The shame of it is that it is flanked by an absolutely awesome video from the same fellow, Jesse Rosten: iPad shopping could look like this. I’d have to buy stock in J. Crew and BCBG if my wife could get this. (Of course, it would be worth it: just look at her.)

Mekki and a friend ran with an idea I tweeted last October: “Who’s got a web-based service that will take a huge pastebomb (300K of text) and smarten all quotes, turn — into em-dash, etc?” They created something called Cleantext. I just pasted in the entire text of my next short story collection (written as plain ASCII in a text editor) and out came something that was beautifully formatted and ready to be pasted into a layout program for further massaging. I’m delighted by this — how useful!

I’m really excited by this: it shows that there are people who can execute on an idea and create something. I’m also very encouraged that Cory doesn’t seem interested in getting his “piece of the action.” Of course, given his writing and his recent approach to publishing his books as free ebooks, that’s about what you’d expect.

Congratulations to Cleantext and a hearty well-done to Cory for providing inspiration without no strings attached. Even better, he just gave this site scads of good great word of mouth.

Maybe I’ll finally break out my comp (fka Senior Comprehensive Project) or my not-quite-finished note from law school and give this a try.

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I started the orphan ideas category of posts because I wanted to accomplish three goals: first, get these ideas out of my mental baggage list, second, maybe give someone else a little spark, and third, maybe, just maybe, see something get built or done.

Turns out it definitely is. We would go to the Aquarium in Monterey with visitors and stop there for a great lunch/early dinner on the way home, or after a day of kayaking on Elkhorn Slough. (Yes, that was pre-children!)

No spoiler’s here. You can see excerpts on the Phil’s website.

This is brilliant insight. Just brilliant. If there’s a post like this in every 20 or 50, this blog is worth reading.

The deep message here is about core competencies (I just saw a reference to an article about companies outsourcing their core competency — have to find it and will update this post later) and how companies can, should, and ultimately will have to rethink how they do business so that they are competing where their competitors are weak and partnering with strong partners to eliminate/avoid/counteract their own competitive weaknesses.

I really liked these très cool pictures, photoshop montages of NYC streetcorner photos. Not time lapse but time-space compression photography. It’s a technique I’ve never seen before, and it brings the street photo into a whole new world. I could imagine different photos using the same technique as public service announcements, showing the homeless, abuse victims, animals, and the disabled or elderly. These people are all in our lives, in the City. I think the photographer/artist is really like an editor, carving away the unnecessary and the everyday to focus on the compelling interest for the photo at hand.

Via VSL.