Josh McHugh

My Muxtape

Bush, wiretapping and your phone company

If you have 10 minutes and a spittle shield, check out Keith Olbermann's rant on the administration's craven attempt to immunize AT&T, Verizon, and the other telecom giants from prosecution for selling you and me out to the NSA. Two amazing factual nuggets in here:

1. The son of Bush's new attorney general, Mukasey, works for a law firm representing Verizon; thanks, Senator Feinstein!

2. Ground Zero for the wiretapping-of-the-American-people initiative is a block away from my office, at the scary AT&T building at 2nd and Folsom, a.k.a. the Death Star.

toward a pillowier potato

A nice, bizarre electro Fresh Prince of mashed potato mashup courtesy of Uncle Phil and YTMND.

Touchscreen and beyond

This blog post:

Brian Eno Was Right: The Future Won’t Be Moved By Mouse Alone.

reminded me of something remarkable: my 20-month-old son has become proficient in manipulating the photo display feature of my iPhone. He is an electronics enthusiast -- we've had to resort to using a laundry pin to secure the doors of the armoire holding our video and stereo components -- but he figured out the iPhone's touchscreen interface pretty much instantly. In fact, any time he sees another screen, especially a small one like that on the back of a digital camera, he puts a finger on the screen and tries to flick it to the next picture. If that doesn't work, he puts the camera to his ear and listens intently for the voice on the other end of what must surely be a phone call.

Buttons are interesting to him, and he'll figure out what they do, (oh yes he will, and don't think you can distract him once he's started the figuring-out process) but you can see that using a button to get something done seems like a whole unnecessary step in his mind.

Anyway, it occurred to me yesterday that he will remember the iPhone the way I think of the 8-track tape player: it was good enough in its time to be remembered, just good enough to be the punch line of a joke about old technology.

Facebook fatigue?

After two weeks of not being connected to the Web for most of the day, I returned to work and noticed that something was missing: my Facebook addiction. It may be just a phase, and I still get notified when people send FBmail, but for some reason I'll try to figure out, I'm not drawn to it the way I was in 2007.

Jotted

I am trying out a service called Jott. I am speaking into my phone and what I say is being transcribed and then sent on to the destination of my choice. If this works, it could be fun.

Metamultiply

Whoa - while digging for new mashups, I came across Multiply, which is where I'm actually writing this. It's handy, in that it can rope in all of one's media - your blogs, your photos, your videos etc. - from the various spots you've ended up stashing it all. So I've got my TypePad blogs piping in here, plus Flickr pictures, plus any videos I care to show, etc. But now I want something even mo meta: a site that will sit on top of Multiply, YouTube, MySpace, and all the assorted Google web apps that have wormed their way into my game, and run them all through that one site.

Technorati Tags: humor, travel

Genome Story Wiki

Honestly, when I thought of this in 1995, it might actually have been possible for me to learn most or all of the stuff I would've needed to learn to pull it off. Though I must say it wasn't inter-dash-active, the way I imagined it at the outset. Originally it was more of a 3-d environment where I would kind of riff masterfully (huh?) on the varied expressions of genes, all laid out visually in the form of a double helix you could cruise up and down on each chromosome to see the masterful things I had decreed . The verse (oh yes, it was to be verse) would have somehow corresponded metrically and rhyme-ically to the base pairs making up the genes, and somehow I would have been able to cover a meaningful number of genes. Hah. Somehow.

La Fuga

Here's my piece on La Fuga, the real-life RPG in Madrid. I visited in early January and came away with a bruised kiester for my troubles.

CarHarbor

Hah - this CarHarbor blog, apparently the verbal tarp covering a skunkworks parking-spot arbitrage service, is right in the sweet spot where motorcars and ethics intersect. Craig Newmark is one of the company's advisors. Interesting mention of Wal-mart's use of parking capacity as a competitive tool.