this was the highlight of my day
via www.sippey.com
via www.sippey.com
Do not look at the audience as you walk out onto the set. Look only at the familiar face of Jon Stewart. Know that he will get you through this. Trust in him.
via therumpus.net
In designing a computer “for the rest of us”, finally, 25 years after promising to do so, perhaps the best analogy for the iPad, as a product designed for everyday people, is actually the AK47, or in car terms, the Mini, 2CV or perhaps Trabant.
"A few observations" about the iPad, including the crucial question, "What's going on" with the horrible Notes, Calendar, and Contacts interfaces?
(Is it me, or does this "Blog It" format obscure the central link in these posts?)
Last night I dreamed I met Steve Jobs. We happened to be sitting near each other at a restaurant or something. I wasn't going to talk to him (I was sure I'd have the worst case of celebrity dumbstruck) but, for some reason I can't remember, he was interested in me. We ended up having a nice chat, expressing a lot of mutual respect. After that we hugged for a long time.
via www.adamrice.org
Check it out, I called the name two years ago.
Update: I had the name right in 2002!
Dear FTP user:
You are receiving this e-mail because one or more of your blogs at Blogger.com are set up to publish via FTP. We recently announced a planned shut-down of FTP support on Blogger Buzz (the official Blogger blog), and wanted to make sure you saw the announcement.
Blogger’s FTP support enabled this web logger to move randomWalks from a subdomain at pitas to its very own dot com.
I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:
Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”
And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”
For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”
And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”
Apple seems to also view this as an accessory. What this needed to be was a computer. A new, better, more relevant computer, but a computer. That Apple expects people to sync this to another computer is either profoundly short sighted, or just stupid. Neither of which feels like the Apple I know. By positioning the iPad as peripheral, Apple took what should have been a really cheap, amazing computer in a world of terrible cheap computers, and instead positioned it as a really expensive toy.
Justin Spohn has written the best analysis of the iPad yet.
Aside from the deeply flawed introduction, I haven't heard a single legitimate complaint about the device that can't be solved in software. Even Justin's concern about iPad as peripheral, which I share, can be solved by moving the hub of the digital lifestyle into the cloud.
I suggest you stop what you are doing and go read Axe Cop.
[I hope for] an app that, when clicked, will snap off every television in every restaurant, lobby or waiting area within a mile. I will trade my children for this. Is that what you meant? Or did you mean PhotoShop compatibility?
Very funny, Mr. Breathed! I want that, too.
Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.
When Kathie Lee Gifford said “night blogging” on the Today Show, we knew that Party Rats had altered reality and nothing would be the same again.
With the exception of those in the “dock” area (Phone, Mail, Messages, and Safari) which I consider crucial to the entire point of even having an iPhone, I am going to clear everything from the home screen. Any apps that get accessed more than once in the course of the next week will be allowed to come back.
via minimalmac.com
This is great. I am going to do this right now. I wish the Dock worked this way. I wish iTunes worked this way. I wish my bookmarks worked this way. I wish my email worked this way. I wish everything worked this way, automatically. They promised us adaptive systems!
I made a modest amount of money telling old media companies how they should approach the web, then a similar amount of money hanging around while they didn't do it.
I spent days at a time sitting at home alone, getting high or drunk, playing videogames, watching television, ordering delivery falafel, and wasting time on the internet.
I shared some ketamine with a lesbian who proceeded to get up from my bed, vomit into my sink, and then pass out. I scooped the thick vomit from my sink to my toilet with my bare hands. Hours later, after I passed out, I woke to find her playing with my genitals. She told me the next morning that she'd "had a nice time."
The End of the 00s: Made in New York, by Joel Johnson | The Awl
"dirty and nerdy", "Joel Johnson's '00s look-back for the Awl is the white hot core of narcissistic, wasted-decade hedonism".
We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation. The ability to operate with confidence in cyberspace is critical in a modern society and economy. I will be giving an address next week on the centrality of internet freedom in the 21st century, and we will have further comment on this matter as the facts become clear.
via www.state.gov
Call me naive but I always figured "cyberwar" was a lot of hype. I'd been sitting on this post because I wanted to dig up a crazy discussion I'd come across where an IT guy at a human rights organization in Washington DC described an amazing series of attacks that seem to be connected to this, featuring pixel-perfect phishing emails and toxic PDFs attached to emails with spoofed senders, timed to coincide with expected communications. Really intense. But I can't find it.
Note: this is bigger than Google:
At least 34 companies -- including Yahoo, Symantec, Adobe, Northrop Grumman and Dow Chemical -- were attacked, according to congressional and industry sources. Security experts say the attacks showed a new level of sophistication.
We are naked beings and nothing has any meaning. We only fabricate things to help us be more removed from nature. Humans are like the prodigal sons of Earth – moving away from their mother to spend her fortunes, only to return in death as the stripped down and barbaric beings we once were. So to get closer to true nature? Burn your clothes and belongings and money, have a sharp chiseled stone to catch food and a grass hut to keep shelter! Or realize we live a world that is consumed by false beliefs and agreements and try to live your life without taking it all too seriously.
The right way to do it is to hold people accountable, to really restrict the number of things that you say to them, and to decide on the one or two things that are the most important. And then when you meet with them, you always bring back the conversation to that one thing. You have to do that consistently for over a year before you start having an impact.
via www.nytimes.com
Go get yourself a comic book, or any other rectangle that measures roughly 10” on the diagonal. Hold it as though you’re reading what’s on the surface.
You see the problem? Your fingers get in the way. Think about how big that surface is, too. That’s a lot of acreage to scan, looking for the right buttons to push.
While you’ve got it in your hands, imagine that it’s a sheet of thin steel. That’s heavy, isn’t it? Hard to hold up for long periods of time.
Think about how a user interface would have to incorporate those observations. Now imagine that you’ve been doing this experiment for four years and not four minutes.
via www.suntimes.com
It seems to me the hardest thing about doing great industrial design is having sufficiently high standards and taking the time to meet those standards. Which honestly doesn't seem that hard. How come no one can compete with Apple?
I dreamed I got a box of Chuckles with five licorice squares, and in my dream I exalted: "Finally!"
No longer able to eat or drink, Roger Ebert remembers.
Just as the three-dimensional world can be imagined as a cross-section through a four-dimensional world, so might individual consciousness be simply a slice of a higher form of conscious existence.
When architecture did not suffice, Claude Bragdon began to arrange festivals where people would perceive transcendent realities collectively through song.
?!
Sandy Isenstadt reviews "the first book-length treatment of Bragdon and his world", a biography by Jonathan Massey.
wil wheaton loves avatar
The best thing about Avatar is that it imagines a world where a program to breed Thundercats with Smurfs has been successful. SCIENCE!
via twitter.com
It's all true: it could well be titled "Dances with Thundersmurfs", and it's astonishingly delightful. Go for the 3D.
I was really struggling with the idea that I was going to live in Arlington. I drew a line through ‘one year’ and wrote ‘six months.’ I was there for 21 years.
Ian MacKaye on the Dischord house, The Orange Line Revolution - Music - Washington City Paper
The Black Book, which was first published 35 years ago, was like a scrapbook of the African-American experience
via www.npr.org
There's a certain way you can kind of move in and out of yourself, probably, to win consistently, that may be a little bit like writing fiction.
via David Foster Wallace in transcription at NPR.org. Huh, transcripts are free now. This is actually worth listening to, for the moment Scott Simon is caught off guard when Wallace mentions watching porn.