Announces

I’m tired of my artist friends fetishizing pre-web media, feeling that to matter they have to print a book, get published at a magazine, or get funded to film a cinema movie or start a “real” startup. Fuck that.

You know how those over 40 make fluffy pronouncements about new digital literacies?

Well, the new literacy is PUBLISHING: reaching hundreds, thousands, millions through web media, for next to nothing, and learning to hold their attention. It’s only tangentially a technical challenge.

End rant. I love you artist friends.

Harpoon, my GreaseMonkey script to download tweets is fixed (it broke with some minor changes from Twitter). You can also now download your (and your tweeps’) favorites, which are often substantial & valuable cullings (My friend @olifante has already ~2000 great pickings!).

Get it from its UserScripts page.

The rest of the year will be as exciting as always! As I said just a post ago, I’m now in London and for a week more I’ll stay here, culturally my favorite city in the world. The next week I’ll move to Oxford—I’ve often fantasized about living in a university town, this is the university town. In both cities I’ll stay in great rented rooms (cheaper and better than hostels, of which I’ve seen more than my life’s share already)!

By late August I’ll fly to Hong Kong for a few days, the world’s first Special Economic Zone, Friedman’s miracle of capitalism. Then off to Singapore for a month, where I’ll meet her and we’ll stay in a beautiful rented room better than most hotels, a great find. In 1960 S’pore was as wealthy per person as Mexico, 3 decades later it was 4 times wealthier and still is—it’ll be fascinating to witness one of the world’s most succesful countries. Then off to Bangkok for a month, living cheaply, coding lots, and eating delicious Thai food every single meal!

Then 1.5 months to Chiba: Japan again! To live with her, finally learn Japanese (I can’t say I lived in Japan for 7.5 months and still suck so much at it), and perhaps try my hand at the Japanese job market once more. I’ve missed her far too much.

Finally back to Mexico in time for the holidays.

Wish me luck!

I lived for 3 months in Spain. I shared a room with 3 other people in a nice, simple flat in the northeast of Madrid. Less than 10 minutes away walking was a big mall with a cheap hypermarket, my gym, and the local public library. I was very happy.

Canada imposes visa on Mexico.

Effective today, isn’t it shocking, how fast the world can move?
Yesterday, as a Mexican, I was able to travel to Canada without jumping through any hoops (other than border agents) for up to 6 months.

This effectively makes me unable to travel there, my ticket to Canada from London is in just a month, far too little to obtain a visa that even in Mexico can only be processed from Mexico City and that is sure to have a huge backlog with the extremely sudden imposition.

I lose my ticket to Canada and I have to get a ticket to Mexico (there’s no more developed world to visit visafree as a Mexican) in the highest season (>$1000 dollars one-way).

She was literally going to buy today her ticket to Vancouver to meet me.

I’m sad, stunned.
I thought the world was moving in the opposite direction…
Just yesterday, for no particular reason, I was idly daydreaming of a future North American integration.

In the age of globalization, my life is unexpectedly being defined by immigration tensions.

Icons on Arts & Letters Daily is a simple script to add website icons to the links in Arts & Letters Daily. This adds a visual layer to the all-text site that enables you to quickly scan its sources.

I’m going to Lift France 09 tomorrow! Since a big part of my motivation for going was its focus on networking, since they encourage you to fill a profile on their site and over half of the >550 participants actually do it, and since the theme this year is “A hands on future”, I decided to do a quick re-interface their list of participants, which was too unwieldy for me.

Check it out at http://elzr.com/lift

Much improved! http://elzr.com/reader It’s really getting fun now! Now you can really read the whole magazine in a single page! Plus: columns, much better design (section separators!), and… flags!

It’s still a very early release (the columning in particular will be much improved soon) so please be gentle and let me know what you think of all the changes. What do you like? What’s helpful? What would you like to see?

Note that there are some weird bugs in Safari, to be fixed later. And all bets are off on what will happen in IE, I don’t have a machine to try it in for the moment.

See the project’s history at http://elzr.com/posts/reader-economist

The page is pretty heavy, ~250k, but it still loads up in in seconds. It’s still much less than The Economist’s current front page, which overloaded as it is with flash ads, weighs a whopping 4MB!

Backbars on social link-sites is a GreaseMonkey script to turn the headlines and comments of social link-sites into ambient bar charts (of votes/diggs/views/users…) It works on Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow (and MetaFilter now!).

The idea is to give you subtle non-verbal clues to improve your browsing experience almost subconsciously. The backbars don’t replace the count they represent, what they do is convey you its magnitude unobtrusively, and, crucially, compare that magnitude to those around it. So you can now see, almost without thinking, that, say, some comment is popular, but that there’s a comment around that’s twice as popular.

Once you have it, just start browsing at your favorite social link-site: Reddit, Delicious, Digg, Hacker News, and Stack Overflow.




It’s the first release but it’s very usable already, I hope.

I hope you enjoy and find it useful, please let me know what you think of it in the comments.

Something changed,...

..I’m starting to feel like…

..I’m getting the hang of how to live!

Intermittently through the past 6 months, more and more often, and all over the past week, I’ve been glimpsing a day to day life that fulfills me, that I look at and say, yes, this day, this is the life I want to live.

I’m talking about the little things not the Grand Scheme of Life, the micro not the macro, the structure and weave of daily life—what to eat, when to sleep, what to do, what to work on, what to buy, how to relate to other people, how to love, how to exercise, how to rest, how to organize your time, how to fail, how to recover, how to improve, how to find peace and keep it, how to make a routine, how to be stable, how to find flow, how to live.

Of course I’m only starting, and know next to nothing, and have been far too blessed all along, but for the first time I’ve set it all up and all systems seem to be running smoothly. Exhilarating. Like being able to control your non-training-wheels bike for the first time, the wind rushing by.