eric.stamen.com

2 Notes From Blogging Retirement: We relaunched s...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2006-03-06T22:09:00Z

2 Notes From Blogging Retirement:

We relaunched stamen.com as a flat html website, at which I plan to start blogging at some point, and it'll have RSS and everything, so stay tuned. Our old flash site is still avaiable at http://flash.stamen.com (and a *super* old work site for me is up here, ain't it something how everything comes back around?).

I'm no longer interested in receiving any politically-oriented email, or being solicited by any politically-oriented group via snailmail, or having any politically-oriented conversations, that don't have as their explicit and stated aim the impeachment and subsequent arrest of President George Bush and Dick Cheney. It's time. Just so you know.

Rodenbeck, In Mufti, Auf Wiedersehen. mufti: civi...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2006-01-07T00:42:00Z

Rodenbeck, In Mufti, Auf Wiedersehen.

mufti: civilian dress worn by a person who is entitled to wear a military uniform.

Chris Cummings loaned me a copy of Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr over the holiday. I picked it up a few nights ago and haven't been able to put it down. It's classic Vonnegut — scathing, accessible, crisp, poigniant, laugh-out-loud funny — about a very successful Nazi broadcaster who secretly serves as an American agent, thinking he can do more good than harm with his coded messages - but who ultimately comes to understand that "you should be careful what you pretend to be — because what you pretend to be is ultimately who you really are."

It was made into a movie starring Nick Nolte - who knew?

In an early part of the book, the narrator describes how, when he was captured after the war, he wasn't wearing his military uniform, even though he was entitled to. In other words, he was in mufti. This is a good metaphor for my relationship to this site lately; though I'm entitled to wear the uniform of sometime publisher on a wide ranging variety of subjects, including (though not limited to):

stories and resources related to small business operations, their triumphs and challenges,

stories and resources related to Stamen Design, LLC's operations, its' triumphs and challenges

what a jerk Pat Robertson is,

data visualization,

data visualization in the service of resistance to the policies of George W. Bush,

resistance to the policies of George W. Bush,

often misguided but well intentioned critiques of spirituality in general and Christianity more specifically and right wing fundamentalism in America in particular, and

my personal life,

... but even though I feel entitled to pretend to be an authority on these (and many other) subjects, and like both the idea and the activity of regularly publishing thoughts, notes, and links in order to push an agenda or just mess around and sometimes both (is there any better agenda to have than one which promotes you just "messing around"?).... I'm not really posting anything.

There are alot of reasons for this slowdown-to-the-point-of-nonexistence: Stamen's going bananas (we've grown from 3 to 5 people this year, more than doubled the amount of space we have, we went to a whole pile of conferences, greatly increased both our output and our ambition), I got married, the interface that I built to use to publish this site is seeming unwieldy, blogger really seems to have dropped the ball when it comes to doing things like adding RSS feeds to a site, etc. etc. etc. But rather that go into lots of detail about all of these, make fancy excuses, or try to place the site in some moment in the history of technology and culture, I think I'm just going to bite the bullet and make the decision to shut it down.

I want to try and find a way to continue to publish - I hope to start working on my notebooks again, since it's been forever; I've started researching and thinking about how we might start to apply some of the data visualization tools that we've built to physical objects & spaces; and there's always our work at Stamen to talk about in all kinds of ways - but for the moment, this little venue has run its course.

It's been almost exactly 5 years since I started doing this; so much has happened to me along the way and I'm delighted to have such a detailed record of my life. If you haven't tried to capture your life over a long period of time like this, I highly recommend it. Otherwise it all just slips away.

Thanks for coming along for the ride!

-- Eric

Stamen

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-11-22T21:54:00Z

Ich War Ein Berliner:

Stamen, originally uploaded by Ti.mo.

Mike and I just returned to San Francisco from Design Engaged, Andrew Otwell's conference in Berlin. I was pleased to have been able to make it this year - I think it was Chris Heathcote who told me that last year's conference had given him enough raw material to work on for about 6 months, and I'll add to the general happy feeling that people seem to have had about the conference by saying it was a great chance to brainstorm, discuss, collaborate and drink with about 30 designers from all over the world.

There're lots of links & writeups on the conference site (Mike also wrote up his thoughts here), so I won't try and sum it all up here. But I was particularly pleased to meet Jack Schulze & Matt Webb of, well, schulzeandwebb.com. Ben was agigating for a Stamen vs. Schulze and Webb fistfight to see who would emerge as the champion up-and-coming-boutique-design-duo, which we only narrowly managed to avoid. Jack brought along some metal which melts in hot water that had the whole room atwitter.

Probably the most refreshing part of the conference was being able to simply show work in progress and talk about it. At most of the other conferences we've been going to this year, we've generally presented an argument that was fairly formal and complete - this time we showed work in progress, introduced a few ideas, and let conversational flowers bloom. The photo above is from our presentation of the in-progress live taxicab visualization we're doing with The Exploratorium and Scott Snibbe.

But the highlight, for sure, was the following conversation with Matt Webb & Ben Cerveny, over dinner on this amazing boat restaurant:

Me: (remembering that Matt had mentioned an interest in science fiction) So, I hear you're into sci-fi.
(Amazing conversation follows in which it's clear that we've read all the same books and our interests totally overlap, except for Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, which is all about two people who are found to be compatible to the 9th decimal place, at which the conversation gets too hyper-meta for words, and swooning ensues)
Matt W: So, what else are you reading right now?
Ben C: Well, he reads alot of CEO self-help books & business stuff.
Matt W: (pause) So let me ask you one thing.
Me: Shoot.
Matt W: Your politics: neocon or not?

I think I fooled 'em with the tie. It's working!

From the Stamen HQ roof, 5 minutes ago.3

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-11-01T03:51:00Z

From the Stamen HQ roof, 5 minutes ago.3, originally uploaded by rodenbeck1.

We're quietly sitting in the office, and hear a BOOM, which is not that big a deal in the sunny Mission. Then another, and then another, and then another, in rapid succession, followed by sirens and helicopters and then more BOOM BOOM BOOM, and finally we turn down the techno and Mike says to me "um... do you think we should go take a look?" We head to the roof and it's not quite the giant robot stomping on buildings that we had imagined, but pretty close - smoke belching from a building on South Van Ness & 16th (about two blocks away) & periodic BOOM BOOM BOOM accompanied by huge balls of flame.

And then eventually, out of the silence: '''...so should we go back downstairs and deal with our client now?"

Fire Update 11/01/05: Quinn posted some more and better photos on flickr, most notably this one, which has rental equipment on fire.

So. All well and good, & then we went back to work. But this morning I read in Harpers' (it's not online, I'll have to dig it up) about the Blitz in WWII, and the way that London dealt with it. It's a beautiful story, about how during the sustained bombing that ultimately took the lives of 40,000 city dwellers, people went out dancing, ate in restaurants, bought what food they could in markets, bought party supplies on the black market -- in other words that life went on pretty much as it always had, despite the daily attacks on the people of that amazing city.

And today, standing on the roof, watching the city burn, I felt a deep and satisfying feeling of "fuck all y'all," as my lovely wife would put it. Not just to the theocratic freaks that bomb our cities in the name of a twisted version of an ancient theology (although there's certainly that feeling), but also to the theocratic freaks that are seeking to make us live in fear of one another and take our liberty away under the rhetoric of keeping us safer, that are seeking to expand their ability to peer over our shoulders in libraries and rifle through our trash and spend our taxes on ill-considered wars, that are wrapping themselves in the flag and assaulting the Constitution.

It feels good, like there's been enough time between now and the 9/11 attacks that thoughts like these are more and more possible . Just because we've been attacked doesn't give Cheney et al the right to take America away from us. We can deal with a few bombs - if London could, we certainly can...

Schadenfreude? Eric Rodenbeck: From the NYTimes: ...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-10-31T23:36:00Z

Schadenfreude?

Eric Rodenbeck: From the NYTimes: "The latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll taken over the weekend found that 55 percent of Americans now see Mr. Bush's presidency as a failure."
Mike Migurski: that makes me happy and sad, all at the same time
Eric Rodenbeck: I think they call that "schadenfreude"
Eric Rodenbeck: in the old country
Mike Migurski: like when a clown dies?

It's hard to not feel some degree of glee at the spectacle of the wheels come off the Bush White House - what with Miers having to step down, Libby's indictement, 2000 American soldiers dead in Iraq and no end in sight, and now this kind of polling - but this is necessarily tempered by a probably reasonable fear that if they come crashing down, they'll take the rest of us with them. Watching closely.

In Lieu of Flowers: Theodore Roosevelt Heller, 8...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-10-11T23:43:00Z

In Lieu of Flowers:

Theodore Roosevelt Heller, 88, loving father of Charles (Joann) Heller; dear brother of the late Sonya (the late Jack) Steinberg. Ted was discharged from the U.S. Army during WWII due to service related injuries, and then forced his way back into the Illinois National Guard insisting no one tells him when to serve his country. Graveside services Tuesday 11 a.m. at Waldheim Jewish Cemetery (Ziditshover section), 1700 S. Harlem Ave., Chicago. In lieu of flowers, please send acerbic letters to Republicans. Arrangements by Chicago Jewish Funerals, Douglas MacIsaac, funeral director 847-229-8822, www.cjfinfo.com.

From The Chicago Tribune, via Tomas My kinda patriot; my kinda obituary.

air/storm/structure Beautiful images of Katrina...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-10-07T17:03:00Z

air/storm/structure

Beautiful images of Katrina's structure over at BLDGBLOG. The blog is full of really fascinating ruminations on radical architectural ideas and structures - my favorite so far is "Soil-bombing Iceland":

"BLDGBLOG's Artillery Gardens will require the following: a very large parcel of land; a Howitzer; several shotguns; a military engineer who can calculate launching arcs and target distances; and some seed-packing volunteers, preferably experienced gardeners. Constant gardeners, perhaps. Everyone would fill up as many shotgun shells and old Howitzer cases as they could, using odd, rare, or otherwise exciting combinations of exotic seed; we'd all don some earplugs; and then it could begin: you'd blast a garden into existence.
Landscape planning as field artillery calculation. Landscape-at-a-distance.
Gardening by artillery.

"Through explosion and gunfire and heavy artillery: a rare and fragile garden is born. Species by species, day by day, through blast radii and impact fields, with the "power of endless growth and self-reproduction," these Artillery Gardens will grow.

"War as a garden, pursued by other means."

(via Mike)

Update 10/07: Cassidy kindly pointed me to a snopes.com page which informs us that "These images are actually photographs of tornadoes and other extreme weather phenomena taken by storm chaser Mike Hollingshead in Nebraska and Kansas during the summer months of 2002 and 2004."

I guess my only excuse for the multiple updates today is that I haven't been posting hardly at all lately. Sorry, been distracted...

So It's Like This Now: Selina Jarvis is the chair...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-10-05T20:29:00Z

So It's Like This Now:

Selina Jarvis is the chair of the social studies department at Currituck County High School in North Carolina, and she is not used to having the Secret Service question her or one of her students.

But that’s what happened on September 20.

Jarvis had assigned her senior civics and economics class “to take photographs to illustrate their rights in the Bill of Rights,” she says. One student “had taken a photo of George Bush out of a magazine and tacked the picture to a wall with a red thumb tack through his head. Then he made a thumb’s down sign with his own hand next to the President’s picture, and he had a photo taken of that, and he pasted it on a poster.”

According to Jarvis, the student, who remains anonymous, was just doing his assignment, illustrating the right to dissent.

But over at the Kitty Hawk Wal-Mart, where the student took his film to be developed, this right is evidently suspect.

An employee in that Wal-Mart photo department called the Kitty Hawk police on the student. And the Kitty Hawk police turned the matter over to the Secret Service...

Read more about the ridiculous paranoid state the country is in at progressive.org. I suppose it's a good thing that I have a digital camera and don't need to develop my film at Walmart - otherwise I'd have been dragged off long ago:

I wonder whether this sort of thing will ever happen on flickr? Or whether, perhaps, it already has? Probably not - the flickr folks are too cool for that sort of thing. Chilling though. This is how it starts.

Update 10/7: Tomas sent over a boing boing link: "Secret Service demands removal of Bush+Guns collages on Flickr." So now we know.

Investigating this kind of activity is one thing - but you'd think that the Secret Service would know the difference between someone who's legitimately dangerous, and someone who's making a political statement... oh...

This kind of thing really, really scares me.

We Did It.

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-10-04T19:58:00Z

We Did It.

IMG_3171, originally uploaded by squishy.

This Saturday I married the most beautiful girl in the world.

We had a party in South Park & at the Butler and Chef, and I've just spent the weekend surrounded by the most beautiful stylish positive friendly swanky set of friends and family a man could hope for. I'm deliciously unprepared for my feelings about it and am still on cloud9 and unable to do much but swoon - but I'm happy as candles and glad as I could be. Thanks for marrying me Nikki Rodenbeck!

Holy Hell...

from wax to gold

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-09-28T16:41:00Z

Getting There:

The ring that Nikki gave me in July has been melted down & added to the gold that Mike Binnion's used to make our rings, in plenty of time for our party on Saturday.

Friends and family are starting to trickle into town, and what was a low-level hum of weddingweddingwedding is now becoming a full-throated roar.

Wow. This is actually happening.

from wax to gold, originally uploaded by binnion.

eric and nicky get down.jpg

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-09-16T03:22:00Z

Captured On Film:

eric and nicky get down.jpg, originally uploaded by Dr Cory.

So you're looking through photos of burningman on flickr, and you find a photo of yourself and your beautiful fiancee just totally rocking out at a mid-day dance party in the desert. I think this is a good thing.

Mike Migurski is A Smart Cookie: I've been thinki...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-09-16T02:10:00Z

Mike Migurski is A Smart Cookie:

I've been thinking a lot about bureaucratic efficiency in Katrina's wake, and about the different kinds of organizational efficiency. The Grover Norquist / Newt Gingrich calls against government bloat seemed to be well-intentioned, but it's clear from the Department of Homeland Security that the current Admin is looking for top-down efficiency, initiated by fiat and ruthlessly optimized. This seems to have resulted in the kind of brittleness that Bruce talks about, and was predicted by people familiar with distributed networks of any kind.

What would happen if there were a CNO at FEMA? He'd probably be somebody's fuckwit college roommate appointed from the GOP fundraising talent pool, that's what. Brittle.

I've been thinking that a better sort of efficiency is bottom-up, the kind of deep competence practiced by educated, informed people doing their jobs well...

From mike.teczno.com, which Mike is much better at updating, lately, than I am.

Bar Poetry: We must risk delight. We can do witho...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-09-15T02:05:00Z

Bar Poetry:

We must risk delight.
We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment.
We must have the stubbornness
to accept our gladness
in the ruthless furnace of this world.

- Jack Gilbert, from Refusing Heaven. Full text of the poem here.

Found last night on the wall of the Ha Ra in San Francisco, scene of many of my mellower evenings. Copied, by me, on the back of a $8.75 check, written to me, by BART, the shocking inefficiency of which has not as yet subsided in my brain.

Off to Burning Man: We're leaving in a few hours ...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-08-29T19:49:00Z

Off to Burning Man:

We're leaving in a few hours to head out, once again, to Burning Man for a few days. Not sure if we'll stay for the whole thing - we're mainly headed out to see Zach Coffin's Colossus and have some fun.

The project was in the paper today:

Go Zach! Back online next week.

More Pat Robertson: I'm not supposed to use bad w...

Eric Rodenbeck — 2005-08-23T01:01:00Z

More Pat Robertson:

I'm not supposed to use bad words on my blog anymore (my dad found it), so I'll just let this video speak more or less for itself, except to say that for Pat Robertson to openly call for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez doesn't sound very, um, Christ-like to me. Hah! Pro-life, my ass.