Josh McHugh

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.

BoingBoing: "meaty, thinky"

Link: Promise and peril of data-scraping - Boing Boing.

Josh McHugh's Wired feature, "Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have About You?," is a meaty, thinky piece about the many risks of data-scraping.

So says BoingBoing, in a bit of love for my scraping piece in the January issue of Wired. I know what I want on my headstone, and I will henceforth be pasting that kind blurb on everything that I own.

NYT Ethicist Randy Cohen on urban automotive ethics

Open Planning Project’s Executive Director Mark Gorton interviews Randy Cohen  about the ethical slaughterhouse that is the automobile-oriented metropolis.

From Streetfilms , by way of Worldchanging.

p.s. great point at the 8-minute mark about how a city's potential greatness shows through in, for example, the much-beloved (to me) NYC blizzard of 1996.