Archive for April, 2006

04-28-2006

Star Wars Radio Show Featured in Austin Chronicle

This week’s Austin Chronicle features an article about a radio show on KVRX called These Aren’t the Droids You’re Looking For. The show is a weekly half hour of radio all about Star Wars. I haven’t heard the show yet, but I applaud the creativity of the concept.

Everything in the movies is there to be discussed and dissected from as many angles as possible. Military strategy, scientific inconsistencies, the theological subtleties behind the Force: all in an evening’s work. As Needles says, “For the sake of the show, there’s more to talk about if you accept the world as real.”

Posted by Matt in Austin, communication, creativity, movies | No Comments »

04-26-2006

Dim Sum Beginner’s Guide


Click to download the guide (PDF).

On a trip to Hong Kong a couple of years ago, Amanda and I wished we’d had some kind of Rosetta Stone to take with us to the dim sum restaurants we visited. We knew dishes we liked, but we didn’t know the Chinese names or characters for them. Most of the places we tried didn’t have the typical dim sum carts to order from, so pointing wasn’t an option either.

In getting ready for our recent trip to Beijing, I decided to put together my own dim sum cheat sheet. I used Wikipedia to find a list of dim sum dishes along with the Chinese characters for them. I then searched Flickr for photos tagged “dim sum” that were under a Creative Commons license. I put the two together to create a Dim Sum Beginner’s GuidePDF file. This guide is released under a Creative Commons license, so please feel free to add to or build-on the idea.

The printout did come in handy on our trip to Beijing. Dim sum wasn’t as prevalent there as it was in Hong Kong, but we did come across a few places. The ones we ate at didn’t have English menus or picture menus, so the cheat sheet was a big help.

Admittedly, I’m still a dim sum beginner myself, so this is not a comprehensive guide. There are lots more dishes I could add, but I stuck to the ones I know well—things that we hoped to eat on our trip and would recommend to anyone who hadn’t tried dim sum before. For more options, check out the book “Dim Sum: A Pocket Guide.”

I’d love to see more twists on this idea? How about a beginner’s guide to tapas, sushi, meze, and other snacky foods around the world?

Posted by Matt in communication, creativity, food, photography, travel, wikis | 2 Comments »

04-10-2006

Brass Band Article in Sunday’s New York Times

Yesterday’s New York Times had a lengthy article on brass bands, one of my favorite types of music. The article covers bands from around the world, most of which I’ve heard or heard of.

I hadn’t heard of the Mexican genre of banda before though. I’ll have to see what I can find on Pandora or at Waterloo Records.

Technorati Tags: ,

Posted by Matt in general, music | No Comments »

04-10-2006

Four Great Rube Goldberg Videos

I watched a lot of Tom and Jerry cartoons as a kid. Some of my favorites were the ones where Tom would build his own version of the Mousetrap game. I’ve been fascinated by Rube Goldberg machines ever since.

I happened to run across three great Rube Goldberg Videos over the weekend on various sites. I wasn’t on the lookout for them and I’m not sure if they’re connected somehow. Maybe Rube Goldberg is on people’s minds because the National Rube Goldberg Contest was held recently.

I ran across this first video on the Make magazine website. The second and third were on either populicio.us or Diggdot.us. I believe the third one is a copy of The Way Things Go, which is also available on DVD. It’s about 30 minutes long, so plan your viewing accordingly. Finally, to round out the videos, I also searched out a copy of the Honda Accord commercial from a few years ago that consisted of a Rube Goldberg machine made from car parts.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted by Matt in creativity, humor, movies, tech | 1 Comment »

04-03-2006

Kill Your Television

The West 116th Street blog has a great post on Why You Too Should Cancel Cable and stop watching TV altogether:

My hope is that there will be a massive social and cultural move away from television. The benefits of such a change will be tremendous. We will become smarter, more informed, and less prone to commercial manipulation. We will not stand for lies and misinformation from our government, we will take action and effect change. We will eliminate credit card debt, and pay off our mortgages faster. Our kids will eat more fruit and do better on standardized exams. We will become global participants, and won’t need to tell foreigners that we are Canadian when we visit their countries. We will use less oil. We will get to work on time. We will have better relationships with friends and family. We will make better music, write better books, and develop better software. Just for starters. Pardon my naïve optimism, but I really think that remarkable progress can be achieved very quickly, if you too decide to cancel cable.

Several years ago, I decided to go a year without watching TV. It permanently altered my television watching, to the point that I hardly watch any now. During my year without TV, I read the book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. One point that stuck with me from the book is that things we absolutely must have don’t require advertising:

Advertising exists only to purvey what people don’t need. Whatever people do need they will find without advertising, if it is available. . .

People do need to eat, but the food which is advertised is processed food: processed meat, sodas, sugary cereals, candies. A food in its natural state, unprocessed, does not need to be advertised. Hungry people will find the food if it is available. To persuade people to buy the processed version is another matter because it is more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. The need must be created.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Posted by Matt in communication | 1 Comment »

04-02-2006

How to Draw Users in From the Start

Spark This has an article on how to design home pages that will draw users in. The article has some great visual examples of sites that do it well.

In terms of bad examples, I’ve seen a lot on populicio.us. Populicio.us is a great way to find new and interesting sites, but it offers no context about why the site is interesting. It’s often not immediately apparent why people are bookmarking it. Many web designers would benefit from the advice in the Spark This post:

So how do you engage in a conversation in three seconds or less?

There are four things you can do to improve your odds:

  • What’s in it for me?
  • Call to Action
  • Images
  • Testimonials

As in, “WAIT WAIT! Don’t back-button me!”

I know my own site’s front page could use a redesign. Now I have a better idea of how to go about it.

Incidentally, I’ve created a Google Blog Search bookmarklet for times when I can’t immediately figure out what might be interesting about a site I’ve run across on populicio.us. Searching on the URL will give you a list of other sites with posts about the page in question. The delicious linkbacks bookmarklet is also useful for providing context.

UPDATE (05/08/06): I’ve created a more generic version of the Google Blog Search bookmarklet that prompts for a search string, rather than prompting with the current URL.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Posted by Matt in bookmarklets, communication, tech | 1 Comment »