Hello! to the fellow tumblers who added me as a friend over the past weeks.

こんにちは友人として私をここ数週間で加えたtumblersに。- 私の悪い日本語を赦免しなさい

Lifestream: streaming life matter across the web since 2007

Hi I'm Gavin and this is my tumblelog. Thoughts, links, photos and quotes automagically find their way in here. Only the last 15 posts are listed on the front page. Use the "next" button at the bottom to navigate to previous posts.

Ants and grasshoppers
Free Rice

FreeRice has two goals:

  1. Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
  2. Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.

This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide.


Facebook vs Opensocial

In 1995, Microsoft believed that its proprietary development tool, codenamed “Blackbird”, would be the dominant platform for creating rich online experiences. While it would eventually evolve into a tool that created reasonably standard HTML, Blackbird’s ability to make attractive and pleasing aesthetic experiences for MSN was considered a no-brainer to replace regular HTML for anything that needed to seem polished. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption at a time when most browsers were showing ugly text on a plain grey background with almost no advanced layout or design.

In 1999, AOL believed that its proprietary development tool, called RAINMAN (Remote Automated INformation MANager) would be the dominant platform for creating rich online experiences. While it would eventually be replaced by tools that created reasonably standard HTML, Rainman’s ability to make attractive and pleasing aesthetic experiences that integrated seamlessly into the AOL client was an effective replacement for HTML for tens of millions of users who wanted a polished and social first experience on the Net in the late 90s as they first got online. This wasn’t an unreasonable constraint to impose on the experience at a time when having a rich interactive experience meant downloading complicated browser plugins for video, or configuring temperamental client software just to read email.

AOL was always secretive about Rainman, and remains so to this day, even though Rainman has been largely retired in favor of standard HTML, which has let AOL open up much of its proprietary content to the public web. But Microsoft really wanted to get the word out about Blackbird. There were even conferences for developers, to promote Blackbird for their applications…

It’s not true to say that Facebook is the new AOL, and it’s oversimplification to say that Facebook’s API is the new Blackbird, or the new Rainman. But Facebook is part of the web. Think of the web, of the Internet itself, as water. Proprietary platforms based on the web are ice cubes. They can, for a time, suspend themselves above the web at large. But over time, they only ever melt into the water. And maybe they make it better when they do.

Anil Dash

“It s amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper.”
— Jerry Seinfield
“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.”
— Abbie Hoffman
Change the game

When you destroy the barriers in an existing industry, everyone loses… except you.

What are the things you expect to have a logo on and what without? Would you pay more for chicken that has a logo imprinted on its thigh? Or sofa with a designer label right smack in the middle?

You’ll want your diamond ring to be free of any logo yet you’ll never touch a watch with any logo. Food for thought.

“Only the shallow know themselves.”
— Oscar Wilde
“The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else.”
— Umberto Eco
“Life is pleasant. Death is peaceful. It’s the transition that’s troublesome.”
— Isaac Asimov
“The cat could very well be man’s best friend but would never stoop to admitting it.”
— Doug Larson
“The world is round; it has no point.”
— Adrienne E. Gusoff
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
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