Angry Rage Monkey

"I wouldn’t say that to a monkey!"

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:53:36 -0700

“I wouldn’t say that to a monkey!”

- Overheard, young girl to brother

r203 - jsvectoreditor - Project Hosting on Google Code

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:41:08 -0700

r203 - jsvectoreditor - Project Hosting on Google Code:

My first major contribution to an open source project in a bit

"I am not commited to anything spatula related"

Tue, 15 Jun 2010 23:55:30 -0700

“I am not commited to anything spatula related”

Motto of the Opossum

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 20:50:59 -0700

Motto of the Opossum: Biss ersten, dann Fragen stellen

The definition of insanity

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 09:45:05 -0700

The definition of insanity

Parting is such sweet sorrow…

Thu, 27 May 2010 19:30:05 -0700

Parting is such sweet sorrow…

Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can’t get his iPhone cartoon app past Apple’s satire police » Nieman Journalism Lab

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 21:24:31 -0700

Mark Fiore can win a Pulitzer Prize, but he can’t get his iPhone cartoon app past Apple’s satire police » Nieman Journalism Lab:

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)

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:35:42 -0700

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

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 11:24:20 -0700

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 “droppin’ babies out o’ yo’ ass” (Note 1). I have listened to snippets every so often out of morbid curioisity (Note 2)

So I give you the ICP’s recent “Miracles” a more or less generic R&B fueled feel-good rap. Though with more profanity than someone like Dr Dre or Eminem might put into it. Which is saying something. Those f@#king rainbows blow my motherf@#king mind.

It starts OK. As I say it is a big generic, but it has a good beat. I felt a little head bob want to start. And the basic premise is that we are surrounded by miracles and we don’t pay attention to them. Great I agree with that, sure. I am a little surprised the ICP felt they needed to point that out, but hey. And they are all dressed in white, which makes a nice change for them.

But here is the thing, when they say miracles they don’t just mean it in the extraordinary and amazing sort of way, they mean them as straight up miracles. The also include Rainbows, Magnets, “Long-necked Giraffes,” UFOs, crows, ghosts, basic genetics, and their own success on the list. Oh and they accuse scientists of “lying all the time.” Le sigh.

So this is where Cracked comes in. Because they watched the video as well, and then wrote a post called Learn Your Motherf#@kin’ Science: A Textbook for Juggalos. Which is worth reading if only for the reference to “juggaliraffles”

So there you go. (Note 3)

Note 1: Despite going straight for the crude, they do have some skills. Though I doubt that without the whole clown/dark carnival thing they would still be around. They remind me of the heavy metal kids in high school, who would read Micheal Moorecock, Harlan Ellison, and Tolkien and then produce their own mythologies. Ones that were both intriguing and lose enough to find ways of explaining away the shortcomings when you look below the surface

The Dark Carnival is like that. On the surface it sounds interesting, the pace where damned souls go to before they are sent on to hell. Each soul bound to a different ride based on their sins, and watch over by a different Joker. Except, what now? The souls are tortured BEFORE they go to hell to be… TORTURED? Um that doesn’t make a lot of sense. And then they come out with another album that tells more of the story and tries to backfill any flaws to date. Like for example that the Dark Cranival is more like purgatory, and that only some of the Jokers preside over rides, others perform other tasks. Which only raises more questions. They never succeed fully, and so they are past the “Joker Card” phase. Which is probably good because their last album introduced a new non joker entity whose purpose is to clear the Carnival when it gets too crowded. Um what? Best just move on

Note 2: Tough your can’t simply dismiss them. They have been around for something like 15 years now, still producing albums and videos. Even the occasional film. Master P and The Fat Boys are the only other acts I can think of that made a transition into film as themselves (and Master P is a somewhat iffy case for this example, but he has made a boatload of films).

If they were just crude, and didn’t have their own talent (and talented people working with them) they would be gone by now. Take a video like Let’s Go All The Way, in which they take Sly Fox’s original beat and then invert the meaning of the title to mean either adopting the philosophy of the ICP, or to descend into an orgy of violence, or both — I don’t suppose they are mutually exclusive. But the video has high production values and is presented in as friendly and upbeat was as possible, while be chock full of visual contradictions.

Note 3: Yes I know this sounds like I have listened to way more of the ICP that anyone really should. I haven’t. I retain information well, and did some research before writing this. I really must get a life…: Yes I know this sounds like I have listened to way more of the ICP that anyone really should. I haven’t. I retain information well, and did some research before writing this. I really must get a life…

"I don’t want to your whatever, just because you don’t like it"

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:32:44 -0700

“I don’t want to your whatever, just because you don’t like it”

- Overheard

Don't call the apps Apple pulled Porn...

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 12:52:00 -0800

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 apps only to pull them after the fact months later.

As troubling as all of that is, there is something else that I find disturbing: many of the posts and articles I see reporting on this refer to the banned apps as porn. For example John Gruber from Daring Fireball: Apple Removing Porno Apps From App Store

I would like to ask everyone to stop using the word “porn” when describing the apps that have been retroactively banned from the app store.

I don’t think anyone could legitimately call the apps that have been pulled as porn under the definition of pornography (obscene writings, drawings, photographs, or the like, esp. those having little or no artistic merit) or by the law (in the US: based on community standards). Regardless of how you define it, simple nudity, or titillation do not count as pornography.

Nor does Apple allow true pornography on the App Store, and never has. So none of the apps can be legitimately called porn. Quod Erat Demonstrandum, baby.

The apps pulled might be only suitable for adults only, but that is a much larger category than porn.

And as we learn more about what is being retroactively disallowed, we see it extends as far as swimsuits. Which again is a far far larger category than porn.

I think it is also a bit dangerous to blithely call the apps being rejected as porn, because the word holds a special negative place in so many people’s minds. It conjures up images that start with hardcore sex and go far worse. It makes it easy to defend this move as a good thing, and something we need to be protected against (despite the parental controls in the system).

So anyone writing about this issue, please — please! — don’t call it porn, because when you do you are just being lazy and judemental. What is happening is big, it is complicated, and there are a lot of issues involved. So even if you know where you stand, don’t muddy the waters by calling it porn.

Now that I have said that, I would like to suggest one possible reason for this change — at least one beyond the “there have been complaints” reason that Apple seems to have given.

A few days ago Apple quietly announced that they were extending the app store to 13 more countries.

One angle to this move by Apple I haven’t seen mentioned is the fact that the App Store is now available in a number of new countries: Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda.

Many of these countries have very strict rules about what can and cannot be shown. Especially when it comes sexual, nude, semi nude, and suggestive content. In fact, I have an easier time believing the “complaints” came from prudish countries rather than prudish individuals.

I don’t know if we will ever find out exactly why this happened, but I fear it represents a race to the most blad, lowest common denominator content around. A world in which tip calculators rule the earth and the Vargas Girls must go into hiding…

Poor Xena…

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 15:16:35 -0800

Poor Xena…

Why yes I have mounted Lego to my work table

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 08:26:11 -0800

Why yes I have mounted Lego to my work table

Yummy!

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:25:03 -0800

Yummy!

I couldn’t agree more: karmicunderpath: I’m going...

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:17:16 -0800

I couldn’t agree more:

karmicunderpath:

I’m going through a David-Tennant-is-a-mother-fucking-badass phase right now.

Hearing and Touch

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 09:05:27 -0800

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. It is an illusion to think that somehow when we are seeing our hearing is suppressed, or any other combination of senses you like.

It is also a myth that we only have five senses. I have heard different numbers bandied about — seventeen is a common one — but no matter how you decide to count them, there are at least ten.

Personal revelation: I have lost most of the feeling in my hands. I cannot feel texture at all, and my ability to sense hot and cold are greatly muted (I have to examine them periodically to make sure I haven’t cut, burned, or otherwise hurt myself). I often wonder what other people thing when I turn to my wife and say “I think this is soft, right?”

Increasingly I am aware of how important my other senses are to my sense of touch. What I see influences how I think something should feel. The sound generated by my fingers feeds into the mix. Etc. They all work together to give me clues to what something is. But all I truly feel at this point is a memory.

Think of walking in a dark room, especially one we know well. How you rely on your sense of touch and balance, how every sound your hear provides a clue all swirling together until you can almost see.

It is true that we have discreet senses that can operate independent of one another, but that isn’t actually how we work. I submit to you that we really only have one real sense, which is the combination of all of them.

We do not simply see, or hear, or whatever; what we do is to perceive based on the combination of all of our senses, and our memory and experience.

It is the xMas season and time to hang the tree from the ceiling

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 09:26:57 -0800

It is the xMas season and time to hang the tree from the ceiling

You’d better believe it does…

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:56:51 -0800

You’d better believe it does…

Dear golf sims...

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:25:40 -0800

Dear golf sims, lens flair used to be cool. It isn’t now.

It is as though we don't want to move beyond the Apple ][

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:06:52 -0800

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 of time, and gained a number of non-verbal cues to help and ease our understanding of the text. If you went back 50 years and gave someone a book with straight quotes and vertical apostrophes, they would complain.

Computers took that away from us for a while. ASCII did an admirable job of cramming in the essential letters, punctuation, and other glyphs needed by the English language, into a mere 128 character set. And that is what computers — and people — of the Apple ][ generation had to deal with.

And it broke our brains.

We started thinking that was all we needed. Well we could understand needing lowercase letters, and the accents and diacritical marks. Who needed more than that? I mean except for people who don’t use a latin derived alphabet, and people who wanted more subtly in their text, and other freaks like that.

And that kind of thinking has dominated our (the technology) world, with only lipservice to the idea that we should all do our part for localization and internationalization. In the mean time, people who knew better built the web as we know it.

And so you get browsers that do not do the right thing with smart quotes, et al; and who do we blame? Not the browsers for not supporting them, not the web servers for not properly changing them on the fly for browsers that can’t handle them, but the programs that are doing the correct thing.

And this is what frustrates me about my kind — the engineers and technologists — they are used to the status quo, they are too safely placed inside their bubble of people who agree with them, to think challenge their assumptions or fix this kind of thing in a graceful way.

I loved the Apple ][ too, but I grew out of the thinking it forced me into. You should do the same…