The American Prospect on Trivium!  Worlds colliding!  It’s great!

I read the article, though, and found myself disagreeing with its author, Marisa Meltzer.  How can you provide an accounting of Tumblr’s success and not use the word “Gawker” once?  The service was launched in New York in the right kind of scene, was pitched in the right kind of way, attracted the right kind of writers, and grew from there. Like so many successful products, you can’t simply run Tumblr’s featureset backward through the perfectly-deterministic mechanism of the imagined market and arrive at a proper accounting of why it succeeded and its competitors failed.

I agree that it’s worth talking about the subtle mechanics of the site — how there’s a thumbs-up mechanism but no thumbs-down; I think the consolidation of reader and blog into a single form is a genuinely interesting idea. But Meltzer’s account seemed to me a bit like explaining the success of the iPod via a discussion of its clickwheel.

Nothing like trying to fix some small part of your blog to uncover endless problems with the Movable Type to WordPress migration you performed months ago.  Well, various embedded Flickr galleries have been recreated, and you’ll be pleased to know that posts from 2006 to 2009 that had single-word titles can once again load properly. Like this one. Thank goodness.

Oh! Hello there! I’m not in Costa Rica any more, it turns out.  Actually, I’ve been back since Saturday evening, but I’ve been too busy growing an entirely new layer of skin to write anything here.  That process is now wrapping up, which leaves just the photo editing and fighting with Picasa-to-Flickr uploading (but then it turned out to be a network proxy problem) and then realizing that my Flickr/Lightbox gallery script didn’t make it past the move to WordPress, and considering writing a WP plugin to fix it but then deciding to try out a half dozen until I finally found this one which does what I want. Whew.

What? Right, Central America.  Emily and I just spent 7 days in Costa Rica, driving through mountains, clouds and grids of oil palms, attempting the full volcano/cloud forest/beach trifecta.  I want to write about each of those things, but for now you’ll have to be satisfied with some pictures.

Tomorrow Emily and I leave for Costa Rica, where we’ll be for a week.  Plans include a visit to some hot springs, sightseeing at a volcano, lazing on the beach, a sure-to-be-disastrous surfing lesson, and I don’t even know what else.  Also they have baby sloths:

Between this and their executive-elect being named President Chinchilla, it all sounds like a promisingly animalcentric vacation.

Processing is kind of a fun prototyping tool. And it’s got an animated GIF library!

Kriston and I built Lady Ada’s Game of Life kit over at HacDC a while back, and it roused the interest of a few folks. Sommer asked that I be on the lookout for another kit that might be a good candidate for learning to solder. I eventually suggested another Lady Ada kit: the MintyBoost, a simple circuit that lets you top up your USB gadgets’ batteries through the use of a pair of AAs. By the time I got my act together, six(!) people had expressed interest in building the kit, pushing supplies of my tools (somewhat scarce) and electronics knowledge (decidedly meager) to their limits.

But it went surprisingly well! Everyone’s kit worked immediately; in fact, they even seemed to work with the iPhone 3GSes that were on hand — something that the MintyBoost can’t necessarily be relied upon to do.

I think that my favorite part was watching everyone mess around with the Dremel. That’s some advanced nerdery for you.

I think that folks had fun; we might do this again, perhaps with more of an Arduino bent. If you want in, let me know.

A few weeks back Emily and I were out at Bob & Barbara’s having some drinks with our friends Sarah, John Carlos and Tara. We got to talking about art and technology and sculpture, and with the help of my phone John Carlos found a video of some work he’d done.  The bar wasn’t the best place for watching it, so I emailed it to myself and forgot about it until just now:

The look is just as bespoke, concentrated and confusing as his description had implied, and the noise it makes every bit as terrible as Tara had promised.  I think it’s great.