Saturday, April 03, 2010

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

Subscribed to dwightshrude

Posted: 02 Apr 2010 03:52 PM PDT

I subscribed to dwightshrude's channel on YouTube.
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Sunday, March 07, 2010

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

OK Go - This Too Shall Pass - Rube Goldberg Machine version

Posted: 07 Mar 2010 03:10 AM PST

I favorited a YouTube video: From the new album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky" available at http://www.okgo.net/store Directed by James Frost, OK Go and Syyn Labs. Produced by Shirley Moyers. The official video for the recorded version of "This Too Shall Pass" off of the album "Of the Blue Colour of the Sky". The video was filmed in a two story warehouse, in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, CA. The "machine" was designed and built by the band, along with members of Syyn Labs ( http://syynlabs.com/ ) over the course of several months.
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Sunday, December 13, 2009

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

Little Dragon

Posted: 19 Nov 2009 12:02 AM PST

Gothenberg's Little Dragon make their highly anticipated return to Los Angeles to play songs from their new album on Morning Becomes Eclectic at 11:15am.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

Panettone artigianale con lievito naturale

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:51 PM PST

I favorited a YouTube video: Panettone artigianale con lievito naturale classico e al cioccolato
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Wednesday, September 23, 2009

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

AH NOM NOM: Pizza Hacker- Best Pizza Food Cart

Posted: 22 Sep 2009 01:08 PM PDT

I favorited a YouTube video: AH NOM NOM is a vlog that brings you best eats nationwide with a hip twist. We give you the food for the people by the people. Come check out food that would make you say "AH NOM NOM!" Enjoy! AH NOM NOM: Pizza Hacker - Best Pizza Food Cart in San Francisco http://www.yelp.com/biz/pizzahacker-san-francisco http:www.twitter.com/pizzahacker AHNOMNOM.com
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Saturday, February 14, 2009

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

Someone Take Away Thomas Friedman's Computer Before He Types Another Sentence

Posted: 22 Jan 2009 09:12 AM CST

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America's ability to fall for absolutely anything -- just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts -- along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-'stached resident of a positively obscene 11,400-square-foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man, who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated, get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy-inefficient automobiles?

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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

Gmail Labs' New Task Manager Can Add Email to Your To-Do List [Gmail]

Posted: 08 Dec 2008 07:05 PM CST

For years now, the gaping hole in Google's online suite of applications has been a to-do list manager, but not anymore: today Gmail Labs adds a lightweight Tasks module to your email account. The killer feature? You can add a Gmail message to your task list in one click or keystroke. To get started, enable Tasks in the Gmail Labs section of your Settings area, and a Tasks link will appear below your Contacts link. Click on that to make a Task list appear on the bottom right of your screen (like chat), and there you can create multiple lists and switch between them, indent items, mark them as complete, drag and drop to reorder items, and view or clear completed items. To turn an email into a task, from the More Actions drop-down, choose "Add to Tasks." There are also copious keyboard shortcuts.

The Googlers explain:

1. Manage your email workflow better by converting emails into tasks: "More Actions > Add to Tasks"

2. ENTER creates a new task, TAB and SHIFT-TAB indent and un-indent, CTRL-UP and CTRL-DOWN let you reorder from the keyboard, and SHIFT-ENTER toggles back and forth between the detailed view for a task and the main view

3. After turning Tasks on, turn on Keyboard shortcuts in "Settings > General" and then use "SHIFT-T" to create tasks from your emails - even faster than using the More Actions menu

You can also pop out the Tasks module into its own window, like you can with chat. If you select a particular item, click on the gray arrow pointing to the right to edit the task's details, add a note and/or a due date, or remove the related email message, as shown.

The new Tasks module is huge news for GTD'ers who love Gmail, and while it's an experimental feature that's pretty lightweight, at first blush Tasks is looking very nicely done. Is Labs' Tasks feature looking good enough to lure you away from your current online to-do manager? Let us know what you think in the comments.

New in Labs: Tasks [Official Gmail Blog]
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Wednesday, November 19, 2008

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

In the Reality Lounge

Posted: 19 Nov 2008 07:42 AM CST

     The G-20 came to Washington for the weekend and sucked all the air out of the city before announcing that they were really serious about patching all the leaks in the foundering ship of globalism. Well, they have to at least pretend that they are doing something. Meanwhile, the former bit player known as reality has taken center stage in the ship's main lounge. It is putting on an act even gnarlier than the Kit Kat Klub show in Cabaret.
     This reality show is sending some clear signals to the denizens of the real and really crowded world. The main signal is that the trade and financing rackets of recent decades are over. The extravaganza of economic hypergrowth based on cheap resources is over. The promiscuous swapping around of risk and rewards is over. There is no global institutional framework for managing the impairment left in the wake of this binge. It will be up to the individual nations now to figure out their national lives and livings.
     Alas, the financial impairment is still on-going world-wide and has quite a ways to run before it's finished working its hoodoo on the so-called advanced economies. The lame duck US economic posse so far has done everything possible except the two things that really matter: allow the fraudulent securities at the heart of the problem to be exposed to the light of day to determine their actual value; and allow those companies who trafficked in them to suffer the full consequences by going out-of-business. For the moment, they're content to shovel cash into the truck-bed of every enterprise in America that shows up at the Treasury loading dock. This can only have the effect of eventually destroying the value of that cash.
      President-elect Obama's cagey appearance on 60-Minutes showed that he's hardly in a position to say anything of substance about this country's predicament as long as the old posse holds the levers of the economic machinery -- and retains the ability to run it into the ground before January 20, 2009. So many tribulations are now underway in our Republic that it is hard to fathom what the head of the federal government might do besides act as a kind of psychological counselor-in-chief  to a land full of people in distress.
     The world has changed faster than anyone realizes. One big question is how long the American people will stumble around in a daze before we get back to work doing constructive things in this country -- and by that I mean activities scaled to the resource realities of the years just ahead. More specifically, I mean how we are going to grow the food we eat without massive quantities of diesel fuel and petroleum-based "inputs" and also how we are going to make any of the useful products we need in an energy scarcer time.
      Perhaps Mr. Obama knows that we're not going back to anything even close to the business-as-usual that shaped our lives for the generations born after 1945. I would advise him to begin thinking about this by dividing the problem into two parts. The first part is how his government might handle the sheer emotional fallout of a people whose standard-of-living will be pulled out from under them. For a while, perhaps the first year or so, the public is apt to be trusting and generous, especially regarding a president who has had some acquaintance with being short of cash himself, and who can speak English both clearly and empathetically. Mr. Obama stands a good chance at playing that role successfully, at least for a while.
      The second part, though, is the more difficult operational and administrative matter of promoting the necessary downscaling of all the essential activities of daily life. This is especially difficult given the current trend of the government suddenly taking ownership of everything, from the banking system perhaps to certain areas of heavy industry (if Detroit gets its way). The Obama government will have to resist the temptation to prevent enterprises from failing. These failing things have to get out of the way before new activities can get underway. It will also require government leaders to tell the public the hard truth that it can't do everything we would like it to do.
    The fiasco of medical care is certainly a product of connivance between greedy and heartless insurance companies, profit-driven hospitals, and avaricious drug-makers. But the public itself is responsible for its own suicidal diet of double cheez burritos and Dr. Pepper. How about a national health-care system with one basic requirement: to qualify, participants must be within ten pounds of their appropriate weight. Pretty harsh, huh? Maybe. But times are harsh too, and bound to get harsher. This system would have the great advantage of being absolutely clear. Let the United Way and other charities devote their resources to educating the recklessly obese about diet and exercise so they can eventually qualify.
     The transportation quandary suggests that we have to move away from the private automobile and commercial trucking, and that the airline industry is certain to contract dramatically. When are we going to start the discussion about rebuilding a US public transit system that was once the envy of the world? It no longer matters how much Americans love their cars, or even how much investment we've made in car infrastructure. At some point, we just have to face the fact that democratic mass motoring is no longer on the program. Nor is a commercial economy based on incessant motoring. One other implication of this is the necessity to use our waterways for moving things and people again. Has anybody noticed, for instance, that the once-bustling New York City Harbor, possibly the biggest and best sheltered deepwater harbor in the world, has next-to-zero operating docks left along its massive perimeter? While you're at it, have a look at the waterfronts of Louisville, Cincinnati, Kansas City and a score of other inland port cities on great navigable rivers. What you'll see are condo sites, festival marketplaces, picnic grounds, and plain old empty lots -- everything but the infrastructure for commerce. We can't afford this anymore. We have to put these places back to work.
     The G-20 leaders in Washington last week made a lot of noise about ramping up domestic spending. In the decades to come, this will not happen without import replacement -- which is just what it sounds like: instead of importing things you need, you make them at home, and people get paid a living wage to do it. Import replacement, by the way, is exactly how the United States rose in the 19th century to become the world's preeminent manufacturing nation. It doesn't foreclose trade with other countries, but it self-evidently changes the terms of that trade, and it would spell the end of the kind of predatory "globalism" that has led to the current state of gross imbalance and reckless destruction.
      I believe this will happen whether we like it or not, because these things occur in cycles and the current cycle is obviously ending with a thundering crash of economies, modes of operation, habits and practices, and expectations. For better or worse, we have to move on to new ways of doing things.
      I regard the most dangerous fantasy in America right now to be the wish that we can keep running things just the way they are now (my recurring synecdoche of WalMart, Walt Disney World, and the interstate highway system) by replacing oil and gas with "alternative fuels." This just ain't gonna happen. We're going to use every kind of alt.energy there is and they will still require us to live very differently than we did the past sixty years. The public just doesn't get this. I don't know whether President-elect Obama gets this. I hope he does, and I hope part of his new mission will be to clarify this state of affairs for the public in clear and effective speech. It's going to tick off a lot of them, but it's the theme music playing in the reality lounge right now, and Mr. Obama would be advised to take up the tune.
____________________________________
My new novel of the post-oil future, World Made By Hand, is available at all booksellers.
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Wednesday, November 05, 2008

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

Juan Enriquez on the Debt Crisis and the Future

Posted: 30 Oct 2008 02:09 PM CDT

Great presentation by Juan Enriquez at Pop!Tech on the current financial crisis, its causes, and the solutions, such as they are.


Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now

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Thursday, October 30, 2008

krup's shared items in Google Reader

krup's shared items in Google Reader

Easthampton Burning?

Posted: 30 Oct 2008 04:31 AM CDT

     In the typhoon of commentary that's blown around the world a step behind the financial tsunami that's wrecking everything, two little words have been curiously absent: "fraud" and "swindle." But aren't they really at the core of what has happened? Wall Street took the whole world "for a ride" and now a handful of Wall Street's erstwhile princelings have shifted ceremoniously into US Government service to "fix" the problem with a "toolbox" containing a notional two trillion dollars. This strange exercise in financial kabuki theater will shut down sometime between the election and inauguration day, when the inaugurate finds himself president of the Economic Smoking Wreckage of the United States. What will happen?
      I have thought for some time that things could get dangerously out of hand in America, despite our exceptionalist notion that we are immune to the common plot-lines of history. For starters, inauguration night will seem more like Halloween, as those two little words fly in to haunt the new president. So, a large and looming question is: who will be appointed the next attorney general of the US (to replace the human sash-weight currently occupying the office), and how soon will the federal marshals be scouring the wainscoted hallways of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, not to mention a thousand Greenwich, Connecticut, hedge fund boiler rooms, with man-sized nets?
     A story-line is already emerging to the effect that these birds really didn't quite know what they were doing in grinding out that multi-trillion dollar basket of alphabet securities sausage (a theme on Sunday's "60-Minutes" broadcast). Nobody will buy that line of bullshit, though -- and certainly not in the courtroom where, for instance, Mr. Hank Paulson will have to answer why his own firm of Goldman Sachs set up a special unit to short its own issues. It will be edifying to see how they answer.
     In the meantime, however, millions of Joe-the-Plumber types will have gotten their pink slips, slipped helplessly into foreclosure, watched the repo men hot-wire their Ford pickups, and eaten down the kitchen cupboard to a single box of Kellogg's All-Bran (which had been sitting there for eleven years infested with weevils). They will be watching the official proceedings in the federal courtrooms with jaundiced eyes as they hunch in their tent cities, in the rain, sipping amateur-brand raisin wine bartered for a few snared rock doves. How long before the hardier ones among them venture out to Easthampton with long knives and matches?
    It will bring little satisfaction though, and the disappointment could lead to a more inchoate outbreak of civil disorder that would be more like a free-for-all of vengeance and grievance. There will be a great outcry for the new government to "do something!" Perhaps that will finally bring the troops home from Iraq -- only for them to find that the Homeland has become Iraq....
     If the financial system completes its self-destruction -- and that's looking more and more like a real possibility -- there will be several pretty awful consequences. One is that the United States will be forced to declare bankruptcy by repudiating its own debt. All those who took refuge in US Treasury bonds and bills will be like folks who sought shelter from a tornado in their out-house. That would go hand-in-hand with a massive currency inflation that is likely to follow the current phase of compressive liquidating deflation -- in which every possible asset is being sold off for less than its face value. That process is self-limiting due to the finite supply of real salable assets. The trillions of dollars injected into system while this is happening must eventually snap-back as people shed the last fungible article and compete for necessary commodities like food and fuel with dollars that are suddenly plentiful but worthless. At some point, the government may have to summon up a new currency. I don't think it will be anything like the "Amero" which the paranoid fringe incessantly mutters about as part of their fantasy in which the US, Mexico, and Canada all join up to become one country. But any "new dollar" would probably have to be backed by gold.
     As we discover ourselves to be a much poorer nation, one of my correspondents put it: "the bogus risk-swapping economy must be replaced by a net value-added economy." That means actually making things, growing things, and rebuilding things, and that can only begin to happen if we do not stupidly sucker ourselves into a war with other nations who are liable to be extremely ticked off at us for destroying the global economy, but also competing with us for a dwindling supply of resources that are not equitably distributed around the world.
      This means especially oil. I hope you're enjoying the temporarily cheap prices at the gas pumps, because this is purely a function of the compressive deleveraging that is going on right now, as contracts and positions held in energy markets are being dumped by everybody and his uncle to raise cash to meet margin calls. My guess is that oil and its byproducts will become much more difficult to get in the months ahead -- not just more expensive, but literally not available. The current falling price of oil has little to do with the real supply and demand fundamentals. It's simply a function of the markets being in near-total disarray. We're running on current inventory, and running it down. In the background, all kinds of peculiar and terrible things are happening. The entire apparatus of allocation and distribution is being thrown out of whack. The smaller tanker operations are going bankrupt. The "less-developed" nations are heading back to the 17th-century level of daily life without electricity. The oil exploration and development projects that were planned for hard-to-get oil netting $100-a-barrel minimum -- in places like the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, Siberia, and Central Asia -- are being shelved, which means the world has less of a chance to offset coming depletions in old fields.
      The bottom line of all this is that we in the US could find ourselves in a situation of shortages, hoarding, and rationing. This would pretty much kill off whatever remains of the previous shuck-and-jive economy -- hamburger sales, theme park visits, Nascar weekends -- while it makes obvious the failures of our suburban living arrangements (and drives the value of housing there closer to zero).
     The new president will have to be Franklin Roosevelt on steroids, with some Mahatma Gandhi and Florence Nightingale thrown in. My pet project of restoring the American passenger railroad system might seem pretty minor in the face of all this, but it's at least a place to start that will accomplish several things: allow people and things to get places without cars and trucks; put many thousands of people to work at many levels doing something of direct, practical value; and be a small step in rebuilding confidence that we are a society capable of accomplishing something.
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