Ryan Tate

Apparently, all visitors to Wired.com made it into the...

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 21:34:00 -0700

Apparently, all visitors to Wired.com made it into the Web’s will. I feel bad, I didn’t even make it to the wake. [via Dave Winer; claim your inheritance]

Steal this Twitter feature, already

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:46:00 -0700

An underappreciated reason for Twitter’s success is that the service made it so easy to subscribe to things. Uniform button. One click and you’re done. Remember how hard it was before Twitter, with RSS readers? Find feeds, pick feed, view feed, send feed to reader, import feed, pick a folder — click click clickity click KILL ME ALREADY I GIVE UP.

But Twitter is kind of lame — centralized, regulated, opaque and brittle. Frustrated users like Dave Winer say it should be supplanted by an open and decentralized system that can’t Fail Whale or be pimped out for one company’s benefit. That’s true, and probably inevitable. But not until we get a “Follow” button that can work on any website and that skips choices only power users care about (feed readers, RSS vs Atom, summary vs full length feed, etc).

Easy following is not a “should” for supplanting Twitter but a must. As Joel Spolsky once wrote, large user bases are built by ruthlessly improving usability:

Whenever you “lower the bar” by even a small amount, making your program, say, 10% easier to use, you dramatically increase the number of people who can use it, say, by 50%.”

More usable products, in other words, are more used. For evidence of this look to Tumblr. Like Twitter, Tumblr has a built-in feed reader and one-click following. This made Tumblr’s bloggers quite active; even without a 140-character limit, the company adds five times as many posts as rival WordPress each day, with 1/15th as many users. The feature is so powerful Google’s Blogger eventually copied it.

It’s going to be tricky, but there’s got to be an open way to enable one-click subscriptions outside and across the Twitter, Tumblr and Blogger sandboxes. There’s been a big emphasis on the technical aspects of supplanting Twitter, but these user interface details are every bit as important.

Why writing is more draining than programming

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 18:43:00 -0700

I’ve been on hiatus from my programming sideline and giving all spare time to my long-form writing sideline. Tonight I was wondering why editing lots of writing (say an essay or book chapter) is so much more emotionally draining for me than editing lots of code.

It’s because editing prose involves so much time judging your work, I decided.

In programming, you typically judge your work in a fraction of a second. Your code compiles or it doesn’t. Your Web app feature works or it fails. Sure, you’ll spend long frustrating stretches debugging the code. But even then your head stays in a creative place. You literally have to hunt for flaws in your work, and so the act of debugging becomes a process basically identical to that of programming - imagine a solution to the problem, write/edit some code to test your theory, run the code, observe results. It’s just more creation.

In writing prose, you judge your work by reading it. This takes minutes or hours for a longer work rather than milliseconds. Minutes or hours of finding flaws, many entirely subjective, in your own writing. The deleterious effect on your mood is predictable, if sometimes subtle.

Added to the pain of prolonged self criticism is the pain of mental state change. First your brain moves from a creative mode to a critical mode in order to proofread. Then to fix the problems unearthed in the judgy readthrough you must move back into a creative mode and rewrite certain passages, move others, and write transitions to glue everything back together. Then do it all again to find the new errors you’ve introduced, and the problems you didn’t notice the first time through. Rinse, repeat.

This repeated switch in mental modes is inefficient and unpleasant, which is why many writers prefer pounding out a first draft without doing any self editing, and even without using notes. Of course they eventually have to surrender to the editing process, and to the ping-pong of mental state changes. This draining back and forth is largely absent from the process of programming, save for those rare hero coders who carefully re-read and refactor their working software so it can be more easily understood and modified by other people. But that’s an optional and very occasional process — not, as with writing, one integral to the process of creation itself.

The only consolation is that the writer will never, like the programmer, spend days or weeks trying to fix a single mysterious bug. Unlike, say, C, the English language is mushy enough that some things can, in the end, be fudged.

…and that’s when I clicked “Force Quit.”...

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:42:51 -0700

…and that’s when I clicked “Force Quit.” Which is probably just another way to “consent” to penetration testing from cyber Guantanamo.

A cóctel for the Cup

Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:33:00 -0700

So for my birthday my wife gave me, among other delightful things, Kingsley Amis’ Everyday Drinking, a fitting addition to the other titles on my cocktail bookshelf, Absinthe’s Art of the Bar and Eric Felten’s How’s Your Drink? (HI ERIC!!).

Anyway, tonight I was plowing through the second chapter, “Actual Drinks,” and, amid many weird cocktails built around fortified wines from the Iberian peninsula, there was an intriguing entry distilled from Amis’ time down South America way. The drink, “La Tequila con Sangrita,” is sort of like a Mexican Bloody Mary, but with the booze served separate from the tomato stuff.

With some tweaks — Amis’ version serves three and is built, inexplicably, using Tobasco sauce and Cayenne pepper — the two-fisted drink was something Anne and I agreed, emphatically, we can get behind. What’s more, I think it would be ideal for the Mexico-Argentina World Cup match next Sunday, 11:30 am/2:30 pm depending what part of the U.S. you’re in. Here’s my adaptation of Amis’ recipe:

1.5oz tequila, neat, unchilled, in its own glass. A good blanco works fine, provided it’s 100 percent blue agave. I don’t suppose a more expensive reposado or anejo tequila would muss things up, but the pricey stuff is certainly not necessary. Just avoid Cuervo and other mixto tequilas.
1.5 oz tomato juice. I used a fresh roma tomato and pressed it through a mesh strainer; juicing one with clean hands would be fine too, provided you’re OK with pulp and seeds, and I don’t imagine canned juice would be so terrible. Tomatoes can well!
Generous 1/2 oz fresh lime juice. Or, if you can’t be bothered to measure, half a large lime or a full smaller one
1/2 teaspoon (or more, say four dashes) Tapatio, Cholula, or other Mexican hot sauce. Or Tabasco if you’re hard up - if it’s good enough for Amis, you’ll probably be fine.
Two pinches salt.

Amis on how to serve:

The tomato concoction and the tequila do not meet until they arrive to start a joint operation in your stomach. Each partaker gets a small glass of neat, unchilled tequila and a twin glass of the stirred, also unchilled red stuff, and sips in alteration…

You will find it a splendid pick-me-up, and throw-me-down, and jump-on-me.

Sounds about right. Sangrita means “little blood,” which is what I hope our southern neighbors inflict on those Falkland-grubbing Argentine bastardos. (I guess. I’ve actually not been following the Cup. But… Salud!)

My Steve Jobs argument, for those coming from CNN.com

Mon, 17 May 2010 10:22:07 -0700

My Steve Jobs argument, for those coming from CNN.com

Clearly, it’s time I took a long, hard look at my life, at...

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 14:33:34 -0700

Clearly, it’s time I took a long, hard look at my life, at my values, and at the choices I’ve made.

Oh, so we're too good to be 'gossips' now?

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:55:00 -0700

fek:

I wouldn’t categorize them as “gossip bloggers.” I don’t think they’d categorize themselves like that.

Rovzar:

By putting the “gossip” label on them… the paper is revealing how it actually feels about these blogs: that they’re actually just fluff.

Fischer

He uses the phrase “gossip blog” over and over, as if to hypnotize the reader.

Ya seriously where did the New York Times get the idea that people from the likes of Gawker, Dealbreaker, Curbed, Crushable and MediaTakeOut are “gossip bloggers?” One can ONLY GUESS:

(Via: Gawker homepage, Dealbreaker homepage, Curbed about page, Crushable about page, MediaTakeOut homepage, and Goooooogle search of Mediaite.)

Apparently, at his last job, Google’s CEO was dubbed...

Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:58:00 -0700

Apparently, at his last job, Google’s CEO was dubbed a flim-flam artist by a snarky web publishing outfit that employed Owen Thomas and Ana Marie Cox. Imagine that. (“Flim-flammy” Schmidt quote from this InfoWorld article.)

"HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our age… We have a..."

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:16:00 -0800

“

HTML is not just one output format among many; it is the format of our age…

We have a worldwide communications and distribution network where you can publish anything you want and — if you can manage to get anybody’s attention — get near-instant feedback. Writers just 20 years ago would have killed for that kind of feedback loop. Killed!

”

- Some of Mark Pilgrim’s insights into the future of book publishing, as woven into this article about his workstation setup. (Related.)

"Tate, a San Diego resident, also brings an acting background to the job, which is evident in her..."

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 10:05:00 -0800

“Tate, a San Diego resident, also brings an acting background to the job, which is evident in her expressions, emotions and imitations. She is a pleasure to watch… high energy, constant movement and good material tie her act together.”

- From the Los Angeles Times’ rave 1990 review of my mom’s stand-up comedy act (page 1, page 2). Yay mom!

C as a death monster (and Ruby as a companion demon)

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:52:00 -0800

Fran Allen: I kind of stopped when C came out. We were making so much good progress on optimizations and transformations. We were getting rid of just one problem after another...

Peter Seibel: Do you think C is a reasonable language if they had restricted its use to operating-system kernels?

Fran Allen: Oh, yeah. That would have been fine. In fact, you need to have something like that, something where experts can really fine-tune without big bottlenecks because those are they key problems to solve...

Fran Allen: By 1960, we had a long list of amazing languages: Lisp, APL, Fortran, COBOL, Algol 60. These are higher-level than C. We have seriously regressed, since C developed. C has destroyed our ability to advance the state of the art in automatic optimization, automatic parallelization, automatic mapping of a high-level language to the machine. This is one of the reasons compilers are... basically not taught much anymore in the colleges and universities...

Peter Seibel: Surely there are still courses on building a compiler?

Fran Allen: Not in lots of schools. It's shocking, there are still conferences going on, and people doing good algorithms, good work, but the payoff for that is, in my opinion, quite minimal. Because languages like C totally overspecify the solution of problems. Those kinds of languages are what is destroying computer science as a study.

Peter Seibel: But most newer languages these days are higher-level than C. Things like Java and C# and Python and Ruby.

Fran Allen: But they still overspecify. The core thing is that is specifies the location of data. If you look at these other languages, they stayed away from specifying the location of data and how to move it, where to put it in the machine. It was ultimately about its value at any point.

Peter Seibel: But very few languages other than C and C++ have raw pointers anymore. Java has garbage collection and the data moves around. Would you say that's overspecified?

Fran Allen: Yes. I believe there's an opportunity to do what we have done with computation in the optimization world with data. We don't manage data very well. We don't have good ways of managing data automatically -- establishing locality of data that's going to be used together.

Fran Allen: There are lots of threads of research now which are very exciting. But I think what's missing is the bigger, bolder concepts.... We need to start trying to break the boundaries of, "This'll be done here and that''ll be done there."

From the excellent Coders at Work: http://www.codersatwork.com/

More on Fran Allen: http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html

Angel, c. 1995-2009

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:29:00 -0700

We lost our fussy, demanding, jealous, absurdly cute and frighteningly affectionate cat Angel on Thursday. A dog killed her before my eyes. She was about 14 years old, and irreplacable.

Of our three indoor cats, Angel was the first to be adopted, and by all indications considered our other two felines to be usurpers. She’d hiss at them merely for walking by.

Her hostility was no surprise: Adopted as a decidedly solo pet, Angel had found herself with feline housemates within 24 hours of arriving at her new home. At the rescue shelter, she’d been so hostile to other cats she had to be sequestered to her own cage. At home, she almost immediately had to contend with Taro, whom Anne had found sick and abandoned under a freeway overpass. A few days later came the third cat, pregnant and meowing on Anne’s doorstep.

Angel hated these other animals but loved humans. My first meeting with her was typical: A fluffy cat with gigantic eyes stared at me from on top of Anne’s desk. One pat lead to another and soon she was on my lap — piecing my leg with her long, razor sharp claws, and purring. I learned the next day that her punctures had ruined my slacks and with them an entire suit. Angel lesson number one: Always have a blanket ready.

When I moved in with my now wife, Angel was part of the bargain. It was a win-win for me and the cat: Angel got extra attention that Anne, with two others to worry over, didn’t have time to provide. I got reassurance I was a welcome addition to the household.

Angel wasn’t shy about letting me know when I wasn’t living up to my end of the deal. When I became Gawker’s night editor, I made sure to give Angel a shout out online, but she wasn’t interested in fame. When my shift stretched on too long, she’d come to the door of my office and start meowing. She wanted attention, and I’m ashamed to say I wasn’t always friendly about responding to her entreaties. But I did sometimes foist her up on to my big glass desk (she loved new materials — see her sitting on the book above), or onto a blanket on my lap (claw protection!), as seen in the picture up top. And when I woke up the next afternoon she usually got some quality couch time.

I’m trying not to dwell on how she passed. She lived a good long life; we don’t know when she was born, but last year a vet estimated she was fully 11 to 15 years old. She was happy. Between the two of us, she got plenty of attention. And she had a yard and (at her insistence) neighborhood to roam, from which to pluck the occasional mouse, including two this past season.

On Thursday morning I was blogging for Gawker in my living room. I heard a series of noises common to our neighborhood: A dog barking, the rummaging of recycling bins, more barking. But my cats were suddenly alert, so I went outside. I soon spotted a gray, short-haired dog thrashing about across the street — with something brown and fluffy underneath. It was a vicious-sounding, decent-sized animal, and I started screaming the worst threats I could imagine, as though it mattered what I said. The dog, suddenly docile, gave me an almost friendly look and immediately ran off. I remember it was wearing a collar and clearly loose from its owner.

I was crestfallen to find, at the end of our neighbor’s driveway, Angel, immobile, her fur muddled and reeking of dog spit. I picked her up, frantic. As I remember it, Angel looked at me and made some faint vocal noises, not quite meows, as I rushed her home. I grabbed my keys, and sped off to the animal hospital. Despite immediate attention,she was dead on arrival. Snapped neck, internal bleeding, or both. I somehow had no clue she might be gone until the vet told me. I blame those big eyes, open right through to the end, for artificially inflating my spirits.

After driving to my wife’s office to deliver the news, I asked to be allowed to finish out my workday, and kept coffee meetings San Francisco.

Thursday night we buried Angel in the yard beside our house. We laid her down with lavender stalks and the sort of thing she always enjoyed sleeping on: fresh laundry, in the form of a newly-cleaned t-shirt. Tidying the kitchen this weekend, Anne retired Angel’s food bowl.

Teary apologies won’t do Angel or I much good, nor is there much point in obsessing about how I might have reacted more quickly to an incident that played out, start to finish, over about 20 seconds. So I hope I’m done doing both.

Angel will be everywhere Anne and I turn for a good long while, in clumps of fur on jackets and shirts, in small holes in various pairs of leather shoes, and in the punchline of jokes about the most demanding lady of the house. And, inevitably, she’ll be in my further regrets. Not because I failed to save her life, though that may well haunt me, but because I wish I had enjoyed Angel even more when she was still here. I had four wonderful years with her. And to think there was a time when I didn’t want cats. Thank you for all the distractions, Angel. Sometimes a guy needs to be knocked off course.

Here’s why sans serif fonts tend to suck for body copy:...

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 08:04:00 -0700

Here’s why sans serif fonts tend to suck for body copy: The name written above looks like “Chris Aheam.” Which is what I originally called him on Gawker. Turns out it’s Chris Ahearn, A-h-e-a-r-n. Sorry, Chris. Maybe have your Web designers specify a different byline font.

Japan trip pictures (Dec. 2003)

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 19:33:00 -0700

We’ve been dying to return to Japan; looking through old pictures I realized these weren’t on Flickr yet, so here, EAGER READER: pictures of my trip to Japan with Anne nearly six years ago.

Noteworthy things about Japan I remembered from these pictures:

In Kyoto, consider indulging the local passion for “WHITE LOVER.”
Better cheese in the subway convenience stores than you will find in the best U.S. specialty shops, due both to our national paranoia (no luscious young “au lait cru” cheese for us — unpasteurized fromage cannot be imported to the U.S. fresh) and Japan’s general awesomeness when it comes to food quality (great food — French, Japanese, Korean and otherwise — all over the place, maybe due to density). (More cheese pics here, here, here)
A long wine tradition! Here’s an article Anne wrote at the time for Joi Ito’s Chanpon. A winery outside Tokyo was kind enough to tour us and provide an executive we could quiz after. They also had a museum; here’s a shot of some old Japanese bottles, some prized French wines they were saving and, of course, the shop.
I miss Anne’s aunt and uncle and cousins — and aunt’s cooking — terribly.
Really consider Miyajima if you go to Japan; it was a major highlight of our trip. Features several awesome monkey signs!
Also underrated: Hiroshima.
Even more underrated: Squiriting mayonaisse on Japanese food like this in a bar. (Okonomiyaki)
If you show up at the Japanese Foreign Press Club without a connection, they will politely find a kindly journalist (perhaps Bangladeshi) to vouch for you. You just have to convince him you’re legit!

I heard rumors of a Gawker Media San Francisco office, so...

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:32:04 -0700

I heard rumors of a Gawker Media San Francisco office, so I’ve started looking for appropriate signage.

Would Carla Bruni’s music be even more appealing if I knew...

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 22:26:49 -0700

Would Carla Bruni’s music be even more appealing if I knew what she was saying? I doubt it.

"Fearing competition from radio, newspaper editors in April 1933 had coerced the Associated Press..."

Sat, 09 May 2009 11:25:00 -0700

“Fearing competition from radio, newspaper editors in April 1933 had coerced the Associated Press into witholding its news service from the networks. “If radio companies want news,” declaimed Hearst, “let them get their own news.”“”

- Neal Gabler in Winchell: gossip, power and the culture of celebrity, illustrating how AP has been waging a war against the future for more than 75 years now.

My last night shift is over.

Fri, 08 May 2009 05:55:15 -0700

I’ll miss the drunken email tips, clipping the late shows, election nights, White House news conferences, writing three-hour posts, being a generalist, having no immediate editor, gossip roundups, IM chats with Blakeley and once and present Valleywags and waking up to a day’s worth of feedback in my inbox. Among other things. But maybe what I’ll miss the most is the taste of my first post-shift drink at 4 or 5 in the morning. Especially on Thursdays.

OK you know what, Netflix? You think you got me figured out, but...

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:36:07 -0700

OK you know what, Netflix? You think you got me figured out, but don’t ASSUME you do, or whatever. I could be the type of person who HATES Dark Foreign Movies Featuring a Strong Female lead and whatnot. (That said if I could specify specific actresses that would be great kthxbai)