Recommendations

A week ago I learned two friends are coming from the US this July 21: that means empty cases. Two happy days later and hundreds of dollars less: 38 books on shipping parcels from Amazon. Book shopping is a pleasure in and of itself (I’m rarely this happy!), and hereforward’s my list (which is quite an intimate thing to share—it’s the perfect psychological text, if you know how to read it).

I was only able (or rather, willing) to do the cool, long screen captures on my previous post because of Easy Screen Capture And Annotation—a nice and full-featured software that allows you to capture the entire content of a scrollable window, among many other things.

It’s shareware ($30), but you can use it for free without any limitation other than a welcome-nag and a red-watermark when saving your image (which can of course be easily bypassed by copy-pasting your capture to another graphic-editing program). Very useful if you ever need to do serious scren-capturing.

Oh please, please—I’m begging you here—go do yourself a favor and buy Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture this very moment. Please. Please.

I’ve been rereading my hilites from it, searching for an elusive quote and I’m just shocked again at how good this book is. I have no doubt whatsoever this will be a canon book from the late twentieth century. Don’t be fooled by the 3.5 stars in Amazon, it’s simply a 1997 book that’s still ahead of its time.

Johnson is lucid to (and over) the brink of genius when he talks about interface, technology, media, computers, the web, blogs (which he predicts 10 years ago), hypertext, novels, software, online communities, artificial intelligence, culture, design, agents, TV, life, the universe, and everything.

Being his first book, written in his late twenties, it is full of youthful passion, exhuberance, and raw virtuosity—but, get this, he is right.

Except for its nasty tendency to crash unexpectedly (great strides have been made, but it still does it once in a while), Azureus is pretty much the BitTorrent Client. My favorite thing about it (and this seems to be a pattern of open source projects) is its extensibility. There’s everything from a Flag plugin (to get a kick out of how international piracy is!) to a Web (HTML+JS+CSS) UI to the program.

But my favorite plugin is far and away 3D View—a dense, beautiful 3d representation of the torrent process (really, just the standard swarm graph writ 3d). Like the 12/60 clock, it comes with no instructions but it doesn’t need them. If you’ve read anything about how torrents work (and you should!), everything will fall into place after some staring. Its pure infosight—real-time infoporn of the best kind¹.

¹ Which reminds me: I heard somewhere today that “there is no such thing as bad porn, there’s only better porn.”

As I said, today I’m happy and since my father isn’t coming to dinner (he has some appointment) and I’m home alone, I’m off to give myself a treat. I’ll go buy the previous-week Economist, which looks to be quite something (Inequality and The American Dream is the cover article, and the edition’s suvey is on logistics—need I say more?) and read it under a tree somewhere after eating Hindu rice at this very nice restaurant on Lopez Cotilla.

Next day update: Dinner was great, not so much for the rice (Biryani Hyderabad), which was a bit too spicy for my taste, but because I got to some interesting talking with the restauratrice, who gave me some very useful advice on my Honda: I could get almost free service checkups at Centro Magno’s agency, and they actually give free tours of the Honda plant here in Guadalajra (where they supposedly build a car in under two hours). I’m baffled at the incredible amount of local knowledge available if one will only listen.

They didn’t have the previous-week Economist at Galerias’ Sanborns so I had to settle with the previous-previous-week one, to which I gladly agreed once I realized it contained the 26-page technology quarterly. I gobbled up some it at the restaurant and then the rest up until late at night at Minerva’s Starbucks (it was too rainy outside for a tree and anyway, outdoors are heavily overrated). It was a wonderful edition—I was laughing so hard at times I got quite a few surprised looks. It felt like talking with a very witty, very sharp ole friend. And I found out two important things: I’d much rather read the day away than go watch a movie (and they cost about the same) and The Economist is far and away my favorite magazine.

The famous polyfacetic wit and good friend of mind, Adolfo, has finally decided to keep the letters flowing in an unsurprisingly-Seinfield-inspired Spanish blog: The Timeless Art of Seduction.

Good news indeed.

Si te gustan los refranes la mitad de lo que a mi me gustan no te pierdas la version en linea del Refranero Mexicano de Herón Pérez Martínez. Es una joya. (La version impresa tambien es muy buena y la consigues a unos 130 pesos en la Jose Luisa o directamente en fce.com.mx.)

I just finished re-installing Google Desktop for the fifth time (I always find it annoying after a while) and was surprised with this new gadgets thing. It may not be terribly useful, granted, but cool it is (specially with the Shift hotkey). Right now I have a virtual flower, a calculator, and a clock, 12/60, that just might be the coolest time interface ever. It needs no explanation, just install it and stare at it—the epiphany will hit you in bare seconds.

Oh, this is in fact so pretty that it has got me excited once more with my color clock of yore. Maybe I’ll port it to Javascript this week, you know, just as some Javascript back-to-shape calisthenics.

This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.

He is my namesake and in many other ways my electronic soulmate but nothing that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written has left a deeper impression in me than his goodbye to his death brother I read this morning.

We shall, indeed, have to work faster (and smarter).