.

Ok, I know I’ve been sleeping on this, but Reggie Watts is off the hook.
I should have watched his performances when I first hear about them.

John Gruber pulled, “We’re going to double down on secrecy on products.” as one of the key quotes from Tim Cook’s appearance at the D10 Conference.

I picked a different one.

When pressed about Apple TV, Cook responds: “We’re not a hobby kind of company, as you know.” Boom.

Apple ain’t going to mess around with Apple TV (in it’s current black box incarnation) unless they can ‘make a dent’ in the television universe.

We’ve all had a gut feeling about Apple TV, whether you read Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs where Jobs claims he’s finally cracked it (‘it’ being television) or you’re just connecting the dots from the iPod to iTunes to iPhone to the expansion of iTunes to movies, rentals and shows to iTV to iPad to Apple TV …

It only makes sense.

Over at the Atlantic, Derek Thompson gives us a short philosophical history of personal music and explains how working with headphones hurts our productivity (via SlashDot):

To visit a modern office place is to walk into a room with a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of younger workers listen to music on their headphones, and the vast majority thinks it makes us better at our jobs. In survey after survey, we report with confidence that music makes us happier, better at concentrating, and more productive.

Science says we’re full of it. Listening to music hurts our ability to recall other stimuli, and any pop song — loud or soft — reduces overall performance for both extraverts and introverts. A Taiwanese study linked music with lyrics to lower scores on concentration tests for college students, and other research have shown music with words scrambles our brains’ verbal-processing skills. “As silence had the best overall performance it would still be advisable that people work in silence,” one report dryly concluded.

From my experience, he’s absolutely right – at least as it pertains to any work involving critical or creative thinking.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, I find it helpful to have music or a podcast on when I’m doing any sort of production-level work. This kind of work doesn’t require heavy mental lifting.

The object of everybody’s search in movies – the power cube, the energy crystal, Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase?
Turns out theres a name for these objects – a MacGuffin:

In fiction, a MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is a plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist (and sometimes the antagonist) is willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to pursue, often with little or no narrative explanation as to why it is considered so desirable. A MacGuffin, therefore, functions merely as “a plot element that catches the viewers’ attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction”.[1] In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, a potential threat, a mysterious but highly desired item or object, or simply something that is entirely unexplained.

Thanks Bryan.

My copy of Nicholas Felton’s newest Biennial Report just arrived.
It’s a good day.

Beautiful little film on a 300SL and it’s owner.
Just listen to that engine. Incredible.
via Le Container

I’m linking to the LA Times article about the NY Times article on the rumors Facebook is working on it’s own smartphone (I’m not doing this because I moved to LA, I reached my 10-article limit at nytimes.com):

Now, it seems Facebook is dedicating more resources to its phone project. The New York Times reports that the company has hired more than half a dozen former Apple software and hardware engineers and is actively recruiting others.

Ok, despite the title of this post, yes, you can buy talent, but you can’t guarantee it’ll stay around and it won’t guarantee you a hit product.
I would never buy a Facebook smartphone. I don’t want one company managing my relationships and monetizing them with contextual ads.
Apple manages my credit card with which I can purchase music, movies, applications and games. I am Apple’s customer. With a Facebook smartphone, I am not Facebook’s customer, the advertisers are. So like Google, Facebook’s goal is to please advertisers, not me.
No thanks.

Over at Macworld, John Moltz gives his non-objective review of Windows 8:

This is the pig of Windows 8 that resists any attempts at applying all forms of lipstick. There’s simply no getting around the fact that this is a confusing dichotomy. Additionally, Windows on ARM–now saddled with the mock-worthy name “Windows RT” for “Run Time”, which has so much meaning to consumers–won’t run traditional desktop applications other than a core set provided by Microsoft. (Please refer to the matrix, thank you for calling.)

So, Microsoft’s big hope for getting into the tablet space is an operating system with an attractive but flawed front end that’s incongruously tied to a legacy desktop, and will require different versions of applications depending on which hardware you have.

What could go wrong?

To give them a bigger metaphor than they deserve, Microsoft has built a brand new Ferrari and dropped an 8-track tape in the dash and some seats from an ’86 Ford Taurus.

Randy Murray gives some sound advice on backing up your digital stuff:

Last year I needed to use a play that I wrote nearly thirty years ago. It was originally in a digital form, but that format, a Lanier word processor on huge floppy disks, was long inaccessible. But because I had it on paper, it was no problem to read and use. I’ve updated it to a new digital edition (I retyped it and rewrote it), but I’m keeping copies of each edition on paper. I also keep really important digital files in as raw a format as possible. For example, save as text, not a proprietary word processor.

I don’t do enough of this and I should. And you should too.