Is this something new? Buried in the redesign of the NYTimes’s Web site, I just spotted this: personal ads from the New York Times, powered by Yahoo. I guess it makes sense. Maybe Times readers aren’t likely to be as kinky as the bohos who scan the Voice — and with Net, why else would […]
Continue reading... April 14, 2006
Unusual candor from the MTA
When the MTA screws up the subways in lower Manhattan, downtown Brooklyn suffers, too — sometimes to the point where you just Can’t Get There From Here. East Side trains run on the West Side, West Side trains run on the East side, and mysterious trains like the J appear more or less randomly on […]
Continue reading... April 14, 2006
Why? Because We Like You.
About 100,000 Disney-branded portable DVD players are being recalled because their batteries have a tendency to explode — which somewhat detracts from the user experience.
Continue reading... April 13, 2006
Fun City II
Good to know that a little water hasn’t dampened New Orleans’s taste for bizarre politics. First comes my friend Jason Perlow running into Mayor Ray Nagin waiting tables. (Check out the rest of his excellent food blog, too. Then comes Kimberly Williamson Butler, the clerk of the criminal court and a N.O. resident since just […]
Continue reading... April 12, 2006
Boot Camp and Apple’s Strategy
There’s a programmer named John Gruber who’s got a Mac-related blog called Daring Fireball. He doesn’t blog often but his analysis when he gets around to it is always worth reading. He recently wrote at some length about Apple’s release of its Boot Camp software, which allows the newest Macs to boot Windows XP and […]
Continue reading... April 10, 2006
It’s True: We *Are* All Nuts
From today’s NYTimes: “Nearly 1 in 7 adults in New York City described their mental health as being frequently ‘not good,’ compared with 1 in 10 adults nationally.” The survey also shows, as Gawker pointed out, that the other 6 out of 7 New Yorkers lie to researchers….
Continue reading... April 4, 2006
Why the Net May Look Broken Today
If you discover that you can’t reach big chunks of the Internet today, it’s not your fault or your ISP’s. Network Solutions appears to be down. NetSol is the company that administers the .com piece of the net, and is far and away the largest domain name registrar on the Internet. For many years, it […]
Continue reading... April 4, 2006
The Opposite of Open Government
NYTimes piece this morning (by Michael Cooper) about how New York State spends millions of dollars on pork-barrel spending but doesn’t actually itemize it anywhere. (Free subscription required.) Turns out that the state budget includes one line — $200 million for "Community Projects Fund-007" — that the governor and legislative leaders can disburse without fear […]
Continue reading... April 4, 2006
The Slush Pile
In the Old Media model, writers would submit articles to a magazine, get them rejected, stick them in a drawer and move on. In the New Media model, the articles are still rejected, but now writers can whine about it publicly and post them online. Why the hell not? I mean, it’s not like the […]
Continue reading... March 27, 2006
Failing with a 20 percent margin
I love Molly Ivins, but I wouldn’t go to her for business advice. Still, her column today reminds anyone who’s interested of a very good point about the recent sale of Knight-Ridder newspapers: that far from being failing businesses, the papers had a 20 percent profit margin. Lots of business would kill for that kind […]
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