Honolulu Pulse: Scene+Heard: Getting to know Matt McVickar
My new friend-through-friends and fellow musician Sabrina interviewed me for her blog on Honolulu Pulse, the Star Advertiser's online nightlife section.
Vulture: Arcade Fire, and the ‘Never Heard of It’ Grammys by Nitsuh Abebe
”…the tweets offer a funny reminder that one kind of center really does hold: That no matter how dominant and predictable something might be in your world, it is still a weird, marginal thing to most everyone else.”
“Co-hosts Burt Lum and Ryan Ozawa take a look at the latest tech news and happenings. Then they talk about HTML 5 with Dan Leuck and Matt McVickar.”
I was on Ryan and Burt's weekly show for my involvement with Ocupop's redesign of the HTML5 logo. It was my first time on live radio. Fun!
“I stumbled on this unsettling story of an obscure Pokémon bootleg/art-hack that I thought might be neat to share on here. I think this originated from 4chan, so I’ve no idea if this hack actually exists. It probably doesn’t, but it’s still a great concept/tale!”
The Morning News: How to Say I Love You by Paul Ford
Ends with Paul’s and Mo’s vows, which are great:
“I will not hide anything from you except surprises.
I promise to let you make fun of me.
I promise to meet you at the emergency room with a book and a sweater.
I promise to always see and treat you as an equal.”
For when an app has a keyboard shortcut symbol and you can't figure out which key they mean.
“The symbols below appear in menus and represent keys that are used in keyboard shortcuts. Some of these symbols also appear in the help and are referred to as ‘modifier keys.’”
“…here’s a Q&A with Matthew, who was kind enough to agree to an e-mail interview the day after the HTML5 logo was unveiled. He was quick to point out that it was a team effort, and that Ocupop Creative Director Michael Nieling headed the project and designed the logo itself.”
“Perry’s ouevre is nasty, sticky and a little bit stupid; it’s a kind of Hello Kitty-themed update on Carry On; fruit-scented lube on a rather imposing black dildo. It works perfectly because the American ideal of the teenager - wholesome and optimistic - is of course at odds with its reality of unprotected sex and casual drug use.”
“The data used to calculate when museums are quiet is gathered from foursquare. Foursquare is designed to show popular trending places or where your friends are. I instead used it for antisocial purposes. A small cron job checks the /herenow endpoint in the foursquare api a few times an hour. The number of people present is logged for each venue that is tracked. Once a week these checkins are aggregated and passed to the frontend web application hosted on Heroku. The graphs are generated in SVG using Raphael in the browser.”
“Beets is the media library management system for obsessive-compulsive music geeks. The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. It then provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.”
The Exiled: ‘The Rally to Restore Vanity’ by Mark Ames
A skewering of the non-politics of those members of Generations X and Y who would likely attend John Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity, based around a paragraph-by-paragraph deconstruction of a viral ‘Breakup Letter to The Left’.
The Atlantic: The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of WikiLeaks
“The flip side of responsibly held secrets, however, is trust. A perfectly open world, without secrets, would be a world without the need for trust, and therefore a world without trust. What a sad sterile place that would be: A perfect world for machines.”
Columbia Journalism Review: ‘Look at Me!’ by Maureen Tkacik
“A writer’s search for journalism in the age of branding.”
In which Maureen Tkacik engages in a number of jobs she wouldn’t otherwise take to explore them journalistically and try to get at the heart of the ‘nothing economy’. This is a great piece, and I think the reactions (in the comments and in my knee, occasionally) questioning her ‘legitimacy’ and hypocrisy illuminate the very problem she’s talking about. I think the idea of injecting a journalist experience into a piece are wonderful, because so-called straight journalism is often a myth and because it can make the writing and reading better.
Andrew McLaughlin: An Open Letter to Dr. Tarek Kamel, Minister of Communications and Information Technology of Egypt
Former White House Deputy Chief Technology Officer weighs in, urging Egypt’s Minister of IT to help the people of Egypt and to not ruin his legacy with a human rights violation that will overshadow all of his accomplishments.
A elegy to hipsters, complete with obnoxious photography, sort of just picks and chooses various elements of youth culture and NYC hipster party culture and starts dividing them into subspecies. I have read this through three times and still don’t get it. That may be my fault or this may just be total bullshit.
1stwebdesigner: 20 snippets you should be using from HTML5 Boilerplate
Sounds stupid and listy but it's actually a good introduction to some of the more useful and practical pieces of the huge insane HTML5 Boilerplate (html5boilerplate.com).
Nitsuh explores the Black Eyed Peas iPad app, and why so much party pop music — which is so often aspirational — has been sounding “rote and blanched of purpose”.
AlterNet: How TV Superchef Jamie Oliver’s ‘Food Revolution’ Flunked Out
It’s not terribly shocking that a reality show about an ignorant millionaire trying to fix a school’s lunch program with his own special menu was a costly, exploitative, and ruinous failure, but the disastrous state of school lunch programs nationwide *is* shocking.