http://www.brunobornsztein.com Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:04:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en She's here! Check our our family website for details, photos and regular updates [1]. [1] http://www.bornszteinfamily.com http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2009/01/28/ayla-rose-bornsztein/ Things I like about Buenos Aires: Coffee comes in small cups. Very small. A t-bone steak costs about a dollar. And it's better than any 30-dollar-steak in Minnesota. My grandma's homemade gnocchis. From scratch. The way the subway rocks and sways and wants you to sleep. It's normal to have dinner after 10. The restaurants are full at midnight and beyond. Pictures I had never seen of grandparents I never met. My dad's report card from 1960. The afternoon light through the tall trees that line the avenues. Things I dislike: My mouth gets tired of speaking Spanish. It's impossible to not gain weight. Babies sleeping on foam pads beside their parents in the street. Walking by on the way to my hotel room, and a bed. Noise. Busses, scooters, honking, sirens. Not knowing which street I'm on, where it's going, and which part of the city I'm in (but I'm learning). http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2006/04/30/killing-time-at-the-airport/ Valentine's day: I was at the Target Center in Minneapolis for a Timberwolves game against the slumping Seattle Supersonics. We got better-than-usual seats in a package deal that included a $30 gift card to a fancy pretend-italian restaurant whose chef must have just moved up from Denny's or Perkins. We sat right above the tunnel where the players come out (this is also where the cheerleaders sit and undulate pseudo-sexually). The whole goal of going to a Timberwolves game, of course, is to touch or in some way attract Kevin Garnett's attention as he walks on and off the court. Unfortunately the man is very intense and either didn't notice or ignored my hoarse screaming. I suppose if I were him I wouldn't be that interested in making brief personal connections with random people I'll never see again. At the end of the game (we won) he walked into the tunnel with his head down and didn't even flinch when people reached out and brushed their hands on his shoulders. How many times did this happen before it became unexciting for him? And when did it stop being weird as hell? If I walked down the hallway at work and people reached out and put their germy, unwashed hands all over me, I'd probably collapse into the fetal position and cover my head with my hands. Other players, either because of their relative un-stardom or because they were in better moods, seemed a lot more interested in this whole fan-player tunnel-touching ritual. Ricky Davis high-fived every kid who lined the entrance. Eddie Griffin pretended to remember this (crazy?) trashy lady who claimed she met him at "the club" (is there only one?). This acknowledgment caused her to declare, definitively, that he wasn't an asshole. Mark Madsen was the best, because he looked right at me and pointed when I yelled "Mad Dawg!" in that suburban-high-school-jock-voice I sometimes do. Maddy (sorry, that's what my friends and I call you), if you read this, could you please put a link up on your always-entertaining-and-adorably-sincere-blog [1]? Or, even better (and I know this is asking a lot) could you maybe come out a little early before the next game, turn to the stands and yell "B-DAWG!"? I can assure you I will not find it weird or off-putting. As long as you don't try to touch me. [1] http://markmadsen.com/blog/ http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2006/02/17/fame-and-obscurity/ Do what SportsIllustrated.com [1] does; insert a loud, annoying streaming ad down at the bottom of the page (under the fold), and have it autoplay, so that when it starts, it's impossible to figure why or how your computer is blasting noise. Then, just for kicks, make it play on every page of the site, even if the user has already watched the whole thing and muted it. That way they'll have to scroll down to the bottom and stop the ad every time they load a page. Or you could just have a big header at the top of every page that says "GO AWAY!" Whatever's easier. I watched the Super Bowl tonight despite the fact that I hate the Super Bowl. It's an overhyped excuse for comercials between two teams that aren't necessarily the best in the NFL. But the other networks seemed to concede the night to ABC so there wan't really anything else on. This ad for the new Toyota Camry hybrid really stood out. [2] [3] Because it was so terrible. It features a bilingual dad explaining to his son why they bought a hybrid: Son: Papá, why do we have a hybrid? Father: For your future! Son: Why? Father: It's better for the air, and we spend less because it runs on gas and electrical power. (Points to dashboard display.) Mira, mira aquí. It uses both. Son: Like you, with English and Spanish! Father: Sí! Son: Why did you learn English? Father: (Pauses.) For your future! Both my parents are immigrants from Argentina, and I grew up speaking English and Spanish. I wouldn't go so far as to say I was offended, but I was definitely put off. The commercial is a blatant, moronic attempt to reach out to the Spanish speaking audience, and the association between hybrid cars and "hybrid" families is forced and unnatural. When I was growing up, my bilingual parents were working hard on their graduate degrees (for my future!) and saving every penny they could (for my future!). We drove a broken-down 1979 Chevy Monza [4] they bought at the Goodwill for $400. For my parents in 1986, buying a new car to ensure my sucess in the future would have been as ridiculous an idea as signing me up for polo lessons. But even more than that, the ad just smacks of condescension and false-multiculturalism. I find it annoying, and I'm probably one of the people they were trying to reach out to. For a more subtl (and probably more objective) analysis, check here [5]. [1] http://www.si.com [2] http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/minisite/superbowl/index.html?s_van=GM_HOME_SUPERBOWL_TXT [3] http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/minisite/superbowl/index.html?s_van=GM_HOME_SUPERBOWL_TXT [4] http://monza.homestead.com/monza.html [5] http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002805.html http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2006/02/05/how-to-make-your-web-site-visitors-mad-at-you/ Got bored yesterday watching a rerun of Desperate Housewives and decided to take my own advice [1] and make my own clothes. Here's a shirt I'm buying (and building) at Spreadshirt [2], because I'd actually want to wear it. And hey, if I can wear it, maybe you want to wear it too. So here you go (click the shirt to buy): [3] [1] http://blog.feedmarker.com/2006/01/26/the-internet-will-clothe-you-too/ [2] http://www.spreadshirt.com/shop.php?sid=21511 [3] http://21511.spreadshirt.com http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2006/01/30/tapeman-says-eat-me/ If you're lucky enough to be on a Mac, then you've probably had the pleasure of using Quicksilver [1], an application launcher, document searcher, and general computing-life enhancer. Well, I just found Colibri [2], an application for Windows that does many of the same things. It makes launching an application as easy as typing the first few letters of its name. You can do Google search right from your desktop (note: you can do this will Google Desktop too, but it's much slower). You can even control your volume settings without taking your hands off the keyboard. The app is still very new, and is missing some of the features that make Quicksilver great (like the ability to learn keystrokes that stand for certain applications, for example, typing FF to launch Firefox). But it looks very well thought-out, installation is clean and easy, and since I bet it will progress very quickly. Update: Just discovered that Colibri actually does learn common keystrokes, so you can do things like typing FF to launch Firefox. Yay! [1] http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ [2] http://colibri.leetspeak.org/ http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2006/01/26/colibri-quicksilver-for-windows/ A lesson in trusting computers: don't trust them. As I learned the hard way yesterday, if you're not willing to do a small amount of human thinking, you're at the mercy of a machine, and the machine is not always as smart as you think. Case in point: I had a meeting with my sister last night at a place I'd never been. She sent me the directions in an email about a week ago. They said that the place was located in St. Louis Park, just off of highway 100 and 394. take 94 to 394 west, to 100 south, to cedar lake rd exit. take a right on the first driveway you see into Parkdale Plaza. The address is XXXX South Highway 100" These are not difficult directions to follow, had I noticed them. Instead, however, I noticed the handy little icon on the side of my GMail screen that said "Map This", like this: So, sensing that Google Map's directions to the place would be better than my sisters (and more techy!), I clicked that. Problem. A sensible human being will notice that Google is offering to map a completely different address (one it had picked up from an earlier e-mail in the chain). So the map I received gave me excellent directions to the wrong place. If I had read my sister's e-mail, I might have realized that. Instead, I trusted Google to read her e-mail for me, assuming it would figure out where she wanted me to go on its own. Google is, sadly, incapable of having meaningful interactions with my sister via e-mail. So it got confused and got me lost: http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2006/01/19/how-google-got-me-lost/ America's boys are in trouble. They are the most violent in the industrialized world. Surprised? I didn't think so. It shouldn't come as a shock to anyone that American boys are in crisis. For years now we've seen the statistic; lower grades, lower graduation rates, higher crime rates – than girls. So when I caught this two-hour documentary on PBS [1] tonight I was glued to the TV (didn't even switch off for E.R.). It's called Raisin Cain: Boys in Focus [2]. If you get a chance, I suggest you watch it. It covers the problems boys face – from attention deficit to bullying to drugs and academics – and at every turn attemps to put the issues in new light. Should we stop violent pre-school boys, or let them sort it out on their own. Does an an aggressive imagination lead to aggressive actions? There's an established way of thinking about these things in our culture, and this documentary suggests our way of thinking may be wrong. This is important not only for parents, but for teachers who must decide how to address the behavior of boys in the context of our culture and their own development. Learn more about the narrator, Michael Thomson [3], and how the documentary got its start here [4]. [1] http://www.pbs.org [2] http://www.pbs.org/opb/raisingcain/ [3] http://www.michaelthompson-phd.com/ [4] http://www.pbs.org/opb/raisingcain/filmmaker.html http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2006/01/13/raising-cain/ Photos from my recent trip to Argentina are up [1] in all their unedited glory. My belly is full of 15 days of steak and vino tinto. Next time you go to the liquor store, pick up a good Argentine Malbec and see what you think. [1] http://brunobornsztein.com/wp/gallery.php?file=photos/argentina/ http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2005/07/20/dont-cry-for-me/ Go read Doc Searl's essay in the Linux journal, called "Getting Flat, Part 2" [1]. Seriously, go read it. Commenting on Microsoft's (and others') practice of screening job applicants by IQ scores: I can save Microsoft a pile of time and money by reporting a fact no school wants to admit, one that will flatten the world far more than any other factor: pretty much everybody is smart. And, quoting an article by education guru John Gatto [2]: After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. The whole article is in response to Tom Friedman's [3] new book (and the accompanying article in the NYT [4]) "The World Is Flat" [5]. I think Searls' essay is just as valuable as the writing that inspired it. [1] http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8280 [2] http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/index.htm [3] http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/ [4] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5090&en=cc2a003cd936d374&ex=1270267200&partner=rssuserland [5] http://www.thomaslfriedman.com/worldisflat.htm http://www.brunobornsztein.com/2005/05/12/how-we-learn/