Hacking Homelessness at Business Rocks

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

What do you get when you combine a hundred hackers with a bunch of business billionaires? Just maybe a solution for global homelessness!

Manchester, UK, April 15, 2016:  At 9:00 a.m. on April 21, the Business Rocks conference in Manchester will welcome the 48-hour Hackathon for Homelessness, bringing together hackers from around the globe, billionaire business leaders, and international activists to collaborate on producing a technological solution for the growing problem of global homelessness.
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Snap, Crackle, Broken!

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(Revisiting an anecdote … other projects have my attention at the moment.)

My lust for toys went through phases when I was a kid, from action dolls to Matchbox cars to magic kits to a brief fling with fully functioning model trains, to video games.

The most “useful” action doll was “Stretch Armstrong,” which was the one doll that lived up to its name and moved just like the cartoon character. It stretched. Thus, it was “realistic.” One of my friends had one of these. The least useful was the “bionic man” Steve Austin doll, which was easily broken yet completely indestructible. His bionic eye was not a telescope but instead a simple hole drilled through his head with a glass tube inserted. The tube was cloudy with dust within months or minutes of opening the doll’s box. Thus, it was “real” as opposed to “realistic.” And that of course was the doll I owned.
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Today in History: April 15

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Joey Ramone died 15 years ago today.

The Ramones made an artistic statement out of the concept of limitations—both self-imposed limitations (two-minute songs) and those forced on them by the fact that none of the members knew much more about music than they wanted to be stars by making music—and that statement still reverberates, almost 40 years on. I just listened to a eulogy for Joey Ramone by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, and Jello is as moving about Joey Ramone as Jello Biafra will ever allow himself to be.

In his huge book about punk rock and its antecedents, “Lipstick Traces,” Greil Marcus mentions the Ramones but once, in a tossed-off joke that is both punk in its sharp shot and a bit of a punking-out: “‘Beat on the brat/With a baseball bat’—what could be more punk than that? Not stopping there—and that is where the Ramones stopped for years.” Yet Joey Ramone, so awkward on stage that he owned it, unschooled in singing yet embodying a sound, really had aspirations, which he met, as a crooner (“What a Wonderful World” below the fold):
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