what you think and what you know

We really like the Edge Foundation. They and the GBN (Global Business Network). Almost anyone who is affiliated with these two amazing orgs, and there is frequent cross-over which is no surprise, I will enjoy reading or listening to.

Every year, the Edge Foundation asks 1 big question of its members. They are usually big, open-ended questions to get you thinking. This year, it’s “What is your dangerous idea.” Go ahead and click them down the side. Andy Clark, as usual, pulls in one of our favorites (and it’s remarkably akin to Malcom Galdwell’s recent research in blink. While you might think Clark is cribbing, keep in mind he’s been doing this work for years).

And while we have GBN on the mind, let’s check in with one of our favorite features on the web, the GBN Book Club. The freebie web version is always a few months behind the paid-member one, but we are totally cool with that. Nov 2005 is about Terror. GBN has thrown up a number of books in the past couple years about Terror and trying to understand it. Mostly, they talk about how Terror organizations work, cells of chaos, disruptions, communications networks. All interesting stuff. But what we want to know about Terror is that (and we will put this as politic as possible) given that most Terror organizations in the world are backed by a radical Muslim ideology, A) what is the ultimate end-goal of this form of Terror, B) why does it cling to Islam, and C) why does Islam (radical or not) prop up such a view? While we continue to gain insight into how people communicate to perform Terror acts, we know little as to the how or why.

For instance, we saw last night on the news a story about the Iranian president speaking out against the Holocaust again. A “childhood friend” was interviewed who said he “didn’t really believe that”, but what the hell do they think happened? The president’s podium was decorated with a sign which read, “A world without Zionism.” We can understand an Arab hatred of Jewish-occupied Israel; we get it. It’s about land, okay. But there is a deeper hatred there, which lies seething. The news story concluded with the Iranian president talking about moving forward with a nuclear weapons plan. And then we remembered a Jerusalem Post article we saw yesterday that the US might be planning an attack on Iran.

On another note, one of the perils of turning a new year is the inevitable lists and comparrisons with previous years (although ESPN’s year-end fawning over USC being the “best team ever” sure didn’t mean much last night–what happens to “SC wins” shirts?). Most of these lists we dread. Although the BBC’s list of 100 things we didn’t know last year, with facts like “A single ‘mother’ spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today,” is fun. And first cousin to the lists are the year in pictures. Here’s 2005 by MSNBC and Time magazine.

BigSleep666 recently told us about Learning to Love you More, a series of artistic “assignments”. We tend to enjoy these sorts of generative experiments. Chalk it up to early OuLiPo influence in our formative years.

our favorite gmail hacks

Hello, true believers. Today we post 2 gmail hacks (greasemonkey scripts, really) that we have been testing at Taco Labs, Inc. As you know, we aim to test everything we can before recommending (or not) a product to you.

Gmail has been our favorite email client for a while. Let’s face it, their come on with a free gig of space a year and a half back was irresistable. Anyway, there are, of course, some minor flaws with it.

One of the things we never liked about it was that there is no friggin delete button. You can do almost anything you need to do with a message from a handy drop-down menu, but there is no friggin delete button! We delete, damnit, with buttons. It’s just how we are wired. Lo and behold, we are not the only ones wired this way. Arantius to the resuce: this greasemonkey script (we employ the ‘user script’ and not the ‘full extension’) will add a delete button to gmail.

OUr second favorite hack is message preview. We get a kick out of Outlook’s message preview, and we hear that the new and fancy yahoo email (for which we signed up for a beta and yet never quite got onto the ‘must get’ list, harumph) has it as well. Well, gmail’s got ya covered, little soldier. With this greasemonkey script, right click on a message to preview and take action on it (except add labels, that doesn’t work from preview).

We found both of these links from lifehacker.com.

networked!

And now, let us pause to thank Big Randy for his gracious work in getting the Taco Compound fully networked.

Since we bought the Apple G3, we have been trying to get the dang thing on the Internets. But to no avail. We even tried putting on our old (and worn, and tattered) networking gloves (and hats and protective eyeware). Alas, they were too worn and frayed, and we could not get everything talking. Well, we could, we just couldn’t get it talking to each other. And so we called in our big guns.

And our biggest gun is, you guessed it, Big Randy. He came over and got everything working ship-shape. And so we say thank you. And the Taco Matron thanks you as well, seeing as she can now find out for herself, as the rest of us already know, that the Internet is for Porn.

toys of the future

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog mentions that Amazing Amanda is the “it-toy” for girls of the near and coming future. She talks, her expression changes, she “knows” what she’s wearing, and if she doesn’t get what she requests, she tells you about it. And they wonder why boys have trouble plugging in to emotions.

But the toy we are most interested in is the LG Migo, a cell phone for kids. We at the Taco Compound love to kick around the idea of what gadgets the taquitos will carry around and how they will use them. One such indispensible item–in our times, it seems–is the cell phone. But with downloadable picture and video porn, not to mention phone sex–will the kids of the future consider phone sex “sex”, if they don’t consider oral sex “sex” now?–we worry.

Enter the Migo: a 4-button programable pre-set phone with GPS. Of course, you can’t keep kids from giving out the call-in number, but the simple text display and 4 simple keys seems to greatly cut down on a lot of danger. Plus, it has GPS, for keeping track of your kids. We wonder if Verizon, the company currently rolling out the Migo, will have a handy online interface for parents as well.

literary history 2 – living the history

We took a major break last year. It’s the first paid vacation we have had in 5 years (at least). It was a scant 4 and a half days from work, but with national holidays and weekends, we managed to parlay it into 11 days off. In that time, we had to say an official goodbye to our original site, which fills us with deep sorrow. We traveled some (nothing of note, really), sent out a lot of cards, set up a new computer (a really good deal on an old Apple G3 from Discount Electronics), set up the HD of the HDTV (just in time for the Rose Bowl–Hook ’em Horns!), and appeared in 2 First Night Austin pieces, including one where we managed to draw the ire and curses of standersby during a family friendly show. And last in the wrap up news, we finished our last book of 2005, Bee Season.

We confess that we picked up Bee Season originally when we saw a preview of the movie a few months back, mostly likely in front of March of the Penguins or Murderball. It was something that the father figure, played by Richard Gere, says in the preview that caught our attention. It appears that he is driving in a car, and he talks about how it is our job in the world to help complete creation. This, if you know, is the Jewish doctrine of Tikkun Olam, a strange thing to hear from the mouth of that quirky Buddhist. Anyway, we never actually ended up seeing the movie, but we finished the book while traveling. Was it good? Is it worth recommending? We wish there was another chapter, actually, but over all, it was good. We suppose our desire is a desire to spend more time in Myla Goldberg’s world.

A great book we came across this break is the first volume in a 7-volume set called My People’s Prayerbook. This excellent series describes the origin, history, and meanings of the Siddur, as well as its varieties and editions. (Though we link to amazon.com for the book, we recommend, as always, using addall.com for finding the best overall prices on your books.) Also, on the topic of prayer, we were fortunate enough to find a CD of Shlomo Carlebach music for Shabbat services. Earlier last year, we met his widow and traveled with her, but that is another story.

Thanks to Jason Kotke and his Best of ’05 links, we have come across 2 great interviews of people we greatly admire. The first is Chip Kidd. While not an interview of him, it is an interview by him of Milton Glaser, and that is good enough for us. The second is an interview of Errol Morris, whom we have loved since we caught Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control at the Dobie.

literary history

While looking for books from our past, we came across a great guide on the Google Answers pages. Someone asked for recommendations for a young child and got back a world of information. Here is the great answer, and it’s broken down by age group. Scroll down past the disclosure part and begin at “The Preschool Part”. Great books.

A different part of our past is the music of a people. Recently,  PBS ran a “Great Performances” show called From Shtetl to Swing. It an excellent compendium of the history of the influence of first-generation Jews on popular music, using Irving Berlin as its main frame.

geek to live: underwear rotation and google’s rules

We’ve borrowed one of our favorite blog’s slogan (lifehacker) for today’s entry.

Firstly, underwear rotation. Here’s a topic near and dear to our hearts. When Mrs. Taco found us rotating our t-shirts (of which we have many), she laughed. Lo, how lonely we felt! As if we were the lone taquito left in a 3-rolled-with-guac combo from ‘Bertos. Because we not only rotate our shirts, but the underwear, and, in their own way, the socks as well. We’re not fanatics about it, but it helps keep everything worn at least somewhat evenly. So it was with great joy in our hearts that we read about ChangeLog’s wife rotating his underwear. We’re not alone!

Newsweek recently published Google’s 10 ten rules for employing IT workers. We can find no fault in these.

1. Hire by committee
2. Cater to every need
3. Pack them in. Almost every project at Google is a team project, and teams have to communicate. The best way to make communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each other
4. Make coordination easy
5. Eat your own dog food
6. Encourage creativity
7. Strive to reach consensus
8. Don’t be evil
9. Data drive decisions
10. Communicate effectively.

Almost every good working environment I have had–where people are genuinely happy and look forward to coming to work–has focussed on most of these in some way or another. But some days, we would be happy enough with just some good communication.

Web animation that kicks your ass

Earlier this year, we were turned on to a great animated video done for an acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep”. We already loved that song, but man, that video was just fantastic! We couldn;t get enough of it. Here it is, animated Creep.

We hadn’t heard much from the animator nor seen any of his work, until we saw the JCB Song animated video he did. Holy crap. It has made several people in our affiliated offices weep like the little girls we knew they were. Just kidding. But damn, that is a great and wonderful combination of video and song.

The instigator behind this wonderful stuff is Lait Bahrani, and his site–where all his animations are available–is Monkeehub (awh, he’s playing on our love for monkeys, the cheeky boy!).

2 more fun things to watch: Here is this guy doing a silly dance all over the world. This has a special place in our hearts, as we love to dance silly dances when we are bored or want to entertain others. And then then is the “Chronic(-les) of Narnia” video (properly called “Lazy Sunday”) from Saturday Night Live. If we remember correctly, this is the 2nd Andy Samberg video that we’ve enjoyed. Keep up the good work.

EDIT: Oh! check that out! Previous Andy Samberg videos are available at Channel101.com, where we found the great series Kicked in the Nuts last year. Very nice.