When the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad was being built in the mountains just after the Civil War (last week I walked on its old tracks), the work crews were worked hard. The most famous worker was John Henry, a steel driver who hammered spikes into the mountainside to make space for sticks of dynamite that…
In the 1960s, Walt Disney joked that one day he’d replace his elite corps of animators, known as the “Nine Old Men,” and their slow, expensive way of making hand-drawn movies, with Audio-Animatronic figures. At the end of last month, Walt’s joke came true. The studio bearing his name announced that, due to a “changing…
Today is the 10th anniversary of the Netscape initial public stock offering (IPO). To say that the IPO changed things is an understatement. —Dan Gillmor —The Netscape IPO, a Decade Later (Dan Gillmor’s Blog)
· 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005. That is roughly 30% of all U.S. Internet users and 1 in 6 of the total U.S. population · Five hosting services for blogs each had more than 5 million unique visitors in that period, and four individual blogs had…
Discovery swooped through the darkness of the Mojave Desert and landed on the Edwards runway at 5:11 a.m. PDT, well before sunrise. It marked the conclusion of the first shuttle re-entry since Columbia’s tragic return. —Alicia Chang —Discovery Lands Safely in California (AP|My Way) Whew!
They’re a couple-of-dollars part on a $170 helmet, but even the smallest detail must be dealt with when you’re building a football team from scratch. “You can’t play the game without chin straps,” Snyder said. And you can’t play without coaches and a team and a field and helmets and uniforms and the myriad other…
Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane…
The death of Peter Jennings means an era in television news has ended with stunning swiftness, giving broadcasters the challenge of reimagining the nightly news in an age of instant Internet updates. —David Bauder —Jennings’ Death Ushers in Uncertain Era (AP|MyWay) Tom Brokaw retired from NBC last November, and Dan Rather gave up the big chair…
Thomson ?cannot hold back the realization that the movies have never been good enough.? As a form, he writes, movies are ?most acute when fixed on what happens next; whereas literature, sooner or later, is about the meaning behind events.? This explains better than anything else I know why it is that the finest movies…
Terugkerend thema in onze gesprekken met klanten is de wijze waarop het internet als beste ingezet kan worden. Aandacht hierbij gaat vaak uit naar de wijze van communiceren. Vandaar dat wij graag u hierbij een overzicht van interessante artikelen over dit onderwerp willen presenteren: —Schrijven voor het web (”Writing for the web”) (Darwine Nieuwsbrief) A newsletter…
In my dream he wanted the bathroom. “What’s that smell?” he said. “A gift,” I said, and gave him cheap soap hugely wrapped in purple with a golden bow, no less. How thoughtful. How thoughtless. Not only splash, but flash. —Rachel McAlpine —Four Dreams about Jakob Nielsen (Quality Web Content) Jakob Nielsen is a web usability…
How can you boost your web site’s credibility? We have compiled 10 guidelines for building the credibility of a web site. These guidelines are based on three years of research that included over 4,500 people. —Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility (WebCredibility.org)
Am I supposed to compare this Bo (Seann William Scott) and Luke Duke (Johnny Knoxville) to their counterparts from the series, John Schneider and Tom Wopat? Perhaps I could contrast the Daisy Dukes: Jessica Simpson and Catherine Bach. Or, better yet, I could strip naked, douse myself in gasoline and run flapping down the interstate…
I sometimes wonder whether graphics wouldn’t be better off if graphics designers and developers had stayed with vector-based graphics. For all that pixels are wonderful (I have nearly two million of them in front of me right now), they sometimes make Web designers do really stupid things. —Peter Seebach —Oh, the Pixel Pickle (IBM DeveloperWorks) I’m…
_ Humans are basic units of economics. _ Humans are souls trapped in the physical prison of the fleshly body. _ Humans are physical bodies dyspeptically infested by parasitic souls. _ Humans are information just like everything else in the universe. _ Humans are the orphans of the animal kingdom. _ Humans are goooood eatin?.…
Hawthorne’s description of the Custom House emphasizes the nearby dilapidated wharves and decayed wooden warehouses crumbling to ruin and his office “cobwebbed and dingy with old paint.” Hawthorne offers us an almost gothic Custom House, a fitting element in the introduction to a romance novel. The Custom House is, in fact, an airy, handsome structure,…
“It’s been said that a bunch of nerdy white guys are creating these games,” Armstrong said. “The problem with a bunch of white guys creating the games is that the story isn’t being created with balance.” Roughly 80 percent of video-game programmers are white, according to preliminary results of an International Game Developers Association survey.…
Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, JonBenet Ramsey, Elizabeth Smart and now Natalee Holloway all became household names because of the way television news divisions, particularly the cable networks, extensively covered the story when they went missing. Each had another common trait: they were young, white, pretty and female. Some have questioned how they became stories, when…
If the blogosphere continues to expand at this rate, every person who has Internet access will be a blogger before long, if not an actual reader of blogs. The conventional media – this very newspaper, for instance – have often discussed the growing impact of blogging on the coverage of news. Perhaps the strongest indicator…
A number of colleges and universities are having to assign full-time staffers or forming entire new departments to field parents’ calls and email. Others hold separate orientations for parents, partly to keep them occupied and away from student sessions. The University of Vermont employs “parent bouncers,” students trained to divert moms and dads who try…