society

On most sites I visit, error pages are infrequent. On Twitter, problems are so common the error pages have their own cultural currency. Sadly, I still regularly hit errors without such soothing imagery:

Clay Shirky has an incredible article about the Newspaper industry failing to come to terms with its own demise. Gems of wisdom abound throughout, but I found this particularly striking:

Zed Shaw’s NYC VCs Can’t Do Math poses a theory on why California has so many tech startups:

Perhaps Last.fm’s recent revelation will elighten more people to a longstanding reality about the tabloid Techcrunch:

This year’s Halloween Critical Mass was as awesome as always. A few thousand (my guess) people showed up in costumes and lights and (of course) political motifs. After many rides over many years in San Francisco, and a few scary, but important, rides in Manhattan, the SF Halloween Mass is one event I’ll keep showing up to year after year. In fact, it sounds like this year it was the main Halloween event in the city!

If you are being text spammed by a short-code (a mobile number typically 5 digits long), just reply with “STOP”. This should work if it’s a service that cares to not piss off its recipients. This probably won’t work for an annoying relative. In my case, spam was coming from a service called Kadoink, and after I sent “STOP”, I got back a text that said I’d receive no more messages. I suspect this is some sort of industry accepted command: I found it in AT&T’s, What YOU can do to control cell phone spam.