Tracy Ruggles › Comments

"So bring it on information flow. Because the faster the river of information flows the more obvious it becomes that trying to control it makes no sense at all. Technology may finally return us to ourselves." - Tracy Ruggles

a great & simple API for adding sparklines via google - Tracy Ruggles

"I've been thinking about audiences, and who artists make art for. When an artist is creating, is she or he thinking about the viewer? Are they thinking about the buyer, the gallery owner? Are they thinking about what their friends and peers might think? Are they thinking abut themselves? When you create a non-commissioned work, who do you think about?" - Melissa from Bookmarklet

... and I love the way these drawings also ask these questions inherently... who is the "I" and the "you" when you're looking at them? It's like an evolution of Magritte's paintings, especially "this is not a pipe" - Tracy Ruggles

go go go small-business entrepreneurs fighting the soul-less corporate schmucks!!! - Tracy Ruggles

"When my son was 3, my wife and I rushed him to the emergency room. Bouncing from couch to chair in our living room, he had slipped and crashed into a coffee table. The pediatrician and the nurse explained how to care for his five stitches. At some point, it dawned on me that neither one made eye contact with me, even after I asked a question. They gave directions to my wife only. Soon after, I was bringing my older son to school, and his teacher asked me: "Would you tell your wife to pack an extra pair of shoes for Jake tomorrow?" Admittedly, I'm not eager to pack the shoes, and my wife and I easily slip into classic gender roles. But at the same time, my better nature cringed. Why should I so easily be let off the hook?" - Melissa from Bookmarklet

Hmmm... I haven't really experienced this too much. I think it has a lot to do with the personalities of the parents. In those "official" situations (emergency rooms, school offices, parent-teacher conferences, cops), someone there usually quickly sizes up who they're dealing with and makes a decision about who is "in charge". Maybe it's just me & my relationship with my wife, but it's been a pretty even split as far as who they think is the more "in charge" parent. - Tracy Ruggles

those little micro pigs are awfully cute... I wonder how easy it is to potty train them and would their little hooves scratch up a hardwood floor? - Tracy Ruggles

This has inspired me to heave this novel back up and dive into its depths and just play play play - Tracy Ruggles

This has inspired me to heave this novel back up and dive into its depths and just play play play - Tracy Ruggles

10 fresh, useful and fun ways to get an outside perspective on your work - Tracy Ruggles

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down. - Tracy Ruggles

A study last year conducted by members of PRS for Music, a nonprofit royalty collection agency, found that of the 13 million songs for sale online last year, 10 million never got a single buyer and 80 percent of all revenue came from about 52,000 songs. That’s less than one percent of the songs. So it was no surprise that The Financial Times reported on Monday that Apple is working with the four largest labels to seduce people into buying more digital albums. It’s too little too late. (Note: I wrote this column while listening to “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill,” the last truly great CD I ever bought. Every track is a gem. When did I buy it? 1999.) - Tracy Ruggles

;) - Melissa

I loved the soft colors of the sand, sea & sky :-) - Tracy Ruggles

I have more .... I upload soon. - Melissa

"After almost 70 years, one of the literary world's great love triangles will finally resolve itself. Eternal teenager Archie Andrews — he of Archie comics fame — has finally chosen a bride. The drama will play out over six issues of the comic book, the first of which is out Wednesday." - Melissa from Bookmarklet

Nobody seems outraged at what I think is the more important question: What's a 17 year old doing getting engaged. :) - Justin

Heh - that's also a sign of good breadcrumbs you left for yourself - Tracy Ruggles

It was a good name, which is a wiki good practice. title search: knock - Adina Levin

I'm just going to put this on an infinite loop as a soundtrack to brilliance - Tracy Ruggles

The twelve leverage points to intervene in a system were proposed by Donella Meadows, a scientist and system analyst focused on environmental limits to economic growth. The leverage points, first published in 1997, were inspired by her attendance at a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) meeting in the early 1990s where she realized that a very large new system was being proposed but the mechanisms to manage it were ineffective. - Tracy Ruggles

We start this week by talking about the songs of the decade. We get that 500 is a lot of them; after all, we only listed 200 songs from the 1960s and that's, like, The Greatest Time in Pop Music History. But there was a much greater variety of music released this decade, and also simply a lot more of it. So we did our best to squeeze in as many highlights as possible. We did, however, generally stick to the format of the 60s list-- short critical pieces on our top 200-- but have added today's extended list of honorable mentions in order to provide a larger pool of tracks for you to hear. Thanks to Lala, this feature doubles as a music library that you can return to over and over. (For a primer on what Lala is and how to use it, click here.) So grab the tracks and arrange them in the order you prefer, revisit old favorites, and discover new ones. And tune in the rest of the week as we count down the rest of our Top 500. - Tracy Ruggles

"From Banksy to Katsu to Iz the Wiz, we often hear about guerilla graffiti artists who've taken their social critiques to the streets with powerful images and strong words. Along a quieter alley, Hungarian artist Edina Tokodi brings her art to the urban landscape in a softer way, but her message is no less provocative." - Melissa from Bookmarklet

Wow! That's so awesome! - Tracy Ruggles

very cool - Steve C

"My family was visiting, and I was planning on taking them to the beach to enjoy the beautiful day when i saw a billboard that made me want to cry. It says “Save the Whales,” with a picture of an overweight woman in the foreground." - tiffany from Bookmarklet

After PETA proposed renaming "Spearfish, SD" to "Sea Kitten, SD" it instantly lost its remaining half-ounce of respect. - Gus

this is really cool. - Melissa

thanks :-) I'm constantly surprised how well my clunky old sony-ericsson phone can take pictures - and that I found myself underneath an amazing color show - Tracy Ruggles

"Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova record and tour together using the name The Swell Season, which is a shorter but far less descriptive moniker than "Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, Who Won Oscars for the Song 'Falling Slowly,' From the Hit Indie Musical Once." So when we informed our coworkers that last Wednesday's Tiny Desk Concert would feature the pair, the response generally ran somewhere along the lines of, "Um, okay. ... Wait, who? THEM? REALLY?"" - Jason Toney from Bookmarklet

this was awesome - Tracy Ruggles

Devastated. I think I've passed anger and am edging into bargaining. Acceptance is a long, long way off. - Akiva Moskovitz

Relieved. :-) - Mathew A. Koeneker

it was an awesome hike up on the marin headlands with 30-40 mph winds & fog - obie thought I was crazy! - Tracy Ruggles

wow...has anyone tried this recipe? Noms! - Anna Lynn M. from Bookmarklet

I'm not crazy about popsicles, but that photo is awesome and I now want to have one of those chocolate-bourbon ones! - Tracy Ruggles

i want. - Melissa

Orange sneakers ... oh yeah! Summer of love. - Kate Foy

Orange? AWESOME those are a PERFECT match for the walls in my sons room! - Nicholas Kreidberg

your avatar totally looks like you!!! - Melissa

I was surprised they had my funky hairline! :-) - Tracy Ruggles

"As government agencies and corporations scramble to cut expenses, one idea gaining widespread attention involves cutting something most employees wouldn't mind losing: work on Fridays. Regular three-day weekends, without a decrease in the actual hours worked per week, could not only save money, but also ease pressures on the environment and public health, advocates say. In fact, several states, cities and companies across the country are considering, or have already implemented on a trial basis, the condensed schedule for their employees." - tiffany from Bookmarklet

I work in a busy accident & emergency dept. and it's 10 hour shift work, but because of the timings between shifts you find you spend all that 'extra time' in bed and socially out of sync with your friends. Personally I want to go back to 12 hour days so I get it out of the way and can enjoy more days off in a row rather than spend one of my days off changing sleep schedules :-\ - CannonGod from BuddyFeed

"Abdul Sattar Edhi has personally washed tens of thousands of corpses that he has rescued from gutters, beneath bridges and from the sea. The 82-year-old Pakistani has devoted his life to the destitute of Karachi, burying the city's forgotten and giving fresh life to its abandoned newborns. His pioneering social work has drawn comparisons to Mother Teresa's. His mission is synonymous with this sprawling port city, where rickshaws bearing veiled women, scooters spewing smoke and drivers pressing palms to horns all squeeze in the narrow streets through spaces as thin as a ray of hope." - Melissa from Bookmarklet

I heard this on NPR a few days ago! I loved him! - Ayşe E.

"The Coen Brothers are already back again with yet another black comedy, titled A Serious Man, following up their CIA black comedy Burn After Reading last year. Out of nowhere comes the first trailer for A Serious Man straight from Apple. Up-and-coming actor Michael Stuhlbarg stars in the lead role as well as funny man Richard Kind as his brother. You probably won't recognize too many people in this, which is probably a good thing. Considering it's the Coen Brothers, they've got some crazy, twisted, dark comedy up their sleeves, so why not let some incredibly talented unknown actors take center stage." - Derrick from Bookmarklet

I still haven't been able to see Burn After Reading but all my so-called friends tell me it's not worth seeing :-( - Tracy Ruggles

totally digging these guys right now - Melissa from Bookmarklet

awww, thanks girlies! Tracy, I found randomly through last.fm of course. So so good on that ambient indie tip. - Melissa

hmm... thinking seriously about how to write songs specific to places - recording them in those spaces and then stringing them together in a here's my response to a movement through space... both through long distances via trains, planes & automobiles and through short distances via foot, bike and piggy back - Tracy Ruggles

Anyone out there know any geohackers who might want to collaborate on an online app specific to this project or a broader approach so other artists can create travel-specific art/music pieces? - Tracy Ruggles