July 2010
1 post
2 tags
When Editor Zealots Attack →
Yehuda Katz has switched to Vim in spite of all the people recommending he switch to Vim:
The last few times someone tried to get me to switch to vim, I issued them a simple challenge. Can you tell me a way to switch that will not significantly reduce my productivity for the first few weeks. It wasn’t a challenge that was intended to fully shut down discussion. When I really thought about it,...
December 2009
15 posts
“If your software is being used in production, it should probably already be...”
– Tom Preston-Werner, introducing Semantic Versioning.
"I Am Locking the Wikipedia Article On Our Sex... →
From McSweeney’s:
Neutral point of view is a fundamental principle of Wikipedia, and no one with a neutral perspective could claim that, over the six months during which we were engaged in a sexual relationship, my performance was “lackluster,” “uninspired,” or “noob-ish” (or, indeed, “noobian”).
3 tags
She Plays For Gamerscore, Whether It's Fun Or Not →
Kotaku profiles a young mom in Indiana who is (more or less) addicted to Xbox Live achievements:
Two hundred thousand. According to MyGamerCard, only one other woman has a total that high (with a second very close to reaching it.) And yet when Kristen brings it up, it’s with a tone of voice that ponders what she will do then. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to get there,...
“After 2 weeks in the store, I had a very bipolar weekend. First, I wrote an epic...”
– One Year in the App Store, from Retro Dreamer’s blog. (via marco).
Re: Dean.
So, in the comment thread of the Zeldman blog post I linked the other day, Dean Allen took a moment to expand on why he shut down Favrd:
I started Favrd solely to furnish me with something amusing to read while waiting in line at the supermarket, calm in the assurance that in doing so I’d never ever see Pete Cashmore’s stupid douchey face or read his stupid douchey toots. It worked great guns...
The NYT interviews Jeff Bezos about the Kindle. →
What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub?
I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully.
What if you dropped your Kindle in the bathtub?
If it’s sealed in a one-gallon Ziploc bag? Why don’t you try that experiment and let me know.
Dean.
Recently you’ve grown more and more concerned about The Pout, which is your term for the way übernerds react to things and situations which, however good they are, have drifted from those individuals’ idea of perfect and thus become intolerable. The next-most-recent example was Joe Hewitt publicly leaving the iPhone platform several weeks ago, ostensibly because Apple’s App...
November 2009
1 post
The guy who know stuff about computers. →
“If I’d just gone into investment banking or some shit, I could spend Thanksgiving watching football and drinking beer.”
October 2009
1 post
#byebyeclover
As of recently the Intelligentsia Coffee near my work has backed away from their ‘all Clover, all the time’ policy, and started to brew their Pick of the Day using a kettle, hot water, unbleached paper filters and ceramic filter baskets. (There’s still a Clover around for when customers request it, but from the looks of it people hardly ever do.)
Why have they dropped the Clover, after...
August 2009
8 posts
The Slatest news. →
A new news aggregator from the folks at Slate, offering summaries of the day’s top news stories, updated in the morning, afternoon and evening. It’s pretty nice. It would be even better if they offered a Slatest-only RSS feed, but hey, it’s their first day.
It’s not quite as curated, but there’s also some quality linkage in Slate’s Twitter stream.
Three key elements of news stories we almost never... →
A great critique of contemporary journalism by Matt Thompson on Newsless.org. And he mentions Atul Gawande’s now-legendary New Yorker article from earlier this year about the cost of health care (which has since been cited by no less an authority than President Obama) as an example of journalism that gets it right. (Via Gruber.)
City Council's $3.7 million allowance: How... →
Dinner at El Bulli →
The story of two dudes’ quest to enjoy a meal at the Greatest Restaurant in The World, told in comic book form.
Note: this writer has dined at El Bulli’s closest American counterpart — Grant Achatz’s Alinea — and found it awesome and a bit exhausting. El Bulli makes a meal at Alinea sound like a mid-day snack.
The etymology of fail. →
Ben Zimmer, filling in for Bill Safire on the NYT’s ‘On Language’ column:
Time was, fail was simply a verb that denoted being unsuccessful or falling short of expectations. It made occasional forays into nounhood, in fixed expressions like without fail and no-fail. That all started to change in certain online subcultures about six years ago. In July 2003, a contributor to...
TIME Magazine Says Exercise Won't Make You Thin →
Or, more accurately, humans aren’t built to lose weight in proportion to how hard we tend to work to get rid of it. Exercise is very important, says the article, but the net effect of intense cardio or circuit training can be that a person overcompensates for the amount of energy they’ve burned by eating more, and worse, food.
So, on Saturday Lucy and I went to brunch at Jam on our way to a comics convention. We ended up furious, hungry and with me having to bow out of the comic con trip because by the time we got out of there, I had no time to make it to Rosemont and back before a 3 PM appointment.
A previous version of this post went into great detail about why I was so frustrated with them, in a way that may or may...
July 2009
6 posts
"I wanted to go to Disneyland." →
There are plenty of funny-disturbing anecdotes in this Foreign Policy list of the “world’s worst sons” — that is, sons whose depraved antics are made possible by their powerful parents’ wealth and influence — but the topper has to be this one about Kim Jong Nam, whose father is North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il:
In 2001, Nam, along with his wife and son, was arrested at...
Urban Outfitters Now Sells Fixed Gear Bikes →
Note that it’s not just that Urban is selling bikes—they’re selling fixies. Proof that either (a) fixed-gear bikes are no longer deck enough to be a true hardcore hipster signifier, or (b) Urban Outfitters is more hipster-hardcore than previously suspected. (Via @ejacqui)
Jeffrey Zeldman: "HTML 5 is a mess. Now what?" →
Less an opinion than a summary of the discussion that’s flared up since XHTML2 was killed earlier this month.
As this developer sees it, a lot of people seem to have confused a couple of awesome HTML5 features — standards-based video embedding, client-side database support, cool new structural tags like header — for the spec as a whole. The new HTML 5 features are undeniably awesome,...
June 2009
1 post
New Super Mario Bros Wii, the trailer
→
New Super Mario Bros. for the DS was absolutely my favorite video game of 2006. The only game I’m looking forward to more than this one is The Beatles: Rock Band.
May 2009
3 posts
The Life of a TV Series, in Four Stages →
From Canada’s National Post, a fairly good explication of how good series go bad, even if it does cite as examples shows I wouldn’t be caught dead watching like Without A Trace:
The history of a TV series, like the history of a nation or an art movement, falls into four periods — primitive, classic, baroque and decadent.
This more or less conforms to what I’ve...
The Japanese, They Fear The Internet →
Japanese Internet users use fake names and pictures, obfuscate their e-mail addresses and never leave content laying around for people to find, let alone search. Néojaponisme explains the reasons why. (via The Morning News)
Norway Thrives by Going Against the Tide →
How do you say “schadenfreude” in Norwegian?
April 2009
2 posts
Are App Store Customers Good Customers? →
Garrett Murray, who makes the wonderful iPhone web stats app [Ego](http://ego-app.com/), is losing his patience with Apple’s molasses-slow review process for app updates, and the bitchy customer feedback that process creates:
> Sounds horrible to say but it might be true: Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want. With the ridiculous approval process leaving...
Listen
March 2009
2 posts
Scrabble Words Are Overvalued? Nuh Za! →
The Wall Street Journal is on to my Scrabble strategy:
“Za,” “qi” and “zzz” were added recently to the game’s official word list for its original English-language edition. Because Z’s and Q’s each have the game’s highest point value of 10, those monosyllabic words can rack up big scores for relatively little effort
MacHeist 3: 12 10 Mac apps, $39 →
The ever-controversial MacHeist is back, and this year I actually recommend it. For 39 bucks—25% of which goes directly to one of ten very worthy charities—you get a variety of great Mac shareware apps, most of which retail for more than what you’re paying for the bundle. This includes such designer-friendly tools as Acorn (a great, simple image editor for when Photoshop is just too much...
February 2009
6 posts
xkcd Discovers Kindle's Secret →
Safari 4 Beta →
Rockin’ new version of Apple’s top-notch web browser. Top new features: a “Top Sites” thumbnail view of your most-visited/favorite sites, improved JavaScript performance and a new “tabs on top” toolbar style.
HFCS-Free 'Throwback' Pepsi and 'Mountain Dew... →
Of course, what’ll really blow consumers’ minds is being reminded that Mtn Dew used to have vowels in it.
WatchLadies and gentlemen, our loyal opposition.
Coffee FTW.
Today isn’t the first time Gaper’s Block’s Drive-Thru food blog has annoyed me, but it’s the first time their hipster-populist bent has led them to blow it on an article concerning my favorite beverage: coffee.
The post in question is about Intelligentsia’s recent moves to replace cheap drip coffee with brewed-to-order cups made in their Clover machines at all their...
Textual Misconduct →
Dahlia Lithwick reports on local officials’ disturbing trend toward charging teenagers who send each other naked pictures of themselves as (yes) kiddie pornographers.
December 2008
2 posts
Jennifer Aniston: hardest-workin' woman in show... →
Ken Levine (a TV writer who worked on Cheers and Frasier) can be a smartass, a curmudgeon, or often both. But he’s right on the money here about why an actress who has yet to star in a single hit movie is nonetheless a major star.
Lawyer Seen as Bold Enough to Cheat the Best →
Federal authorities have been tracking what they describe as a brazen swindle of some of New York’s savviest investors by one of New York’s more accomplished lawyers. Mr. Dreier has been charged with multiple frauds in the United States and a related crime in Canada, and is being held without bail in Manhattan.
In court last week, prosecutors said their count so far put the money missing at $380...
GiftBox: Now available for iPhone →
My first iPhone app is finally on sale! GiftBox (iTunes link) is a simple holiday gift list, making it easy to keep track of who you’re shopping for, what you’re getting them and which items you still need to pick up.
GiftBox 1.0 sells for $1.99, and updates to any 1.x release will be free of charge. (Version 1.1, with a bunch of crazy new improvements, is already in private beta.)
24ways is back! →
My favorite nerdy holiday tradition, 24ways is an advent calendar for web developers, with a different cool technique, approach or treatise published each day. Drew McLellan starts off the 2008 series with an article on smooth design hand-overs. Squee!