Obsolescence
Posted: October 16, 2010 Filed under: Brooklyn, Technology, Thinkers | Tags: obsoleted 2 Comments »Saw this walking home from the Lorimer L stop the other day:
Ten years ago, this was cutting edge. O to think what the future may bring…
The Hackers 15th Anniversary Party, Saturday October 2nd
Posted: September 30, 2010 Filed under: Hell Yes, New York, WIN | Tags: Hackers, Hackers (the movie), Hackers 15th Anniversary Party Leave a comment »After a month of planning, the Kickstarter drive is now closed. We set out to throw the party of the year and we raised almost twice our $5k donation goal to do so. This is happening FULL ON this Saturday. I hope to see you there.
And since 3 people bought “The Slave” package for $500 each, I will be wearing a dress.
HACK THE PLANET!!!111!!!11!
FOUND at the Internet Garage: WTF is in that bag?
Posted: September 11, 2010 Filed under: Found, The Internet Garage, WTF 3 Comments »Shortly after I started this blog a little over a year ago, I started the FOUND at the Internet Garage series to share all the amazing crap I find at the charmingly dysfunctional Internet cafe where I work on the weekends.
This one takes the cake.
Today I was sitting at the help desk, Internetting and stuff, while my coworker Mike dug around in the shelves behind me looking for a part for the laptop he was fixing.
“Yo, need any birth control pills?”
“Probably.” I said, turning around to find him holding two months worth of Yaz. “Oh, nevermind. That stuff makes people crazy. Why do you have that?”
“I don’t know, someone left this bag here the other day,” he said, holding up an Urban Outfitters tote bag.
I got up to examine the contents and found the most perplexing combination of items I have encountered at the Internet Garage to date. I immediately went to the scanner to document the contents, as I usually do when I find strange things in that place.
Wanted: Mildly sadistic editor with egg timer
Posted: September 9, 2010 Filed under: Entropy, Writing 3 Comments »In my 11th grade AP English class, we used to begin every day with an exercise in response writing. Mrs. Smith would write a word, phrase, or provocative quote on the black board and set an egg timer for three minutes. In those three minutes we had to write a “journal entry” in a notebook solely dedicated to those exercises. The deal was, we could write about anything, and she would never read our journals. She would just flip through the pages a few times throughout the semester and check them off to make sure we’d actually been writing while the timer was running.
The point of this exercise was to build up confidence in our ability to churn out content. It was a skill that was highly necessary on the standardized tests we were all constantly preparing for, but I had a hunch that Mrs. Smith had other reasons for her assignment as well. After all, this was the teacher who one day, after we had all gotten situated and were waiting quietly for class to begin, blared Barbara Streisand’s “People” on the CD player, to our horror, to break us of the habit of using the word repetitively as a subject (people think this, people do that, etc..). She once broke the sacred “teachers don’t swear” rule to illustrate her opinion of how the word “fuck” was the epitome of classlessness and that there was always a better word choice. She tended to go to extremes to drill important lessons into our heads.
T-bagging at the Glenn Beck rally in DC
Posted: August 29, 2010 Filed under: Adventuring, Photography, Politics, Thinkers | Tags: Glenn Beck, Restoring Honor rally, Sarah Palin, tea baggers, tea party, Washington DC 32 Comments »
I was in Washington, DC today and attended Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally. I didn’t know what I was getting into two months ago when my mom asked me if I would meet her in DC for a “veterans’ memorial event” and I agreed. Both of my grandparents on her side of the family were WWII vets and, not bothering to look up the event, I just assumed it would be a boring speech by a general or something. Needless to say, I was stunned when I realized that she’s tricked me into attending a tea party rally led by one of the most hateful bigots in the media.
But I’m the kind of person who will try to make the best out of any situation, and walking to the Lincoln Memorial from the Arlington Cemetery subway stop, I passed this couple that gave me an idea of just how to do this…
They were posing for a picture for someone else, and I just kind of walked by and snapped one too, wondering to myself how much the people who made those t-shirts profited from this rally.
Then I started to notice more and more people with full-on tea bagger gear, so I made it my mission to photograph T-shirts with the most idiotic things I could find on them.The closer I got to the stage, the better (read: more absurd, unbelievable) they got.
If “Jesus Is The Standard!” doesn’t that make you and everyone else sub par?
FOUND at the Internet Garage: A Williamsburg sampler platter
Posted: August 14, 2010 Filed under: Found, The Internet Garage | Tags: The Internet Garage 1 Comment »
Left in the scanner. We really don’t fuck around with our stereotypes in this neighborhood.
Washington D.C. Earthquake Damage
Posted: July 17, 2010 Filed under: haiti | Tags: Earthquake Leave a comment »
From MSNBC:
WASHINGTON — The largest earthquake ever recorded near the capital rattled Washington, D.C., early Friday, waking many residents but causing no reported damage. The quake hit at 5:04 a.m. ET with a magnitude of 3.6, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was centered near Rockville, Md., the USGS said. NBC News reported that the quake was felt in the D.C.-area, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. Amy Vaughn, a spokeswoman for USGS, told NBC station WRC that the quake was the largest recorded within 50 kilometers (31 miles) of Washington since a database was created in 1974.
Yo D.C., Ima let you finish, but Haiti had the most destructive earthquake of all time…
Photo found on twitter via @firesideint and @troylivesay.
Look at this fucking love connection
Posted: June 15, 2010 Filed under: Hell Yes, Internets, WIN | Tags: Atari 520, Commodore 64, geek love, love connection 2 Comments »Last year when I was working at ScienceBlogs.com, my co-Cat Herder dug up this web gem on flickr and posted it in the forums to the amusement of the bloggers. Titled “Arikia at work”:
Then today, while searching for inspiration for the upcoming photoshoot I’m participating in so I can have some decent head shots/avatar pictures, which have been requested by just about everyone above me in the professional world (and one person in my personal world who I wish was above me in a different way right now if you know what I mean), I came across this strapping young lad’s soul mate:
Look at that fucking love connection!!!!!!!! Amirite?
I hope they found each other and had dirty hot sex by the light of the Atari 520 ST with color graphics and 64k RAM.
Can you spot the IT Consultant?
Posted: June 1, 2010 Filed under: LOL, Nerdy | Tags: Hilarious stereotypes, IT Consultant 3 Comments »From the Staff Profiles page of the website for Dean’s Property:
CAn’t. Stop. Laughing.
(H/t Dan MacArthur)
Blog neglect — for good reasons!
Posted: May 23, 2010 Filed under: blogging, Musings 1 Comment »… it happens. Of all the stuff that I have to do, my blog is unfortunately the thing that I put last on the priorities list. The up side of that is that I’m working on about a million really awesome projects right now. Currently in the mix:
- I’m still working with Nate on the book project, which is coming along swimmingly and continues to provide me with the most fascinating brain food I have ever encountered. Friday we went to IBM Headquarters to interview the project manager of Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer that beat Grand Master Gary Kasparov in 1997. It was the first time Kasparov had ever been beaten, period, and by a computer.
- I’m a community manager of Haiti Rewired, Wired.com’s community-driven site to discuss technology and infrastructure solutions for Haiti. It’s an incredibly challenging and rewarding project to be working on. The site has been in existence for about 3.5 months and now hosts 1,250 members. Compared with the previous community-driven site I worked with, ScienceBlogs.com, which only had about 80 active contributors, it’s an entirely different animal. Though I do see many similarities in user behavior, especially with regards to the waxing and waning periods of activity. One cool thing that’s happening with that now is that a project to create a Wired computing hotspot in Port-au-Prince for Haiti Rewired journalists is launching in about two weeks! It’s really motivating to see real-world progress come from online activity.
- I’m finally being acknowledged as a social media guru and am going to be working with a awesome author and his publishing company to create the online presence for his new book. I won’t say what it is until everything is finalized, but I will say that it’s high in saturated fact.
- I’m working at the Internet Garage every Friday and Saturday night. I’m coming up to my 2 year anniversary! I still find it funny that the first time I went in there to scan my passport, I left it there and didn’t realize it until I’d been working there for a month and found it in the drawer. Good thing they hired me.
- The weekend before I went to Haiti, I attended the New York Hackathon, an event put on by HackNY at NYU, as an ambassador. The purpose of the event was to put groups of bright NY computer programming students in the same room with the founders of tech start-ups for 24 hours and have them build things together. It was great to see what kind of talent is out there, and it left me wishing that I was a freshman in college again right now so I could participate in events like that. Since the event, I’ve been talking with the founders of HackNY and want to help them get the word out about their organization via various internet pathways.
- Also at the Hackathon, I got to know Dave Winer, a software developer who just moved to NY from Silicon Valley, the author of Scripting News (one of the first blogs according to Wikipedia), and a really nice guy. He is all about collaborating to make new things online, and he is a do-er. I went to a meet-up he hosted last week and it totally satiated the need for collaboration in a university setting I’ve been feeling lately.
So, that’s what I’ve been up to lately, and why I have no time to blog. But I hope that changes soon. Dave demoed some sweet software that I think will make blogging a lot more impulsive, which is a good thing for me. And even though I’m not here on WordPress much these days, you know where to find me.
<3
Arikia
