It’s kind of interesting when separate things rub together, and funny how there is no public condemnation of western State sponsored violence.

http://www.morenewmath.com

Went back to the Apple store last night and, after being helped by one of the concierges there, had a dickish genius at the “Moron Bar” tell me that this type of damage is NOT covered by the warranty, the reason: You would need ‘excessive’ force to do this type of damage. This is a 1 week old computer don’t forget, and everyone knows that any rational human being who has spent more than $1,000.00 on some laptop would type with a hammer for the first week. There is NO possible way that 1 key out of the gizillion keys they manufacture is defective right? And how much is excessive force anyways? 1 psi? 10? 500?

Sam, the genius there, of course must have tried to jam the key in or something (I don’t know what he did because he was out back) but insured that the hooks, which were cracked, are now fully broken. This means that now I’m not able to put it in the keyboard and have it stay for more than 1 click (which it did before).

Update 021409: Finally, resolution… The girls and guys at the 14th street Apple store finally pulled it through. After a week of much frustration with the absurdity of the issue, you won’t hear about it again. Until the next key breaks that is…

That quick? My old Dell lasted 4 years without a hitch. 1 week and the MacBook Pro has already begun to fall apart… (singing the alphabet, as per the previous post).

Update 021209 9:40 am: I just got in from the Apple store @ 59th Street. I was told I basically had to leave the laptop in for repair, 5 – 7 days…FOR A BROKEN KEY! So far I’ve spent 1 hour on this, we’ll see how much longer this takes.

Repeat with me: this will be the first and last Apple computer I will ever purchase.

Update 021209 1:06 pm: Got off the phone with someone at Apple Support…No dice. Apparently the only option is to either send it back to Apple or take it in to the store/service providers for repair. Am I crazy or is this just insanely stupid? How about just mailing me the damn keycap? I SWEAR I’ll mail the broken one back! This was pretty fast, so it took about 15 mins total.

Update 021209 3:42 pm: Just came back from Tekserve…had a very helpful guy help me out, but once again, no dice. Well, he did give me a (different semicolon) key from a different (older) computer, so I could definitely put it in its place, but that seems like so reasonable after shelling a chunk of change on this thing doesn’t it? I guess I’ll have to take it in, have it’s keyboard be fully replaced and be without a computer for a whole week.

Pff.

Saturday we made it to Liberty State Park in N.J. for the All Points West festival. The only reason for going on Saturday, for me, was to see Radiohead. Chromeo was also up in there in the list, but playing at 2 pm, there was no way I was going to make it.

Radiohead was of course incredible. They played 2+hours and had 2 encores. The visuals were pretty nice: two large screens as well as what seemed to me (from my spot) like strands of fiber optics hanging and creating simple patterns. The screens had 6 different views of the stage and every now and then some interesting patterns.

Some pics after the jump. Some clips coming up in a few days.

The venue itself was absolutely horrendous though. Getting there wasn’t terrible but once in the park, it all just crumbled down: long waits everywhere, the process of acquiring beer was among the most idiotic I have ever experienced in my life and the thrill and joy of taking about 3 hours to come back to the city cannot really be put into words.
One thing is for sure, I am NEVER going back to New Jersey. Period.

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So, you get someone’s info and the best thing you can come up with is to get a cell phone and start, I don’t know, calling and texting hotlines or whatever? The idiocy of the end itself sort of defeats the purpose of the entire thing. I mean, if you’re already going to do something stupid, wouldn’t you want to just go all the way through and get something interesting out of it?

Pfff

Eric Thompson, the owner of a company that sold firearm merchandise to both the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois shooter is, as a good will gesture, selling his products at cost for two weeks so “law abiding citizens” can buy them to prevent other tragedies. As he makes it clear, he “want(s) to help people save lives”.

“Initially, I wanted this to be an offer for college students,” he said. “But there’s no real way to determine whether someone is a college student … so we opened it up to any legal American.” Because it is so much easier to recognize a law abiding legal American than a card carrying student…

It only makes perfect sense to have everyone in school is carrying a gun right? That way you’ll never ever see another mass shooting be carried all the way through; instead, you’ll just see a bunch of little shootings every day over moronic things. Professors should be allowed to carry semi-automatic weapons (you have to keep maintain the hierarchy somehow).

Read the CNN article here.

“It’s been a difficult few weeks, rockets are bouncing off your buildings, and maintaining focus can be an occasional challenge,” (ambassador) Crocker said…

Read the CNN article here.

Read my previous entry here.

via [archinect]

Click on the image for a larger version or go after the jump below to see the transcription.

Crude oil costs have almost doubled in the past year, and Middle East tensions, OPEC, refinery problems, and speculators have caused the cost of gas to go up and down as much as 10 cents in a single day.

Retailers of gas only make about 5% gross profit, or around 15 cents per gallon. That is used to pay for labor, loss, equipment, maintenance, and credit cards. (Cards cost retailers, and therefore customers, about 5 cents / gal.) This leaves the retailer with about 1% net profit.

Many costumers will spend 5 or 10 minutes to go 1 mile out of their way to save 2 cents/gal x 10 gallons purchased, or 20 cents. In this mile, they use $3.20/gal gas / 16 miles per gallon, or 20 cents. There are few places where we let less than a 1% price difference drive our decisions. You may or may not save any money, but what’s your time worth?

With these wild and crazy prices, are we all getting crazier?????

At one point Mr. Bush stopped before aerial photos of the Auschwitz death camp taken by American planes during World War II, and asked Ms. Rice why the American military did not bomb the camp. “We should have bombed it,” he told her, Mr. Shalev told reporters later.” the NYT article reads (my emphasis).

Never mind the thousands of prisoners…

Read the NYT article here.

After reading the news about Bush’s recent visit to Israel and the West Bank (obviously there was no mention of Gaza) and what according to the press might have been some of the strongest statements to date on the need for peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians(…) I couldn’t help but wonder what the record (the U.N record that is) shows. A funny pattern of vetoes comes up dating from 1995, having almost every veto being from the U.S. against Palestine. This of course leads me to believe that this time around he REALLY wants peace. Right?

Click on the image above for a higher res version or read this fantastic chart of total UN vetoes here.

Read the BBC article here.

Is this the cusp of civility or of idiocy? In my mind, it seems like jumping off a window because your boss told you to do so would fall under the same category. You are assuming a risk for consuming an illegal substance (yes, that means that its quality cannot be guaranteed, because it isn’t regulated!). It is also a bit difficult to believe that she didn’t know about crystal meth’s addictiveness, maybe Googling it could have given her some insight, but perhaps she doesn’t know about Google either…

Read the BBC news article here.

Nowadays, it seems like the future is turning rounder, smoother and more NURBS-like (or Subdivision-surfaces-like) than before. Perhaps it’s that part of the cycle where everything becomes smoothed -which seems to be somewhere about every 10 years or so- but for some reason it seems like this time around is not just some fluctuation but instead is here to stay. So, where is the square future?

Most of the work being produced at the schools right now (Columbia, Pratt, DRL, etc) seems to be getting smoother – I’m trying not to use the word blobby in here – the result not only of the processes of generation which aren’t inherently smooth but typically default to 3rd degree surfaces.

I will continue building up with this post, right now this is a very incomplete rambling.

Where is the square future? Mies’ Glass Skyscraper unbuilt project was the future. Superstudio’s Continuous Monument was what the web is nowadays too, formally a grid, yet topologically a network, but it’s was in my mind, it’s hard edge-ness and the way it intersected -or swallowed- that which was existing what embodied the future (nevermind the discourse…). Le Corbusier of course jumps right in, with most of his masterplans and Ville Savoye.

Back in the 60′s, the Metabolists -among many others- were pushing for their organic architecture, the whole current seems to have died -from the academic mainstream- but since the late nineties and with the use of these new tools, with the simple click of a button (the smooth button) becomes ‘organic’ or rounded.

And is there a right one? Why do rounded edges make something look cool, and is cool a synonym of good?

This instead is more interesting: The McLaren team has been fined £50m having in their possession a whooping 780 page Ferrari document, after loosing their constructors’ points in September for information handed to them by a Ferrari spy(?!?!). Spies in sports… sigh.

I guess this would be the equivalent of steroids in motor sports.

Read the BBC article here.

It’s of course all over the press, so I’m not really going to comment on it. But in case you actually haven’t read what these people (Michael Hayden et al) use for excuses, read this excerpt from The Guardian’s article:

“The tapes posed a serious security risk,” the CIA’s director, Michael Hayden, told agency employees in a statement yesterday. “Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the programme, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al-Qaida and its sympathisers.”

Really? So the destruction of tapes which contain footage of an interrogation technique which cannot be admitted nor denied -because it would actually qualify as torture- is for the protection of the actual interrogators. Not because it *might* be torture.

Read The Guardian’s full article here.

BBC’s coverage here.

We went to visit our recently acquired land upstate from Saturday to Sunday. Every time we see it it just looks like a completely different place. The first time we saw it was winter, fairly cold but not much snow. The second time it was a snow-covered world (imagine Star Wars’ ice planet). Two weeks ago, the place looked pretty full and lush, it seemed like some work would be needed but definitely nothing out of the ordinary. Last weekend we just got back from our latest visit and the place was a jungle. Imagine Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo… machete in hand and all just to make your way through the dense brush. It is insane. A house NEEDS to be in that place soon.

I can finally understand Manuel DeLanda’s statements about human settlements, and how the first thing that defines them is the clearing of nature, then keeping the weeds out and from then on the subsequent battle (over time) to maintain that order.

I will post more before-after images later on.

Why take the reins now? Is this simply a carrot on a stick?

No, no, my trusty steads. There’s a very old Mexican proverb that I just found on the Internet. It says, “It is not enough for a man to know how to ride; he must know how to fall.” My roots are speaking to me. They watched me walk and trot. They know I can prance with airs above the ground and gallop like the wind.

My intentions are to feed this blog with only the finest hay. To extend its lunge line and cut it loose. To make this gelding into a stallion.
And as with the previous trail of tears (www.g-digit.com), I don’t expect everyone to follow. There will be broken hooves and apple picking (not of the fruit variety). It’s up to you to break us in. But as Winston Churchill once said (also recently found on Internet), “There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man.” Which outside part, I am unsure of, but I implore you to grab on and see where we go. It should serve as an oasis in the Arabian desert that is your life

But as they say, you can only lead a horse . . .