July 2010
1 post
“I wouldn’t say that to a monkey!”
– Overheard, young girl to brother
June 2010
4 posts
r203 - jsvectoreditor - Project Hosting on Google... →
My first major contribution to an open source project in a bit
“I am not commited to anything spatula related”
Motto of the Opossum
Motto of the Opossum: Biss ersten, dann Fragen stellen
May 2010
1 post
April 2010
3 posts
Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can’t... →
This is just another example of why I am leaving Apple’s Touch OS (iPhone, iPod touch, iPad) ecosystem. I wish this were the only example, but it isn’t. When the stars align I will be moving over to Android (which I like).
I just wish I didn’t feel like I were being forced to…
Google accused of YouTube ‘free ride’ (FT.com) →
My favorite part of this article is this line:
Some European telecoms groups fear Google will reduce them to “dumb pipes”
To which all I can say is Too Late. Guess what? That is what the internet is. The sites you connect to and the information you get back are important.
The pipe? Not so much. Welcome to 1995…
Insane Clown Posse and Miracles
The impossible has happened bacause I am about to link to both Insane Clown Posse AND Cracked. These are two things I generally like to avoid. ICP more than Cracked. But only in the sense that one or two times a year I get suckered into reading Cracked, and the last time I seriously listened to ICP was about 10 years ago because I was curious about them, and the lyrical charm of...
March 2010
1 post
“I don’t want to your whatever, just because you don’t like it”
– Overheard
February 2010
2 posts
8 tags
Don't call the apps Apple pulled Porn...
There have been a number of stories about Apple banning/removing “overtly sexual” content from the app store. To my knowledge it started with this post from TechCrunch
I think this is a problem for a number of reasons, from the fact that I don’t see a problem with this content being available (there are parental controls after all), to the fact that Apple had approved these...
January 2010
2 posts
December 2009
5 posts
Hearing and Touch
The old saw is that blind people have better hearing. It seems to make sense, right? The brain and body has left over capacity and a vital need for more information, so — like a muscle — it gets stronger at the remaining senses.
It doesn’t really work that way though. What does happen is that when you lose a sense we have the option to pay more attention to the other senses. ...
Dear golf sims...
Dear golf sims, lens flair used to be cool. It isn’t now.
November 2009
3 posts
It is as though we don't want to move beyond the...
I am listening to This Week In Google (episode 18) and they got into a sidebar complaining about those annoying things that Microsoft Word forced on them that they don’t want, things like Smart Quotes and curly apostrophes and the like. You know the things it is supposed to do for the good of humanity.
I am not kidding about that last line. The written word has evolved over a long period...
October 2009
2 posts
86-year-old’s plea for gay marriage becomes... →
It is men like this who make me so glad that I am an American. It is republicans like this who make me believe our system can work.
August 2009
2 posts
Lord help me I just quoted .38 Special in a serious conversation…
July 2009
4 posts
ross:ching » Death Cab for Cutie’s Little Bribes →
I came accross this listening to the RED Center podcast. Ross Ching took a Cannon 5D Mk II and made a home made video for the Death Cab for Cutie’s song Little Bribes (total budget $75).
And to make the story even more amazing the band decided to make it their official music video for the song. So he made his $75 back (and presumably a bit more…)
June 2009
2 posts
Hulu - Virtuality →
Watch this. Honestly, you need to, it is fantastic and the only way to convice FOX to pick up the show, is to prove that it has the ratings to justify it.
My first rule of e-commerce... →
My first rule of e-commerce is don’t make me create an account just to buy your one and only product. Get over yourselves, you aren’t that important…
May 2009
2 posts
Wrong...
To the morbidly obese man in the “man boobs are sexy” shirt: Wrong.
New, Fast-Evolving Rabies Virus Found →
Great, just what we all needed, and aerosolized version of rabies. Lovely. Luckily skunks don’t normally come up and nuzzle our faces in our sleep.
April 2009
3 posts
I'm only going to say this once...
The prostate is *not* “the male g-spot.” The prostate is the prostate. It might be ok to call g-spot (if it does exist) “the female prostate,” but not the other way around. The prostate is the prostate, and isn’t some kind of new discovery. Get it straight, I do not want to have to talk to you about this again!
I’m starting to forget what things feel like
MacHeist is almost over, let the grumbing begin
I frankly don’t get the controversy over software bundles like MacHeist. The gist of the argument seems to be that the MacHeist people are cheapskates who don’t compensate the developers enough. Of course the fact that these developers all knew the terms going in and were not forced to join never seems to sway opinion. The other is that apparently deeply discounting your software...
March 2009
11 posts
Oh Roy...
The Culture of Ownership » Authors Guild, unbelievably, still after Kindle 2
Maybe it was because I was busy, and then sick, that it took me so long to connect the Roy Blount of the Author’s Guild and their recent idiocy regarding text-to-speach to the guy who writes funny and interesting stories and articles (and is a regular on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!).
Every so often...
Accessibility to the Face →
This is hands down the best essay on accessibility I have ever read. Just like curbcuts, accessibility is to the benefit of everyone. As the author points out “Accessibility is about usability.”
As a related aside, Windows got one part of accessibility — keyboard navigation — right from day one (more than 20 years ago) that Apple still has issues with. It...
Things sneak up on you
Things sneak up on you when your hands don’t feel like your hands and you do your best not to think — as you try and sew a button — this used to be so easy
“I worked briefly with Belinda Carlisle many years back, playing the keyboards on...”
– Thomas Dolby and really who can blame him…
“I minored in evil mastermind in college”
Flying Rodents... →
I cannot express the joy this image brings each time I see it…
Biblical Proportions: Ape →
Ape: An animal of the monkey tribe
Um what now? “Monkey Tribe?” I don’t know who wrote this, but they need to understand that being an ape is not a lifestyle choice. It isn’t like there was one big monkey family (hopefully whorshiping a giant golden monkey god, and then one day a group decided to cut off their tails, inject steroids, and said “see ya...
February 2009
10 posts
My email to US Bank support...
(I really did send this via their “contact us link” on the US Bank page)
To whom it may concern—
I appreciate you concern for account security, but I would like to point out two flaws in your current system: 1) You do not allow numbers or punctuation in my password. This inherently limits the strength of the passwords you allow 2) Your system of supplemental questions is...
Bug, Hack, and Kludge...
Kludge (nee kluge) is (I think) the third term of art in its class of word. The first, of course, is Bug (which predates the world of computers). The second would be Hack. With Kludge following close on its heals. There were a number of others that I had learned between Bug and Kludge: Bit, Byte, Word, Hex, Octal, MODEM (as we spelled it then), BASIC, ASCII, etc etc. People assumed I just...