August 2009
1 post
May 2009
1 post
My First Omegle Chat
Stranger: Game?
Me: Risk.
Me: Movie?
Stranger: Blade.
[System] The other party has disconnected
February 2009
1 post
January 2009
1 post
December 2008
4 posts
Overheard at the office
Person 1: "What's the new version of Word?"
Person 2: "Word? .... XP? Vista?"
Person 1: "Vista!"
(The quote isn't meant to make fun of these two, I just enjoyed how their conversation went fluidly since they shared the same misunderstanding about Word v. Vista. Or maybe Person 2 was just really smart and knew Person 1 wasn't asking about Office.)
Information Workers
Everywhere I turn I see information workers constrained by their inability to use & understand technology. Ease of use problem? Used to be.
The tasks these people are trying to get done are increasingly complex, and I feel they need to invest the time in learning some of the building blocks of technology. Want to edit video? You’re going to need to know something about moving around...
October 2008
2 posts
marco:
“For those hurt by the financial crisis, a coin is no longer required.” — iFixit on removing the battery cover on the new MacBooks
Assuming you were swapping in a new battery, a coin was never required: the flat, round corner of the replacement battery fits right into the lock’s groove. (At least this is the case on my PowerBook G4.)
Cape Farewell - Infuriating image policy
There’s an amazing project called Cape Farewell, where a bunch of artists, writers, scientists, etc gather on a boat once a year and sail to the Arctic to get inspired. Their web site is a little confusing, but basically it’s an annual expedition, and they produce tons of great material each time they go.
Except it can’t be shown.
They only put out playing-card sized images...
September 2008
11 posts
SNL: Our link to Palin
Forgive me for getting way too academic about Saturday Night Live, but I’ve been forwarded the Palin/SNL skits by just about everyone I know, and I got to thinking this morning: these are funny, but why do they have such massive appeal?
I think the reason is this: we all want to understand Sarah Palin, but can’t, because she’s from Alaska, and most of us have no idea what...
Radars Taken Out by Arctic Warming →
Military sites are now under attack, not from terrorists, or some rogue nation, but… global warming. Does this mean we can redirect some defense spending to climate issues?
Before sitting down to watch tonight’s debates, I tried to clear my mind of my Obama support and pretend I was an undecided voter.
From that stance, I felt the debate was a draw. Neither candidate seemed significantly more adept at addressing tonight’s issues than the other. Without knowing details of the situation in the middle east, or the underpinnings of the Wall St collapse, I...
Remember the days when you would go to a website and they would say “we’ve got a ton of links to sites about the topic you’re interested in!” and you sort of felt like you’d made progress but looking back you now realize how useless those sites were? Yeah, it’s nice that the Internet has some real content now.
Tabs & Threads - like a reality hug from Google
I am loving the fact that Chrome puts tabs in their own threads.
I haven’t had Chrome crash on me yet, but it is still so reassuring that I can open 50 tabs and not worry about the whole thing coming down in a fireball on that 51st tab, causing me to lose hours of work. Sometimes my stack just gets pushed really high, and that’s just the way it is — I’ll pop stuff off as...
Five Guys Napkins Diet
One should not eat fast food too often. Here’s an idea for a diet to keep you on schedule, assuming the only fast food you eat is Five Guys.
Go to Five Guys. Have a burger, and keep the spare napkins they give you. Bring the napkins home, and use them with your regular dinners. When you run out of napkins, it’s okay to go back to Five Guys.
TNDA: Three Non-Descript Adjectives
I am hereby coining a new Internet acronym (“initialism” to you querulous Wikipedians).
TNDA: Three Non-Descript Adjectives
For example, “simple, fast, effective” or “agile, robust, secure.” For some reason in the tech world, adjectives always come in sets of three and are rarely specific enough to convey any actual information.
For example, Microsoft (the...
World of Good →
eBay has a relatively new site called World of Good that allows you to buy all kinds of products that have a “positive impact” on the planet. Many of their products no doubt bring much more social benefit than Big Box alternatives, but in terms of environmental impact, don’t forget it’s better to buy nothing at all than something made “eco friendly.”
Put...
Why I don't read TechCrunch
“[Google] Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows.”
-Michael Arrington, TechCrunch
Via Marco, who linked to Ted Dziuba, who opines, “What an absolute infant.”
“R3M, also known as Remote Reservoir Resistivity Mapping, uses a deep-towed...”
– Sci-fi or reality? The latter. ExxonMobil is probing the Earth’s seabed so they can “reduce our impact on the environment.”
“You must have either a demonstrated track record of world-class ability in your...”
– Careers page for Nanosolar, which is sitting on top of half a billion dollars of venture capital. Nanosolar is one of many renewable energy startups pursuing thin-film solar.
August 2008
22 posts
Evernote: your external brain is really smart →
Take notes from Mac, Win, Web, and iPhone, three content types: text, picture, and audio recording. Peak feature: hand writing recognition in photos.
I scribbled some visual ideas (graphs) on a piece of paper, snapped it with my iPhone, uploaded it, and could search within the text I had scribbled right away. To get the same results without Evernote I would have had to go home, remembered how my...
Loopt's branding challenge
Been trying Loopt with my iPhone. This is a service that lets you share your physical location with friends quickly, along with a little status update like “getting tanked.”
I’ve told a couple of people about Loopt, and said something like “You should try Loopt, it lets people see each other’s location.”
This does not go over. A mildly indignant, “so,...
Wikipedia lists the following synonyms for “telecommuting”:
telecommuting
e-commuting
e-work
telework
working at home (WAH)
or working from home (WFH)
These are all horrible. We need a nicer term to make this attractive.
Why Paste without Style is Better
A lot of programs these days paste-with-style by default. This is really annoying and, IMHO, bad design.
In reality, it’s rare that I style text. I almost always use the default style of the editor I’m writing in. This is true for just about everyone as well. Most poeple write way more unstyled words in a day than they do styled.
Unfortunately, when I paste text, the destination...
Cellies & coffee
I’ll keep this short: the reason you should not talk on a cell phone in a coffee shop is that it’s very difficult for other guests to tune out half a conversation. Frequent interruptions in silence are very distracting; a regular two person conversation is not.
All laptops should have tiny auxiliary batteries
I once owned a Dell Latitude CSx laptop that had a feature I loved — a small auxiliary battery that would keep the RAM alive for about 60 seconds while you swapped out the main battery. I haven’t seen that feature on any other laptop ever. It was such a life saver. Finding a power outlet or shutting down is always a much bigger hassle than it should be.
iPhone auto configures Gmail - almost too smart
I got an iPhone this weekend. It did something that kind of freaks me out.
It saw I had a Gmail account under POP3 in Mail.app on my Mac, so it set up the same account on the iPhone. Using IMAP.
It recognized that my address is Gmail, and knew what settings to use for IMAP instead of POP3. I googled, and confirmed this was a recent feature Apple included, just for Gmail.
One of the interesting...
Mojave Experiment →
Microsoft’s ad campaign for Vista, in which they film people who have heard Vista sucks (but not used it) and show their positive reactions to the OS. I just… can’t… quite express in words how funny this is.
No doubt you’ll get some folks who have a good time with Vista, and a lot more who will be positive in friendly, face to face interviews. (Especially after...
“Assume the train misses him by an infinitesimal amount and all those other...”
– Tech Interview Puzzles
Madder than Your Average Mashup: AutoRock →
With regard to musical mashups, as someone on the Internet once said, “Anyone can throw some rap lyrics over an 80s song.” There are lots of good mashup artists, but this DC local — AutoRock — produces truly exceptional work, IMHO. I haven’t seen him live yet, but plan to at the next opp (unfortunately I only know about two people who would be interested in this...
GT's Girls of Gaming →
I guess the game industry just gave up on getting regular girls to play video games on their own and decided to start paying for a boob infusion.
July 2008
9 posts
“You get mistaken for strangers by your own friends.”
– From The National’s haunting track, “Mistaken for Strangers,” currently available on their MySpace page. This, my friends, is a talented band. I think this line is especially appropriate for D.C.
Music for adults
Today I decided I wanted to listen to something totally different. I mean completely, 100% off my usual music radar. Way the hell out there.
Enter: Miley Cyrus. My understanding is she’s the reigning overlord of the under 15 world. Definitely unexplored territory. Anyway. Dear lord, do they compresss the hell out of this music. Every track is just a wall of sound (and not in a good M83...
Quake III Arena skills about to pay off
In taking a Monday morning “breather,” (which I do online; a little twisted I admit) I learned that id Software is working on the next Quake project, called Quake Live. It’s some kind of heavy wrapper for Quake III Arena which adds all sorts of stats and human networks and structure to the experience outside the game, so you can learn that you are currently the world’s...
Huge victory in eating
Well my iPhone adventures may not have lived up to my expectations, I totally won on value of food eaten today:
Breakfast: Trader Joe’s maple pecan clusters, with milk, and whole wheat toast with jam (probably around $2)
Lunch: Potbelly meatball sandwich, with (superb!) vanilla shake $7.50
Dinner: Thai X-ing’s chicken in peanut sauce, with mango & sticky rice for dessert - $14
...