Marco.org

I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Damn it. Come on.

Lost seasons 4-5 == The Matrix 2-3

Having just watched the season 4 premiere of Lost, I think I’m going to regret the show ever crossing this point.

Whenever there is a hard job to be done I assign it to a lazy man; he is sure to find an easy way of doing it.

Walter Chrysler (via Tumbl.us)

Mr. Obama inspired a crowd of nearly 15,000 to show up at an arena in Boise, Idaho, to hear him speak at a rally on Saturday. That’s triple the number of Democrats who caucused statewide in 2004, the Idaho Statesman says.

New York Times Blog (via Dan). This is one reason I support Obama, despite disagreeing with some of his policy plans: he inspires people to care about politics again. Involving the previously apathetic, and getting them to care passionately about our leadership, will help our country more than any minor policy decision ever could.

me-telling-alex-he-should-watch-lost-alex-but

Microsoft will go into debt to finance Yahoo

Vertigo on Microsoft/Yahoo:

I’m still confused about this move by Microsoft. They’re not buying a young, energetic, growing company but an old (relatively), flagging company that can’t seem to turn itself around. Add this to the expected backlash (engineers leaving, users switching) and the need to go into debt to get it done, this deal makes absolutely no sense.

Agreed. I don’t see how this will benefit either company.

Instead of having two massive companies with no direction who waste a lot of money but can’t beat Google, we’ll have one even more massive company with even less direction that will waste even more money and still won’t beat Google.

But there’s an important distinction as long as the companies remain separate: Microsoft doesn’t need to beat Google. If Microsoft would get their act together and focus their efforts into something coherent (which they’ve never done) instead of flailing their arms everywhere, they’d see that they can easily coexist with Google.

Instead, Microsoft is trying to imitate Google’s products badly, while Google is trying to imitate Microsoft’s products badly.

Buying Yahoo will only make this worse - and won’t bring any additional success to anyone.

Casey Liss:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: What is the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers?
Barack Obama: I think the Bubble Sort would be the wrong way to go.

Skip to about 23 minutes in to see that quote. Good watch regarldess, though.

Vote!

The first Super Tuesday primary polls in the country open in 6 hours.

Go vote!

If you don’t vote in the primaries, you have no right to complain about the bad candidates nominated by the big parties when the general election rolls around.

The layout of almost every voting machine I have ever seen is just terrible. Inspired by a cross between a fusebox and a prison.

Seth Godin: Lessons from voting

Food for thought

What if Obama loses the primary tonight, and runs as an independent for the general election?

While FedEx and UPS have a bit more latency than a TCP/IP connection, you simply can’t beat the bandwidth of sticking a hard drive into a box and having it show up somewhere else the next day with all of its data.

The Economics of Online Backup

I can’t believe my state voted for her. I don’t care that she’s our senator.

I fully expect the rest of the country to vote idiotically. But New York? I expected better.

If you’re walking down the right path and you’re willing to keep walking, eventually you’ll make progress.

Barack Obama (via hrrrthrrr)

I hope we can finally count Willard out for good. That was a scary prospect.

I thought The New York Times was good

…until recently. What triggered this particular post about Super Tuesday:

[…] the results suggest that Democrats are fracturing along gender and racial lines as they choose between a black man and a white woman.

No, we’re fracturing along cultural lines as we choose between an inspiring person appealing to young and smart people, and a manufactured, Rove-tactical, lobbyist-funded product appealing to old people and the uninformed.

Race and gender have nothing to do with this.

I’m a white male from Columbus, Ohio. Does that mean I was supposed to vote for Kucinich?

Lawrence Lessig on why he is for Obama, specifically over Hillary. (Transcript, thanks AZspot)

Great watch. Don’t skim it and skip through. Sit down for 20 minutes and watch it when you really have time to listen.

[Jakob Lodwick] blogged his departure from blogging on his blog.

Nicholas Carlson

Six Feet Under

Oh wow, this scanner is absolutely amazing. Inspired by this.

Don’t let the price scare you away just yet — this is one of the most useful, satisfying, and well-performing computer peripherals I’ve ever purchased. How often have you ever heard anyone say that about their scanners?

YES

I predict that 10.5.2 will be released within 24 hours.

Another hypothetical

It’s now nearly certain that the Democratic nomination will be decided by the super-delegates at the DNC, not by the primaries’ popular vote. I fear that this is likely to go to Hillary, since the Clintons have a lot of power within the party.

On Super Tuesday, after not seeing an Obama landslide, I proposed the hypothetical idea of Obama losing the nomination and running independently. People criticized that, saying that it would split the Democratic voters in the general election and the Republicans would win.

But what if such a party-splitting move happens on the other side, too? What if the rumors and speculation are true, and Michael Bloomberg is preparing to run as an independent? There are plenty of Republicans who really don’t like McCain or Huckabee, and would prefer the economic policies of Bloomberg. A great party split could happen: the economic conservatives could break away from the religious conservatives.

(If Huckabee isn’t McCain’s running mate, what if God calls on him to run independently? I considered this, but he and God don’t have enough money for a viable independent run.)

If the general election is between one Republican and two Democrats, the Democrats will lose, no question.

But what if it becomes a race between four viable candidates instead of two, plus an optional Nader slot?

Hillary (D), Obama (I), McCain (R), Bloomberg (I), and Ron Paul (N).

I’d love to see that. Having more viable candidates in the general election would do wonders to help the douche-and-turd problem.

He’s more honest than I thought

Travors said:

Mormon assface Mitt Romney leaving the race isn’t as interesting as what he said as the door was bumping him in the ass(face). If he continued the campaign, he said, it would “make it easier for Senator Clinton or Obama to win. In this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign be a part of aiding a surrender to terror.”

Did Mitt Romney just admit that he was a terrible candidate?

Give them more pills

A Tumblr account came up today in spamwatch for an “Oppositional Defiance Disorder” blog. That sounded like bullshit, so I looked it up. According to Wikipedia:

The diagnostic criteria for this disorder are as follows:
  • Deliberately annoying people
  • Blaming others for own mistakes
  • Easily annoyed
  • Angry and resentful
  • Spiteful or even vengeful
[…] The DSM-IV cites a prevalence of 2-16% for ODD.

Sadly, I’m sure tons of kids are being medicated for this.

When I was a kid, we called those kids “annoying” or “assholes”. At what point do personality flaws (often caused by parenting flaws) become a “disorder”?

I didn’t do my homework in school because I’m smart and lazy. Is there a disorder for that now? (That’s not ADD, although smart and lazy people are frequently misdiagnosed with ADD.)

My frustrated mother brought me to a psychologist for a couple of years during high school, thinking there was some psychological problem that could be overcome and I’d start doing my homework. I thought he was ineffective and useless, but he was spot-on: he told my mother that there was nothing wrong with me, and I was just lazy.

Instead of borrowing against my future mental and physical health by being a medicated zombie throughout my childhood, I was just given mediocre grades and my mother grounded me a lot. Looking back on it, that was definitely the right course of action compared to any medicated alternatives.

(via david)

This was awesome. It’s fun trying to figure out how to transport three giant, 50-pound boxes from the glass-cube Apple store to our office with just two people.

And now we have awesome computers!

I never know what to put in these “write your own security question” boxes. I don’t have pets, the definition of “my first car” is vague, I didn’t have a favorite elementary school teacher, and everyone knows where I’m from.

10 points to whoever first figures out how I got the Airport icon to look like that.

Update: Marc LaFountain wins. Score: 10.

David’s secret Tumblr screensaver

Tiff and I for our engagement newspaper announcements.

Maryland’s too early to be definitive, but this is pretty awesome.

Now we’re talking.

We continue to believe that the Yahoo deal is an expensive way of growing the online business for Microsoft,” wrote Sid Parakh, an analyst with McAdams Wright Ragen, in a research note. “The 14 percent decline in Microsoft’s stock price (since its announcement of intent to acquire Yahoo) has wiped out over $43 billion (or 98 percent of its offer for Yahoo!) in shareholder wealth. Add to that the likely scenario in which Microsoft pays [roughly] $50 billion for Yahoo, Microsoft is essentially paying $93 billion for Yahoo.

Microsoft’s Next Move: How High Can It Go? (via bijan)

Our old color laser printer in the office prints out this error sheet whenever you send any jobs to it.

It’s here.

Bliss.

The Mac Pro

This is, by far, the most amazingly fast, spacious, capable, and well-designed computer I’ve ever used.

I’ve been waiting for this for 5* years. It was completely worth the wait.

* I recognize that the Mac Pro was released in 2006. Before that, I longed for a Power Mac G5, but had no chance of affording one.

Maybe I’m just giddy from the Mac Pro, but this is too cute not to share. (reblogged from my friend, Casey Liss)

Why you should consider OS X

Me:

[The Mac Pro] is, by far, the most amazingly fast, spacious, capable, and well-designed computer I’ve ever used.

Casey:

I have no doubt that’s a nice machine, and I am certainly glad his all-too-familiar, all-too-painful wait is over. That said, can one of the Fanbois explain to me what makes Apple computers any better than a PC set up by an intelligent user?

I think I’m qualified to answer this because, as you know, I was a great Windows user. I maximized Windows’ potential for many years, having only switched to Macs in 2004. I was such a good user that I didn’t even run antivirus software because I hated the performance penalties. I was just smart about how I used it.

Let’s start with hardware. Sure, it’s cheap, but PC hardware is crappy. It’s badly designed, it looks tacky, quality control sucks, and it flakes out too often. I can’t even begin to count the hours I spent in high school and college screwing around with my (or my friends’) PC hardware, trying to get custom hardware combinations to work properly together. And just try to find a PC case that looks decent and is comfortable to work in.

The software world is much more divided. The quality of OS X, and its third-party software, absolutely blows away anything on Windows. The difference is huge.

Mac software follows design principles that you rarely see in Windows:

These principles are everywhere: from OS X itself and Apple’s other applications to the third-party shareware and freeware communities.

The attention to detail is particularly amazing. I recently tried a Windows Smartphone, and it was clear that nobody at Microsoft had ever actually used one of these. Apple hardware and software engineers will take great pains to ensure that a screw is centered or a form field positions the cursor to require the least user effort.

Admittedly, I haven’t used a Mac for more than about 10 minutes in as many years, but I’m failing to see what a Mac can bring me that I can’t accomplish for half the cost with an equivalent PC, and Ubuntu or the Linux distribution of your choice?

Cost isn’t as ridiculous as many people assume. Most Apple machines are very competitively priced with similarly specced PCs. But Apple’s specs only match the high end of most manufacturers’ lineups.

The Mac Pro ($2800) is very reasonably priced for an 8-core Xeon workstation. The MacBook ($1100) is very reasonably priced for a midrange consumer notebook.

It’s not that Apple machines are expensive — they just don’t have a low end.

I get (from what I can tell) just as bulletproof a machine, on great hardware (I use a ThinkPad), without the Apple tax, and with 90% of the eye candy thanks to Compiz Fusion. What makes a Mac so much better?

You can put visual effect layers on top of Windows or Linux, but it’s just painting a turd. Instead of ordinary frustration and time-wasting, you get pretty frustration and time-wasting. (And that’s subjective — personally, I find Vista’s Aero and the Linux “eye candy” add-ons to be garish, ugly, tacky, and completely missing the point.)

We don’t use Macs and Mac software because of the eye candy. We use them because of the design. Design and eye candy are very different — design is a combination of how it looks, what it does (and doesn’t do), and how it works.

Use a Mac for 6 months, and you’ll wonder why you ever used anything else.

See? She’s the one.

The Prius might be the most perfect white product ever. It’s expensive, gives the idea that you are helping the environment, and requires no commitment/changes other than money.

Stuff White People Like: Toyota Prius

The breakfast of champions.

There’s a sort of Gresham’s Law of trolls: trolls are willing to use a forum with a lot of thoughtful people in it, but thoughtful people aren’t willing to use a forum with a lot of trolls in it. Which means that once trolling takes hold, it tends to become the dominant culture. That had already happened to Slashdot and Digg by the time I paid attention to comment threads there, but I watched it happen to Reddit.

Paul Graham: Trolls (via azspot)

An open letter to David Watanabe

Dear David Watanabe (for whom I cannot find a direct email address),

I’m a huge fan of your NewsFire RSS client, as discussed here, here, and here. I even got a second NewsFire license in a MacZot bundle. For an application that served me so well for so long, it has proved to be a far higher value than the nominal price you charge for it.

But recently, I became a two-Mac user for the first time, and if I want to use NewsFire as my RSS reader on both, it has no way to synchronize my feeds and “read/unread” item status. NetNewsWire offers this, and having just made their software free, I switched to it a few weeks ago solely for the synchronization feature.

But NetNewsWire is completely inferior to your excellent NewsFire. I don’t know why the vocal Mac community is so fond of NNW — maybe they’re still thinking like Windows users. NNW sucks. You know this, too, which is probably why NewsFire exists and is so good. And web-based RSS readers can’t even compare.

Maybe you’re discouraged because NewsFire isn’t the dominant RSS reader. I hope not, because Apple isn’t the dominant computer manufacturer either, and they still find it worthwhile to produce high-quality products for the people who value quality and great design.

Please develop and release an update to NewsFire that synchronizes between multiple computers.

Thank you for your consideration.

Marco Arment

(If anyone has his contact info, please pass this along or give me his email address.)

Note Flag is a complete ripoff of my recent launch, Instapaper, but with Google ads plastered all over it.

The depth of the copy is, frankly, impressive:

Don’t miss the blog.

I didn’t want to link to this and give him any traffic, but I just had to share. If you want to look at it, you should probably hurry up before he’s banned from AdSense for life (losing all unpaid earnings) and ThePlanet terminates his hosting. Ripping me off is generally not recommended. :)

The CPU saturation challenge

I’m having a hard time saturating my new Mac Pro’s eight CPU cores.

But there was one thing that could do it:

I knew synchronization was a tricky problem, but it can’t be that difficult.

User-proof

I’ve received a surprisingly high number of forgot-password emails for Instapaper, a service that doesn’t require passwords, and won’t even let you set one until after you’ve registered.

I hadn’t thought of the commenter/viewer ratio. I suppose if you have a constant string of people walking through your living room it’s only a matter of time before somebody decides to take a dump there.

Dan on bad commenters

xkcd: Duty Calls (thanks, aatw)

The problem that we face in America is not the lack of good ideas; it’s that Washington has become a place where good ideas go to die.

Barack Obama (via squashed)

I’m sure this post will really infuriate people. Whatever. I had to say it, and you can’t leave comments anyway.

My sister, discovering the beauty of Tumblr

Blu-Ray 360

Marc:

Has anyone heard what Microsoft’s plans for Xbox are now that the HD DVD format is dead? I imagine that they’ll fire up a Blueray version of that add-on, but I haven’t seen any info.

Paul:

I wouldn’t think so, I believe they will focus more on their digital downloads business. think of the hd-dvd as a way of holding ground against sony’s ps3.

There’s a third option: they could make a premium Xbox 360 with an internal Blu-Ray drive in place of the DVD-ROM, then sell it at price parity with the PS3.

With their recent CPU and GPU die-shrinks, they’re saving a bunch of money on the components. There’s plenty of room to toss in a basic Blu-Ray mechanism.

But here’s where Blu-Ray’s victory is a problem: Sony owns it, and is the sole licensor for the format. If Sony decides not to license the playback ability to Microsoft, a Blu-Ray 360 can’t happen.

If that happened in a healthy antitrust environment, Microsoft could sue Sony for anticompetitive behavior (pot… kettle…). But nobody in the current DoJ would go after monopolies with any real effort.

Scratch My Back (via jonathandeamer)

(thanks, ideachute)

It bugs me, too.

From mattandamy:

Who knew New Yorkers would get so excited about punctuation?  This dude’s been getting lots of praise for the appropriate use of a semicolon on a subway poster that reads, “Please put it in a trash can; that’s good news for everyone.”  Grammar experts have been calling his semicolon use “lovely,” “impeccable,” and “a burgeoning of punctual literacy in unlikely places.”  No word on whether the speaker said that with a straight face.

PS.  If you’re looking for a really geeky laugh, scroll down to the bottom of the article, where the Times corrects its improper grammar in an earlier version of the article.  (Celebrating the Semicolon in a Most Unlikely Location, NYT) 

Everything about this article is awesome.

From Garfield minus Garfield, the ingenious comic modification.

Outside forces that tend to divide people up inside their country are unbelievably counterproductive.

Bush on why he didn’t send troops to Darfur (via zetahydrae). I… I’m speechless.

The true subtext of the Clinton Campaign: “No You Can’t.

Erik Westberg (via johnbrissenden)

We’ll probably end up borrowing this $150 billion from the Chinese. And when we get those rebate checks, most people are going to go out and buy stuff that’s been imported from China. I have to wonder whose economy is going to be stimulated the most by the package.

Mike Huckabee on tax rebates (thanks, Secret Enemy Hideout)

This $50 refurbished iPod Shuffle just took down my new Mac Pro for an hour.

The Shuffle started acting funny the other day while docked: it wouldn’t eject or re-mount, while Finder and iTunes gave strange error messages for it. I quickly forgot, since I hardly ever use it.

Tonight I powered down my Mac Pro to move some wires, and when I turned it back on, it wouldn’t get past the gray boot screen. It was pretty clearly an issue with boot devices. After an hour of troubleshooting, including the futile removal of all 4 hard drives and my extra RAM, I finally remembered that there was this little Shuffle docked to it from my desk.

The Shuffle, a USB mass-storage device, would have been questioned by the computer during boot. Here’s how that went:

Mac Pro: Hey, USB devices out there! Are any of you bootable?
Keyboard: No.
Mouse: No.
Monitor hub: No.
Epson thing: No, but let me make some unnecessary noises because I’m an Epson thing.
Scanner: No.
iPod Shuffle: …ugh… what? Oh! I think… wait… just… a… minute…

The timeout expires in about a minute.

Mac Pro: Shuffle?… ok, I’ll have to move on in a second—
iPod Shuffle: No! Wait! I… er… uh…

Another minute.

iPod Shuffle: Oh, I think I am bootable after all. Shit, hold on… Where did I put my keys?… aw man… I have no idea what’s going on…

(dramatization)

Lesson learned: iPod Shuffles aren’t very good.

(Photo by Tiff)

I left my desk like this last night.

There was actually a reason for that.

What makes metadata meta-data is that it’s not strictly necessary. If I have a dog with some pedigree paperwork, and I lose the paperwork, I still have a perfectly valid dog.

Steve Yegge: Portrait of a N00b

I didn’t approve this comment. (on this)

Left-handed toons by right-handed people (via katydid)

(thanks, jonathandeamer)

The best RTS… ever

If you like RTS games (the kind where you build big armies and attack each other, like Starcraft if it didn’t suck), you need to play Supreme Commander. Even if it means buying a new computer to run it. (And unless you have a really good modern gaming computer, it probably does.)

This is one of those games, like its predecessor (Total Annihilation) and SimCity 4, that will be much more popular a few years after its release when a reasonable amount of people can actually run it. SupCom was released a year ago already, so we’re getting there. It’s also coming out on Xbox 360 next month, but being an RTS, it will probably suck on consoles.

As I discover awesome things about it, I’ll probably post them here. I’m only a few missions in, and I’m already blown away. There are far too many reasons to list here, but here’s a subset:

Zoom

You can zoom smoothly, using the scroll wheel, from an almost-first-person level all the way out to the world map. I find that this replaces panning for me - I zoom out, move the mouse to my destination, and zoom back in.

Micromanagement

You can queue up build orders infinitely. This applies to both factories and structure-building vehicles.

Unit and group orders (move, attack, etc.) can be queued up infinitely.

You can give factories a repeating build loop, such as “2 tanks, 1 anti-air vehicle, 1 missile truck”, and never think about it again.

Resources are accumulated at a constant rate (metal is mined from things that sit on metal patches, energy comes from power plants). There are no resource-gathering vehicles, and the resources are never depleted. You can focus on your armies instead of your stupid ore trucks.

Transports

This was the big surprise to me this week. In most RTSes, maps with water-separated land-masses become huge air battles because it’s prohibitively tedious and time-consuming to transport land units across the water.

Here’s how you solve this problem in SupCom:

  1. Build a handful of cheap transport planes. They hold 6 units each.
  2. Select your tanks and the planes.
  3. Click where you want them to go.

That’s it. The transports will share the load and will automatically pick up the tanks and drop them at the destination.

Like most of SupCom’s mechanics, this works the same way whether you’re operating on 3 units or 300.

I just played a complex mission on an island map, and the only planes I built were the transports. Instead of becoming massive plane battles, a real island assault is actually possible: use ships to clear a spot on the beach, then drop a bunch of tanks there and conduct a land assault. It’s a lot more fun that way.

The game is balanced to encourage this, too - the planes are weak and anti-air guns are cheap.

I don’t understand why any serious RTS players tolerate Blizzard’s simplistic, unbalanced, micromanagement-heavy games. Total Annihilation was far better in 1997, and Supreme Commander is far better now. Blizzard games are the Windows PCs of the RTS world, and Supreme Commander is the Mac Pro.

I did it! The CPU saturation challenge is complete. Those blue graphs at the top represent the CPU cores’ usage, as displayed by MenuMeters.

It’s not 100% of all cores, but it’s close enough.

This is ripping a DVD with the new version of HandBrake to the AppleTV H.264 preset.

It’s worth noting that even with the CPUs at full usage for sustained periods like this, the fans aren’t spinning up to full speed. I don’t detect any difference at all. A real test didn’t, either. The Mac Pro is encoding video about many times faster than my 2 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook in almost complete silence (certainly not noticeable above ambient room noise).

Some flowers are better-built than others.

Let me up! I want to see if anyone reblogged my cookie!

Tiff from the couch

Copyright and Fair Use

Dan asks:

I got a DVD from the library. I want to watch it on my laptop, which has a broken DVD drive. If I rip the DVD on the desktop, share the resulting AVI over the home wireless network, and watch the DVD on my laptop, and delete the files immediately after watching them have I broken any U.S. copyright laws? Does it matter if I don’t get around to watching the movie until after I return the DVD to the library?

You’ve violated the DMCA by ripping the DVD. The DMCA prohibits the circumvention of encryption schemes used for copy protection, and the ripper is circumventing CSS.

As for the library-returning thing… I’m sure it’s violating some provision of copyright law somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly how. It may not be relevant — you had to make a copy in order to retain the content after you returned the media to the library, and the act of making the copy is the violation.

Fair use typically allows copying for a few purposes, including backup. But when ownership of the original expires or is transferred, all copies must be destroyed or given to the new owner.

xkcd blag: Fruit Opinions:

This strip’s been up for 800 seconds and it’s already the most controversial thing I’ve ever written, beating out comics about cunnilingus, the Obama endorsement, and my making 4chan tiny on the map of the internet. It turns out everyone and their mother has a fruit opinion, and every one of those opinions is now in my inbox.

Improv Everywhere: Mobile Desktop:

For our latest mission, three agents entered a Starbucks one by one with their own giant desktop computer and CRT monitor. They bought coffee and worked at their computers as if they were laptops.

Their post also has a behind-the-scenes video. (thanks Dalas)

Tiff:

Marco bought me a mini muffin pan yesterday and here are the results.  And yes, they are delicious.  

I discovered that if I buy Tiff a mini-muffin pan, she fills it with muffins. That was easy.

.Mac is not awesome.

I see little value in drawing attention to something that I do not like. Attention, in the form of links or posts, is extremely valuable on the web; I intend to lavish it on what is good and deny it to what is bad.

Jakob Lodwick

toldorknown:

Six more hours until we’ve dodged the “born on Michael Bolton’s birthday” bullet. If we can’t make leap day, I hope we at least manage that.

From an about-to-be-any-time-now new father.

(thanks, szymon)

SXSW: Tumblr and Next New Networks invite you to the most epic Rock Band party the world will ever know.

highindustrial:

Am I the only one encountering some sort of nightmare Twitter security meltdown where it’s logging me into random people’s accounts with unfettered access to their settings and private information?

Sounds like wrongly implemented caching, possibly with a reverse-proxy.

Why is Argentina completely empty on Google Maps?

Find a problem that’s not solved and try to solve it in a way that’s profitable. Don’t be influenced by what people have been doing so far in that area and don’t be afraid to try new things that may seem crazy compared to the status quo. That’s when innovation happens.

Ricky Van Veen (to hrrrthrrr)

Ian got the 50mm f/1.8.

Redefining the market

Starbucks’ greatest accomplishment was convincing most people that they liked coffee by including it in, effectively, milkshakes. You can add sugar and dairy to anything and people will like it.

In popular thought, they’ve changed the meaning of “coffee”. People who have never had real coffee now think they like it.

And when those people go into a real coffeeshop and order real coffee, they think it’s bad because it’s not full of sucralose and it comes in a cup-size with an English name.

Why should[n’t] we get a co-op apartment?

We’re thinking of buying a co-op apartment. We’ve never bought real estate before. Anyone have any advice? Things we should look out for? Questions we should ask?

Please let me know by email: me@marco.org.

I wasn’t very good at picking my first apartment, but got much better for the second time. We’re hoping to avoid the pitfalls of picking our first co-op (or even the pitfall of buying one, if this is a terrible idea for some reason we haven’t thought of yet).

Thanks!

…If New York City were its own state, it would be the most energy-efficient state in the union; most Manhattanites not only walk or take public transit to get around, they unintentionally share heat with their upstairs neighbors.

The Atlantic (via brooklyngirl)

When geeks and graffiti combine

This morning, in 2008, I took the subway to work while listening to this song on my iPhone.

Reblogged from Dan:

I thought she was trying to paint Obama as all sugary fluff and no substance.  When you go to Obama’s website you can learn about his detailed policy proposals.  Clinton’s website?  Snickerdoodles!

Hillary Clinton is resorting to what an aide described as the “kitchen sink” strategy.  They’re throwing out everything they have.  Apparently that include “Vote for Hillary if you like snickerdoodles!”

That’s… sad.

Software companies are sometimes accused of letting the users debug their software. And that is just what I’m advocating. For Web-based software it’s actually a good plan, because the bugs are fewer and transient. When you release software gradually you get far fewer bugs to start with. And when you can reproduce errors and release changes instantly, you can find and fix most bugs as soon as they appear. We never had enough bugs at any one time to bother with a formal bug-tracking system.

Paul Graham: The Other Road Ahead (via azspot). He really should have been an academic.

John Gruber:

Happy birthday to everyone out there with — let’s face it — the worst birthday possible.

I don’t know about that. I know someone whose birthday is September 11th.

Hillary Clinton’s despicable new campaign ad, taking every cheap shot in the book. I would otherwise have assumed this was a parody.

David Plouffe’s response:

“Senator Clinton had her red phone moment. She had it in 2002,” Mr. Plouffe said. “It was on the Iraq war – she and John McCain and George Bush all gave the wrong answer.”

Thanks, Bijan.

I can’t imagine a service less in need of machine deburring equipment than Instapaper.

I learned from this Ars Technica story that there’s something called the Music Copyright Society of China.

What a scary organization to have after me.

Eggs in peril (via zetahydrae)