Obama After Dark: The Precious Hours Alone—The New York Times—Michael D. Shear: Great profile of Barack Obama and his nighttime work routine. Nice to be reminded that as children grow older, even the president can find more personal time to set aside for work.
The Elements of Stickers—A16Z Blog—Connie Chan: Many of these points have been made elsewhere in bits and pieces, but this is a great synthesis of both the business and the expressive possibilities of stickers in messaging.
Ulysses and the Lie of Technological Progress—The Atlantic—Ian Bogost: I remember seeing the Twitter bots that Bogost describes here and being enthralled by the idea. I don’t remember if I saw them in their first year; it was probably not until 2008. I may also not yet have been familiar with Bogost’s work at that time even though now he’s one of my favorite writers. Regardless, a nice juxtaposition of the technological flexibility and rigidity of print and digital publishing, respectively.
This collection was a great way to catch up with Williams’s working, collecting articles across roughly forty years of his career. There is, of course, a heavy focus on the Cook voyages, but of particular use for me were some essays on British reactions to the apocrypha around the Fonte and Maldonado voyages in connection with hypothesizing a Northwest Passage.
WorldCat » Amazon »This book was published in 2010, so many of the specifics of technical implementation (e.g., Yahoo! Pipes) are now out of date; however, quickly reading through its recipe-based format at a higher level still provides a great overview of the kinds of techniques available in web mapping APIs and what they might be used for. Provided some good focus for going into the Austin music mapping project…
WorldCat » Amazon »This is one of the best programming books I’ve read. So much material on JavaScript is motivated by providing quick snippets and recipes for augmenting web pages, but the bulk of Haverbeke’s book is a real exercise in programming theory that happens to be delivered in JavaScript.
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