Tue
Sep
30
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 it’s like to live there. There’s something about the way she acts and speaks that just puts her a little outside of mainstream American characteristics.
Tina Fey has stepped in to be a sort of intermediary, or “interpreter,” for Sarah Palin. We’ve all seen SNL, so we can relate to Tina, and we trust her, in turn, to be a funny-but-somewhat-truthful Sarah Palin. It’s a lot easier to get Tina than Sarah Palin herself, and particularly since we’re aware that it’s only an approximation, it’s good enough.
What this means is that when voters go to the polls, I bet many will go with a mental image of Tina-as-Palin moreso than Palin-as-Palin. VPs rarely decide the outcome of the election, so it’s no big deal, but it’s still a pretty great twist to this race.
Fri
Sep
26
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 couldn’t tell who was right and who was wrong.
I’m sorry my fellow Obama maniacs, this was just how it came out to me. I will continue to knock on doors for my man. I’m just saying, it wasn’t the smack down I was expecting.
Tue
Sep
23
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.
Mon
Sep
22
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 I can, but it’s going to take me all day. I need my browser to stay up during that time.
I think this shows how different Google’s development mindset is from Microsoft. Google is saying, “We realize we aren’t perfect; our browser will crash sometimes. We’ll acknowledge that and minimize the damage when it does.” Compare that to Microsoft’s implementation — some web site crashes Explorer and your Start Bar disappears. You can’t get to anything, let alone the web.
Thanks Google. Now just make a plugin API for Chrome, wouldya?
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.
Fri
Sep
19
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 chief progenitor of this idiom) says that Microsoft Project brings “usability, power, and flexibility” to your project management. Thanks for the inside scoop, guys.
The truth is, one screen shot of your app tells me more than all your white papers put together. Based on that screen shot I can tell what it does, how easy it is to use, how solid the underlying design is, when it was developed, and, most importantly, whether I want to buy it.
“[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.”
