Marco.org

And that’s why the air conditioning is on.

orangesunshine:

Shine - Trey Anastasio and The Undectet

Trey is offering a free mp3 download from his forthcoming album Original Boardwalk Style. You can order the entire album from Trey’s online store.

CD ordered.

Gender, by Kristen Caston (via ego-technique)

Absolutely, surprisingly, stunningly terrible.

I cannot believe how bad this movie was. And I liked the show. I bought all of the DVDs for Tiff and we watched the entire series together.

Some of the many flaws:

• WAY TOO LONG. 2 hours, 20 minutes. We got bored at 45 minutes. It didn’t get any better after that.
• Nothing really happens. There are no surprises. There’s no character change. Just… nothing. It’s a series of fluffy, meaningless girls-night-out montages (or events that should have been summarized by montages).
• What’s left of the “plot” is predictable and dull.
• The acting is bad.
• The writing is awful.
• Carrie and Miranda look ghoulish and unnatural with the amount of makeup caked onto both of them to make them look like they did 8 years ago.
• It’s not well-made. It looked pretty low-budget.
• There are a handful of stupid cheap-laugh devices thrown in and beaten to death. Dog-humping, pants-shitting… I’m not kidding.
• Did I mention how LONG it was?

Do not see this movie. I don’t care how much you liked the show. Absolutely do not see this movie.

I’m now officially launching Give Me Something To Read: an Instapaper feature, and a standalone site, featuring some popular articles every weekday that Instapaper users saved for reading later.

These articles are hand-picked for interesting medium- and long-form reading, like good magazine articles. They’re also usually optimized for mobile reading.

Like saved articles on Instapaper, the Text button on each article shows a mobile-optimized, text-only version. While it works on most mobile devices, it’s especially designed for ideal font rendering and readability on the iPhone.

When you’re logged into Instapaper, each article gets a 1-click Read Later button (as pictured). But you don’t need to be an Instapaper member to use the other functionality.

Give Me Something To Read is a Tumblr-powered tumblelog, so you can choose to follow it with Tumblr, or you can subscribe to its RSS feed.

I’d love feedback.

Dan in Real Life (2007) features Steve Carell in a relatively serious role, and he does it very well.

Highlights:

• Decent acting
• Excellent cinematography
• Funny

Negatives:

• Plot is fairly predictable, although I didn’t find that this affected my enjoyment of the movie.

It’s a romantic comedy at its core, but it’s entertaining and interesting enough that guys can watch it without being embarrassed when their friends find out. Definitely worth a Netflix or iTunes rental.

Tumblr Staff: (that’s us!)

It’s on! If you weren’t able to make it to SXSW, don’t fret. This Sunday, join Tumblr and Next New Networks for another epic party in celebration of NYC’s Internet Week.

Get the details here →

travors:

Is the Main Character Missing? Maybe Not. - NYTimes.com

The New York Times did an interview with Jim Davis and me (not at the same time unfortunately) and published it in today’s paper (Monday June 2nd).

Congrats, Dan!

We’re not as easily influenced as you think, we’re tired of video games and films being used as excuse to justify the behaviour of a few. My friends are talented, cool people. I see the talents in them. Don’t insult their intelligence. Don’t insult mine.

— Ruby Pseudo: A piece a 17 year old ‘kid’ wrote about brands and youth mindsets… (via obsessivecompulsive, peterwknox)

We continue to lie to ourselves every day. The US public barely understands the first thing about the energy predicament we’re in, and what it means for how we live in this country — or how we get along with the rest of the world — and the news media tragically reflects that ignorance. We fantasize about being “energy independent” and still being able to drive to the mall three times a day to eat caesar salads grown on the other side of North America. Get this: we deserve exactly what is happening to us. We might as well keep on lying to ourselves to pretend that we are not descending into a dark phase of our own history. After all, the true basis of American life these days is to feel good about yourself no matter what you do.

— Jim Kunstler (via azspot)

Modder crams G4 Cube into Mac Plus (thanks, mintunz)

A single picture doesn’t do it justice — look at the others to fully appreciate the level of detail that went into this.

PHP’s integer type has always been a 32-bit signed integer with a maximum value of 2,147,483,647. I thought there was no alternative.

Today I learned that you get 64-bit integers if you use the 64-bit version of PHP, so the maximum value is MUCH higher (9.2×10¹⁸).

If you don’t know, here’s how to tell:

32-bit:

$ echo '<?= PHP_INT_MAX . "\n" ?>' | php
2147483647
$ echo '<?= intval(9223372036854775807) . "\n" ?>' | php
-1

64-bit:

$ echo '<?= PHP_INT_MAX . "\n" ?>' | php
9223372036854775807
$ echo '<?= intval(9223372036854775807) . "\n" ?>' | php
9223372036854775807

This comes in handy if you use AUTO_INCREMENT integer IDs on tables with more than 2.1 billion entries…

Instapaper is best used as way of pretending that you’re actually going to read a very long article on Chinese politics or Emily Gould’s essay on over-sharing.

— Things We Actually Like: Instapaper helps you push your Web vegetables to the side

Know this “Telectroscope” thing that’s been all over the internet? The transatlantic “tunnel” that lets people in London and New York see each other by looking through it? And somehow there’s enough light and proper optics for the image to stay intact and visible? And the artist somehow constructed a transatlantic tunnel on an artist’s budget?

My technical curiosity about its feasibility got the best of me.

Sorry.

Great book. One of the few I’ve read. Review at 52books.

Dear Hillary, conceding after your opponent has already won the majority of delegates is no longer conceding. It’s just losing.

— Rafeco (via deadlybrad42)

Thanks!!

Website name blacked out to protect the… well-intentioned!! Also, the subject line was in all capitals!!

The rest of the email was somewhat spammy, telling us about their website for marketing and advertising people. “And did we mention…it’s free!!!”

Jessica:

Just a few minutes ago I heard some men at the park discussing their buddy’s “lady friend.” I’ve been hearing/reading this phrase for a while now and I think its dumb. Just man up and call her your girlfriend, dude.

How old were they?

There’s a significant vocabulary gap when describing girlfriends above a certain age, especially when the relationship is serious and long-term. We just don’t have an appropriate word for some relationships.

It’s a bit strange to refer to the 60-year-old woman you’ve been living with for 10 years, for instance, as your “girlfriend”. And most alternative words have additional unintended meaning, such as “partner” (same sex), “lover” (it’s mostly physical), or “soulmate” (eternal, destined for marriage).

“Lady friend” is one alternative, although it does sound a bit awkward. (The same problem applies to men, but “man friend” sounds pretty stupid.)

I will be the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States of America.

— Barack Obama, 3 June 2008, 10:15 PM. (via squashed)

Tonight Hillary talked about Hillary, McCain talked about McCain, and Obama talked about the nation.

— Tal Atlas

For my next trick, I will burn Patrick Moberg’s moleskin notebook of neat drawings while defending the virtues of Mary Rambin.

— fatmanatee’s Tumblr-annoyance strategy

Control characters (in the range x00-x1F) aren’t allowed in XML, and most parsers will complain or fail if they’re present.

But they are valid in UTF-8. I’ve been assuming that this is fine to make sure XML’s content is valid (when the text is already supposed to be UTF-8):

$text = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $text);
$node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($text));

That’s not enough. Control characters have to be removed, too:

$text = preg_replace("#[\\x00-\\x1f]#msi", ' ', $text);
$text = iconv('UTF-8', 'UTF-8//IGNORE', $text);
$node->appendChild($dom->createTextNode($text));

I learn some obscure new knowledge every day…

Me relaxing on Memorial Day weekend (by Tiff)

Burger King Tray liners feature vegetable porn?

The trayliner depicts the airport-style high security Burger King uses to ensure that only the top ingredients are used. Images include a scared Onion with his trousers down around his ankles while a fierce-looking Pickle guard with a latex glove, prepares to digitally examine him! Scattered about him from his open luggage are veggie porn mags!

(thanks, fuddmain)

New Wearable Feedbags Let Americans Eat More, Move Less (thanks, energyface)

On Saturday, I will extend my congratulations to Senator Obama and my support for his candidacy. This has been a long and hard-fought campaign, but as I have always said, my differences with Senator Obama are small compared to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.

— Hillary Rodham Clinton in an email to her supporters (via azspot)

yum9me:

That’s not what I meant, but I now I basically have to click

A great example of why computers are stupid. An algorithm doesn’t realize that this is almost certainly not what you meant — it just knows that, statistically, those words are very close, and search queries containing either of them sometimes contain these other common words.

But remember, the brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.

— Dr. Randy Pausch in the “Last Lecture” (via artistspaid)

iminlikewithyou:

I am in Esquire magazine this month. I feel kinda famous. I’m going to walk around with the magazine all day tomorrow and thumb through it - pretending that I’m seeing myself in it for the first time.

I think I’ll do that all week actually.

Did I mention that I’m in Esquire this month?

Uh… Charles? Is that you?

Zombie McCain is a man who gives a speech like it’s the first time he’s read it and doesn’t seem to enjoy the experience. A man who seems to do all he can to squeeze his personality from the words he’s uttering. A man who smiles, repeatedly and scarily, at inappropriate moments.

— The Swamp: McCain needs to lose inner zombie (via amazingamanda)

Casey is about to join the addiction and needs some help with software choices.

Multi-protocol IM. I think Adium is the answer, but I’m open for alternatives

Adium is the standard. Use it. But please don’t use ugly visual settings.

Easy DVD Backups. I think I’d heard that Handbrake was good. I’m looking for something like DVDShrink.

Handbrake is the best tool I’ve ever seen to convert DVDs to AVI/MP4/M4V. But it won’t do a DVD-compatible MPEG-2 .VOB recompress like DVDShrink. I’m sure that’s possible on OS X, but I’ve never wanted to do it, so I don’t know which program does that.

But do you really still want DVD transcoding? If you have an Xbox 360, a PS3, a modded original Xbox, or an Apple TV, you can just play the MP4/AVI files from your computer directly onto your TV.

I was completely into DVDShrink and DVD piracy back when it was new (2002), but I haven’t burned a video DVD in about 2 years now. I have no reason to.

Browser. Is there really any reason not to use Firefox?

Sure, there are reasons. Safari is much faster, far less buggy, maintains a better native interface, and integrates better with the OS.

But Firefox’s shortcomings aren’t severe, and Firefox has those extensions that everyone loves. I use Firefox, but I waffle sometimes and switch to Safari for a few days. They’re both excellent browsers.

Virtualization. Most people I know with Macs swear by VMWare Fusion. Does anyone use Parallels that wants to weigh in?

I use Parallels, but only because I bought it before Fusion came out. I’ve seen Fusion, and from what I can tell, they both share most of the important features.

Parallels is buggier, but usually adds cutting-edge features first. VMware’s release schedule is more conservative, but their implementations tend to be more stable and mature.

I don’t suggest leaving Parallels running all the time on a MacBook. It’s a massive resource hog.

The only reason I launch Parallels anymore is to test websites in IE. It’s great for that. But you shouldn’t be using too much Windows software — you’re not just switching for the pretty eye candy, you’re switching for the excellent Mac software ecosystem.

The only significant reason for most people to use Parallels is for Microsoft Office. The Mac versions suck, and the Windows versions under Parallels/VMware are actually much faster than the Mac-native versions.

Network/CPU Monitor. I like to be no more than a glance away from some feedback on network usage (as in, how quickly am I currently uploading/downloading) and CPU usage. That feedback can be graphical, but I need something. A dashboard widget seems reasonable for this, but is there anything that exists in the upper-right area, where the clock is? What is that area called anyway?

It’s called the menu bar. You want MenuMeters.

I also suggest:

• TextMate: the best programmer’s text editor out there
• Soulver: insanely useful calculator/spreadsheet hybrid

Marc LaFountain’s visiting. Here he is enjoying a tiny cup of espresso while working on a tiny laptop.

Corrected by Jacob Bijani: That was an error. Amazon’s DNS wasn’t hacked. Sorry, Amazon.

But they were definitely down for an hour today. That probably sucks a lot for them. Someone’s probably going to get fired.

• You’ll be out nearly $200
• It takes a long time to scroll through the list
• The loading screen takes longer
• It’s insanely awesome

Big Brown is heavily favored to win. His main competition, Casino Drive, scratched, apparently because he stepped on a rock. Yeah. Horses are sort of fragile.

— Dan on the Triple Crown. Horse racing and horses are so odd.

Engadget calls out CrunchGear’s fake iPhone photo.

Something from a Crunch site was awful, misleading, fake, badly written, or wrong? What an unusual occurrence!

It was like your best friend, who’s been right there with you for seven years of your life, walking up to you, punching you in the face, and then shitting on you.

— nostrich.net. This is actually part of an album review.

That’s annoying.

It was my first time playing the song, too. (In its defense, “Hard” was definitely misnamed on this one, more closely resembling Medium with another button.)

It’s 93 degrees outside.

I’m comfortably sitting inside, with air conditioning, drinking hot coffee from the roaster downstairs.

I love my life.

I could not believe that the president of the United States, staged by Karl Rove himself, had come down to the city of New Orleans and basically put up a stage prop. It was like you had gone to a studio in California and filmed a movie. They put the props up and the minute we were gone they took them down. All the dump trucks were gone. All the Coast Guard people were gone. It was an empty spot with one little crane. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life. At that moment I knew what was going on and I’ve been a changed woman ever since. It truly changed my life.

— Sen. Mary Landrieu in here (via unalone)

Tonight it’s leftovers « See Mike Draw

In reality there is only one candidate. Barack Obama. In November he will win or he will lose. John McCain is relevant only in so far as he is not Barack Obama. The Senator from Arizona is incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls, and has a personality that is best kept under wraps.

— GOP Strategist Bay Buchanan (via election08)

I suggest:

• Text updates and basic pictures from MacRumors Live. They’re consistently the fastest to get text updates out, and their page automatically refreshes with AJAX so you don’t have to do anything.
• Photos from Engadget. They lag behind MacRumors Live by 5-10 minutes, but have better (and more) photos.

It starts in 34 minutes (1:00 PM Eastern). My predictions about the next iPhone.

Go!

The fact is, if governments really want to promote startups and the economic innovation they bring, they shouldn’t listen to the standard refrain of cut taxes and deregulate. They need to start rebuilding the social safety net, so that their citizens know that if they go out on a limb and try something risky, someone will be there to catch them if things don’t work out.

— Aaron Swartz (via azspot)

mascarah:

My boss says he is sure there are going to be three different versions of the iphone, one more business-y to compete with blackberry that has a keyboard, one more music oriented, and then a third wild card. He thinks they will be open to more carriers than just at&t.

let’s see if he is right or just a big statement person who is full of crap, if it is the latter, i am going to get a free lunch.

Enjoy your free lunch. Unfortunately, he won’t be definitively proven wrong until about 2:30.

Tumblr and Digg will be dark in approximately 10 minutes due to WWDC. Upon conclusion of Jobski’s keynote, both will be flooded with the exact same articles being posted for the next 8 hours.

— Aaron

‘WHAT IS YOUR TUMBLR NAME?!??!??’ This was a question of significance at the bar last night, where people gave you confused looks when you mentioned your real name, then skeetered off in disappointment when they found out that you were fat manatee.

— NYC tumbls

Old friends’ lives go on without me.

— Observation by Jakob Lodwick, among many others, about Facebook. This particular occurrence always gets me.

david:

It’s hot outside!

Pretty much everywhere!

It’s been about 40 minutes of SDK examples and demos so far. We haven’t learned anything new, except the mention that 10.6 Snow Leopard would be discussed by someone else later today.

I’m getting worried that they don’t have much else to say, launch, or show than the 2.0 software update.

Rumors or speculation that we haven’t heard anything about and it’s unlikely that we will:

• Updated .Mac service, possibly renamed to Mobile Me, including the “Exchange” push-email/calendar/contact sync
• New Mac hardware

Let’s not add “new iPhone hardware” to this list…

(edit: Apple’s stock just lost 5%)

Push notification service to all developers for background processing! Nice!

Finally! The first new announcement in the entire keynote!

(Yes!)

“A new service: It’s like having Exchange for the rest of us.”

Push contact/email/calendar for everyone. Stores information “in the cloud”. Syncs to Mac/PC/iPhone, over-the-air. Mail, iCal, Address Book on Mac. Outlook on PC (!).

“Web 2.0 AJAX applications” for web access to all of these things too. Includes photo album sharing and iDisk, too, also with web interfaces.

Available at www.me.com, sign in and get all of your data through desktop-like web apps.

$99/year, 20 GB, 60-day free trial. Replaces .Mac. Available in “early July”.

This is probably why there’s a 10.5.4 update coming this week.

• 3G networking
• GPS
• Thinner at the edges
• Flush headphone jack
• “Dramatically improved audio”
• Feels even better in your hand
• Metal buttons, black back
• Same camera
• Better battery life

Test of loading a complex website: 21 seconds on 3G, 59 seconds on EDGE.

$199 8GB, $299 16GB!

Available on July 11. (Damn, I really wanted to go out and buy this today.)

I think Apple just killed a big part of the market for iPod Touches.

It bothers me when this happens: someone who only uses lowercase letters reblogs my post and edits it, replacing all of my capital letters with lowercase. The resulting post on their site misleadingly looks like I wrote it in all-lowercase.

That’s not my style. I try to write correctly.

Quoting includes both what I said and how I said it — please don’t change that.

hilker:

i don’t capitalize because there’s no reason to. grammar, schmrammar. i was an english major for two years which means i have creative license. […] also, the source css for my tumblr includes a “text-transform: lowercase” element because i like the way that it looks, having everything in lowercase. it’s an aesthetic choice that doesn’t compromise the functionality of language.

You can write however you want. I don’t care. (Also, I think your statement about having creative license because you partially completed an English degree is stupid.)

But recognize what you’re saying. All-lowercase writing expresses additional meaning that you may not intend:

• You’re lazy.
• You’re careless.
• You’re uneducated.
• You don’t care about the legibility of your text. (Your theme supports this hypothesis.)

Capital letters, punctuation, and grammar exist to help codify ideas and clarify communication. Using proper case isn’t elitist or arrogant: it shows that I care about the appearance, mechanics, and legibility of my text. I feel that choosing a highly legible font, such as 16px Georgia instead of 24px pink Comic Sans, is also important for the same reason: I care.

You’re effectively saying that you don’t.

That’s fine. You can write however you want. But don’t imply that I wrote in your style.

Neither of these will be deal-breakers, but they both kinda suck if true:

• The 3G iPhone’s plan is $10/month more, starting at $70. This is annoying, but it’s still extremely competitive than what other carriers charge for 400 minutes, unlimited data, and 200 text messages.
• Existing iPhone owners might need to pay a $175 ETF to upgrade their phones? Sounds incorrect, especially since the source is a TechCrunch article, but that would explain why the starting price is so low. Can’t I just extend my unsubsidized original-iPhone contract to last 2 years from July 11?

Lauren, me, and Lee. I always look like this.

(Photo by Jared Roessler)

Lee, me, David.

(Photo by Tiff)

I can’t release something that’s not excellent.

— Dan Meth (via david)

My name always gets used in strange contexts whenever it appears in TV shows.

(For those who can’t read it due to YouTube’s terrible video quality, the tattoo says “Property of Marco”. Also, for the Netflix-enabled curious, this is in Nip/Tuck S4E6.)

And in the time it took me to type this, my new phone is synced and ready to go, to bed, with me. Just like it always was.

— Peter W. Knox: A Love Letter to Apple. Some of us love our electronics more than others. We all get lonely sometimes…

Not a drop of the forthcoming plot had been leaked in advance, but I took a wild guess. ‘Apparently,’ I said to the woman behind me in line, ‘some of the girls have problems with their men, break up for a while, and then get back together again.’ ‘Oh, my God!’ she cried. ‘How do you know?’

— Anthony Lane on “Sex and the City: The Movie” (thanks, Nora). I didn’t like it.

fatmanatee:

[…] here’s the deal with the Sprint: some allotment of anytime minutes, along with unlimited data and weekend/night minutes, for $30. It’s some sort of referral system that one of my friends is in.

It’s called SERO: Sprint Employee Referral Offer. It’s Sprint’s desperate effort to attract subscribers because they’ve been bleeding profusely for years. Anyone can get it: go here and enter “savings@sprintemi.com” as the employee email address.

I used it for a month, wasn’t satisfied, returned it, and went back to paying Verizon $55/month on a crappy old phone for a few months before getting an iPhone.

[…] BTW, I’m also considering the implications that Sprint flat-out sucks.

It does. More than you can imagine.

But with complaints for every carrier, you’d think they all suck.

They do, to varying degrees.

• Verizon is expensive and gives all of their phones a terrible walled-garden interface that nickel-and-dimes you at every opportunity. And their network is unreliable in dense areas. But overall coverage is great.
• AT&T’s customer service is bad, and coverage isn’t quite as good as Verizon. But it’s not as bad as I expected as a previous 4-year Verizon customer. They have the iPhone, and their network is far more reliable in cities than Verizon’s.
• Sprint’s customer service is horrendous, and they will screw up absolutely everything that’s possible to screw up. But it’s very cheap. Their coverage is about as good as AT&T’s.
• T-Mobile has terrible coverage and a terrible data network, but very low prices.

AT&T sucks far less than I expected, and the iPhone is the best device on the market. I’m very happy with my decision.

Casey Liss just got his first Mac. (I guess I won this.)

Note to Windows readers: This post is full of the little squiggly “⌘” symbol found on the “Apple key” on the keyboard. Windows’ Unicode support is half-assed, so if you can’t see ⌘this⌘symbol⌘ or if it shows up as question marks or boxes, oh well. You’re probably already skimming over this post anyway because you’re angry that someone on the internet is writing about Apple again and their computers are for hipsters with too much money and how could they charge so much for looks and you got such a good deal on that 9-pound Windows laptop with the blue LEDs and you hate Macs except that you last tried them in 1995 when they truly did suck and you’d get one now if you could afford it but you don’t want to admit that but don’t worry you’ll change your mind and buy one anyway in 6 months.

Casey, welcome to the addiction! Here are some quick tips for power users getting started on OS X for the first time.

System Preferences that you probably want:

• Appearance: Place scroll arrows: At top and bottom
• Desktop & Screen Saver: uncheck Translucent Menu Bar
• Dock:
  • Adjust the size as you see fit. Smaller is generally better.
  • uncheck Magnification
  • Disable the “glossy” angled-shelf dock if you intend to keep it on the bottom (I like mine on the left side)
• Keyboard & Mouse: (under Keyboard Shortcuts) Full Keyboard Access: All controls
• Sharing: Here you can enable Apache (Web Sharing) or SSH (Remote Login) if you want.

Shortcut keys that are your new best friends:

(Note: Command == Apple == ⌘. And in menu shortcut-key descriptions, ^ is Ctrl, up-arrow is Shift, and that weird slanty-dashy symbol is Option.)

• ⌘Q: quit entire application
• ⌘H: hide entire application
• ⌘M: minimize current window (not entire application)
• ⌘W: close current window or tab (not entire application)
• ⌘X/C/V/Z: cut/copy/paste/undo, just like Windows
• ⌘-comma: application preferences
• ⌘-tab: Switch between entire applications
• ⌘-tilde: Switch between windows of the current application
• ⌘N: new window
• ⌘T: new tab

Generally, most common Control-and-single-letter Windows shortcut keys map directly to the ⌘ key with the same letter on Macs (X/C/V/Z/P/A/S). You have to get used to using your left thumb instead of the pinky for the modifier, but you’ll find after a bit of time that it’s actually far easier to reach.

It may take a little while to get used to the distinction Apple makes between applications and windows. You can close every window of some apps, but they still remain open (as long as that dot’s below their icon in the Dock) unless you Quit them (⌘Q). And Alt-Tab (⌘-tab here) doesn’t work like Windows because it goes through applications, not windows — and ⌘-tilde goes through windows of just the current application.

Oh, and you probably want to install Quicksilver, move Spotlight to a different shortcut key, and bind Quicksilver to ⌘-space.

Oh. My. God.

The Transporter 3.

Here’s a French trailer (English speech, French subtitles) that danhacker found.

I love the Transporter series because it’s so hilariously bad. My friend lost movie-picking rights for life when the first one came out. “Hey, let’s go see this movie. The guy from Snatch is in it, so it’ll probably be good!”

WWDC ‘08 Keynote in 60 seconds (thanks dirtysob, peterwknox)

mylifeinacube: “Just flush me already.”

(glad someone got it)

Board meeting

It’s my birthday. Tiff posted this (thanks!):

Dear Internet,

Tonight we will be celebrating at Hop Devil around 8:30. Come.

I’m so glad XMLRPC.com is so professional with their error pages. (The regular site isn’t much better.)

This is the coolest beer ever.

Thanks for the great birthday celebration, everyone.

Waiting for the spins to calm down a bit before bed. (Apparently, different beers have wildly different alcohol content, and I’m more of a lightweight than I thought.) So it was a perfect night for Trey Anastasio’s new album to arrive.

Plus, my sister got me In Defense Of Food from my Amazon wishlist. Thanks, Christine! I like eating, and I like interesting things by smart people, so this interesting book about eating by a smart person should appeal to me pretty directly.

It was a perfect harmony of beautiful hardware (the iPhone), smart software (automatic iTunes backups), a helpful website (appointment-making), and real world service that treats customers like human beings. Compare this experience to the last time you had to return a product anywhere else, or, heaven forbid, you actually had to interact with your phone company. This is why Apple has a passionate following. It’s not just one thing - it’s everything.

— Derek Powazek: Why I Love Apple, Reason #24789 (via peroty)

David’s to-do list today. Straightforward.

thatguyben:

If I change my tumblelog’s URL, what updates automagically and what doesn’t?

If you change your username (the “thatguyben” part in thatguyben.tumblr.com), people’s existing links to you at thatguyben.tumblr.com will break.

If you leave that the same and just add a custom domain (e.g. www.thatguyben.com), people’s links will still point to thatguyben.tumblr.com, but Tumblr will automatically redirect all of them to the corresponding page on www.thatguyben.com.

soupsoup:

lifeasart:

I know there has been alot of talk here and yonder on the internet about the new 3G iPhone. But, I have to say, I’m pretty excited. I’m already tied into a 3-year rogers contract and a new iPhone would make it much easier to handle. My only worry is what the cost of a data plan (which I don’t have) will be. Thankfully, its main duty will be converging my phone and iPod in my already overstuffed purses and bags, not sending email. But more photo blogging will be nice.

parallels runs on the iphone?

Who’s “cingular”?

twitterstatus:

We’re seeing a number of whales pop up around the site, especially on profile pages. We’re aware of the issue and working on it now.

This sounds pretty funny if you don’t use Twitter.

From nath:

This NY snowball adds an unexpected element on the typical souvenir: there’s a tiny plastic bag floating around gracefully with the snow. It’s ironic because snowglobes usually are idealized little realms of places but this one actually tries to portray the reality of the city. By Andrew Coates.

Every year on my birthday, I always wake up to automated vBulletin “Happy Birthday” messages from Maxima.org (I haven’t owned a Maxima since 2005) and TA Universe (a fansite that I haven’t visited in 8 years for Total Annihilation, a game released 11 years ago that still has an active enough community for “news” to be posted regularly).

This year I even got an automatic paper card mailed to me by my car insurance company. It listed all of the cool stuff that happened in 1982. Thanks, Allstate!

The automatic birthday greeting is a strange concept. Thanks… I guess. But doesn’t it kinda ruin the significance of a greeting if it’s automatic?

Slate’s “Democratic Primary in 8 Minutes.”

It’s actually a great review: there were a lot of events that I missed when they happened, and this reminds me of just how despicable the Clinton campaign was.

(thanks, Nora)

Creating content is expensive. The cost of the tools may have dropped considerably, but the value of your time increases every minute you live past the age of 25, or move out of your parents’ house, whichever comes later. At some stage in your life, you reach a point where Mac and Cheese and free food at happy hour and buying used clothes are disappointments rather than choices. At some stage in your life, asking your friends to work for free is no longer “hanging out”, its imposing or freeloading. It’s at that point you are going to realize that you are working really hard and scared shitless about whether you will be able to make a living doing what you love. Then it will hit you that you are subsidizing the cost of video advertising inventory for Google or MySpace or whoever, while not being able to make ends meet.

— Mark Cuban (thanks, Sarah)

Jakob:

(cold soup served in ice bowls, they eat it like broken glass)

I’d love to be there when the new guy pours hot soup into one of those for the first time.

Vadrum Meets Super Mario Bros 2 (thanks, kami)

Imagine, ignoring technical limitations, how different the game’s mood would have been if this was the real soundtrack.

andrewfox defends his Verizon loyalty (regarding this):

We are, however, married to the 17% discount we get on Verizon through Valerie’s company. We are a poor couple just starting out, and that 17% helps out. If Wegmans gave a 17% discount to the phone carrier of our choice, even if we pay more for iPhones, and we would, I could probably convince Val to leave Verizon.

Depending on which plans you use, this could be shaky.

I use the cheapest voice plans with unlimited data and some text messages. On Verizon, that’s $85 plus taxes ($80 base voice+data plan, $5 for 200 text messages). The current iPhone plan is only $60 plus taxes (the base voice+data plan comes with 200 text messages). The new iPhone 3G will use AT&T’s standard plans, which will be $75 for the equivalent service ($70 base voice+data, $5 for 200 text messages).

Your corporate Verizon discount brings the $85 plan down to $70.55 plus taxes — assuming similar taxes, that’s only about $5 per month less expensive than the AT&T plan. I recognize the need for fiscal responsibility, but if $5 per month is a huge deal to you, you really shouldn’t be paying anyone for a smartphone with data service.

Assuming you and your fiance want identical phones and plans under a “family” rate, AT&T wants $10 less than the sum of both — so $140/month. I don’t see any Verizon family plans that include data or even allow smartphones, so I’ll assume that you’d need two separate plans: $141/month. With AT&T’s $1 savings on the family plan compared to Verizon, your iPhone would pay for itself in just over 8 years!

It was a terrible idea to turn off the air conditioning and open the windows when the huge rainstorm started.

Humidity in here jumped from 35% to 75% in minutes. Now my hands stick to the keyboard. I hate humidity.

Back to air conditioning, even if I don’t need it for temperature.

They say the market value of a product is what someone is willing to pay for it. What happens when anything above $0 cannot compete?

— Kyle Shank: Media Saturation and Software

Does it make me too much of a photo-gear nerd that I saw this picture and immediately noticed that the pictured lens can’t focus anywhere near that close?

Tal Atlas:

United is starting to offer ipod docks on their international flights. They will even be able to play video though the built in screens. This is exactly why the entire industry needs to settle on a standard. Or at the very least apple needs to open their dock standard to anyone.

What entire industry?

The entire industry of portable audio players that also sometimes play video and are likely to be owned by many people traveling on planes? The “industry” may not have settled on a standard, but the market sure has: the Apple iPod Dock connector. Because the market has settled on a device: the iPod (including the iPhone).

And there are plenty of instances where there was no freely available “standard” in a marketplace, yet consumers accepted the tradeoff:

• DVDs (owned by the DVD Consortium)
• Blu-Ray (owned by Sony)
• FAT32, the filesystem used on every Flash memory card (owned by Microsoft)

Consumers will keep buying iPods because they want to — and they’re so prevalent, with such a massive majority of the market, that companies can make iPod-specific accessories or options without alienating any significant amount of portable music listeners.

It’s bedroom-rearranging day!

The great thing about throwing everything on the bed is that it forces you to finish before going to sleep.

This is the result of cutting a hole in an IKEA Mikael desk to make it fit around a radiator knob.

Except that I didn’t have a saw. The only tools I have are screwdrivers and a drill. And I didn’t use the screwdrivers.

And if you’re curious to know what’s inside the Mikael… it’s not incredibly well built. That’s nearly all cardboard, with a very thin layer of laminated plywood as the shell.

That’s what you get for a lightweight $70 desk.

Here’s SR-71’s “Blue Light Special Life”.

You probably know them from their 2000 hit, “Right Now”, and its good album. Their second album, Tomorrow, wasn’t very good, and shortly after its release, the bassist died of cancer.

This is from their incredibly rare third album, Here We Go Again, which I actually like more than either previous album. It’s my second-most-played album in iTunes (behind this). It’s a very solid rock album, and I highly recommend it.

It was only released in Japan, and I can’t find any way for you to legally buy it. iTunes and Amazon don’t have it. So here you go.

!

So does this mean the mystery of all the bees disappearing has been solved? Looks like they were just going to hang out at this dude’s house.

— bg5000 on this

If you teach a man to think he is thinking, he will love you. If you teach a man to think, he will hate you.

— Unattributed, in Don Tennant’s Thinking 101 (via boutofcontext)

Mini-review: CS Hyde Teflon mouse pad

I got my 8x10 “C4 NGen 04” Teflon mouse pad (full professional review) yesterday, along with 139 Teflon stickers for mouse feet.

Total cost after shipping: $20.

I’m very satisfied. If you’ve never used a low-friction mouse setup like this before, I highly recommend it. You end up using far less energy to move the mouse, which helps prevent RSI and generally just feels cool.

And this place is the cheapest I’ve seen. This stuff is a great buy.

Recommended.

Is Firefox 3 out or what? I can barely connect to the site, and when I do, I just get download links for 2.0.0.14.

edit: Oh, I guess that I’m supposed to get it from here. Except… HTTP/1.1 Service Unavailable. Oops. Or maybe here. Connection timed out. Damn.

edit 2: Working download links. Thanks!

Don’t build websites that make it easier to do something old. Build websites that make it possible to do something new.

— Jakob Lodwick

Firefox 3 has a very strange text-encoding bug.

It rendered the substring o/ as ø, even though no character set was defined anywhere. Here’s the entire HTTP response:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:26:17 GMT
Content-Length: 128
Content-Type: text/html


Fatal error: Call to a member function whatever() on a non-object in /Users/marco/davidville/tumblr/lib/whatever.php on line 32

The Page Info dialog reports that Firefox is rendering in Quirks Mode and assuming the ISO-8859-1 encoding.

Looks like it’s mistakenly rendering composite glyphs.

The new [iPhone 3G] also weighs a little less than the current model, though we’re talking a tenth of an ounce. If you notice that difference, a career in weights and measures awaits you.

— iPhone 3G: What you need to know

I use Text Link Ads on Marco.org (upper-left, below the header: “Ads:”).

Their ads are so crappy that I’ve actually been running a fake ad for Senduit next to the two real ones (“ring tones” and “Data Recovery”) just so my site looks somewhat legitimate. I also edited their PHP code to capitalize the first word, at least (“ring tones” => “Ring tones”), and use a <ul> for the ads instead of a bunch of <div>s.

This is almost certainly against their terms of service, but I don’t really care if they kick me out of their dumb ad network. I get $40.39/month from it, so it’s kinda nice since I don’t have to do anything and they hardly take up any space, but the ads are pretty crappy. The funny thing is that I can’t even figure out how to remove my site from their service. There isn’t a “delete site” link anywhere in the control panel.

And tonight, their recent payment check to me was returned by my bank. Their bank refused payment. Awesome.

Great job, Text Link Ads!

Has anyone else recently had a Text Link Ads check bounce?

OS X tip: (mostly for Casey’s benefit)

In most OS X applications, you can drag the document icon directly out of the title bar and drop it anywhere — the Desktop, a folder, etc. This moves the file instantly to the new location, while you have it open, without screwing up.

Also, some Finder navigation shortcuts:

• ⌘-Backspace: Delete file
• ⌘O: open file
• ⌘-up-arrow: Up in the folder hierarchy
• ⌘-down-arrow: Down in the folder hierarchy (if folder), or open file (if file)
• Enter: rename file
• Hold ⌘ while dragging a file to force it to align to the grid.
• Hold Option while dragging a file to force a copy instead of a move.

Jacob Bijani:

I had no idea Firefox was put together by kids.

Have you ever written an extension for it?

Or right-clicked with multiple monitors?

Or tried to move one of its other windows while the download window was open?

Firefox is barely held together by sticks and duct tape. I’m amazed it works as well as it does.

Me:

Have you ever written an extension for [Firefox]? [it sucks, etc.]

jacobbijani:

The only extension I’ve tried writing was actually for Firefox 1.0. The only documentation at the time was the bug-me-not example application. Ugh.

Me too! I wrote the Clusty Toolbar, one of the first official Firefox search toolbars. (We beat Google by a few months, but A9 beat us by a week.) This was about a month before the 1.0 release (fall of 2004) when the big internet companies weren’t taking Firefox seriously yet.

You’re right - there was absolutely no documentation. The only way to figure out how to make extensions was to peek at the source of other extensions (since they’re just renamed .zip files).

Mozilla should send a cake back, include the recipe, and ask for advice on how to improve it.

— Commenter David on IE’s second cake to the Firefox team (I know that sounds weird. Just click the link.)

…makes me want to switch to Safari.

It’s just incredibly and unnecessary cluttered with questionable features and unnecessary interface elements. They want me to input “tags” everywhere (honestly guys, nobody except geeks knows what tags are). The Awesome Bar is a disaster. The interface has more of everything: more buttons, more icons, more text. It’s extremely busy, and it slows me down while visually scanning.

The OS X interface is inferior to Firefox 2’s. It may look slightly more similar, in that they made everything dark gray. And I’m glad they fixed some of the annoying bugs, like the lingering tooltips. But that’s all I can say for it. The form widgets are clunky, awkward, and ugly. The browser’s window and toolbar follow none of the OS standards and inherit none of the niceties that native interfaces get for free.

Clearly, Firefox is being designed by geeks, for geeks. I’m sure having tagging inputs everywhere fits in nicely with their world. But this release shows that the Firefox project management has lost touch with reality and the needs of normal users.

I’m strongly considering a permanent switch to Safari.

(via doodlepipski)

Seattle Times:

“Edith died Sunday, at 86. She died in the tiny cottage she had refused to leave, not for a million bucks.”

(thanks, yourdp)

cultrvultr:

The look on his face isn’t even “How do I solve this?” It is more like, “What in the hell is this thing?”

filthyphil:

Guaranteed to Never Be Solved

I really hope this is real.

Let’s say you’re iterating through a list of items to display, each of which requires a separate lookup, like a posts-to-users mapping.

Normally you’d do it like this:

foreach ($posts as $p) {
    // Looks up e.g. 'SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = ?', $p->user_id
    $user = $p->user();

    // Render some stuff...
}

But this will query the database once per post. If you’re showing 20 posts per page, that’s 20 queries. Bad.

Instead, accumulate the secondary-table IDs first, then fetch them all at once with the IN clause:

$user_ids = array();
foreach ($posts as $p) { $user_ids[] = $p->user_id; }
// Then look up 'SELECT * FROM users WHERE id IN (...)'

Then you get all of your secondary-table objects with one query. And MySQL is remarkably good at handling big IN clauses.

patrickmoberg:

My friend Bill in a Redwood forest.  He’s driving cross country with his girlfriend and two other friends. I’m meeting up with them tomorrow for the last week of the trip.

Damn. Maybe there’s a reason to go to California after all.

jacobbijani:

You know, “www” is probably the most awkward three letter combination imaginable. It’s almost impossible to say out loud without stumbling.

Yeah, I can’t really do it. I rush into it and end up mumbling through the middle and end. And I think the trendy alternative, “dub dub dub”, is stupid.

So I just avoid ever saying it. I make all of my domains automatically redirect to the www-normalized form regardless of what’s entered.

jhalickman:

caseyliss:

iStat Menu, which I think I like more than MenuMeters. They seem a bit nicer looking and more full-featured.

Now I have to uninstall MenuMeters, which is a little wonky since it isn’t a normal app. Thanks to Google I was able to find out how though.

Does anyone know a way to specify the order of menu items from right to left? I like the clock all the way on the right but with iStat it is in the middle.

Command-drag any compliant menu item to move it around. Or drag it off the menu bar to remove it.

I’m so glad I went for the 8 cores. (That’s a Handbrake DVD rip to H.264, 1800 kbit/s, with “slowest” deinterlacing and “strong” noise reduction.)

From Lindsay Campbell:

Another amazing NYTimes pic, this one from Switzerland where a shepherd was catching up on his EuroCup on his MacBook.  Please God, when I die, send me to that mountainside.

If he has broadband up there, screw death — send me now.

David inspired me to try cutting back on caffeine. Previously, I drank about 8 ounces of coffee per day — not a huge quantity, but a high frequency.

Now, it’s been about 5 days with zero caffeine. Experiences so far:

• It’s not hard to stay awake in the morning, but 3 PM really sucks.
• With the 3 PM exception, my energy level is much more even throughout the day. I don’t have the extreme lows that I’d get when the caffeine buzz wore off.
• My… final digestive processes have become more normal and less enthusiastic. (someone had to say it, I’ll be that guy this time)
• I don’t feel hyper, nervous, or tense in the early evenings (when the caffeine would previously catch up to me).
• I get tired and want to go to bed at normal times.
• There’s a lot more incentive to get enough sleep. I can’t just stay up too late at night and borrow against the next day, thinking, “I’ll just drink some coffee tomorrow and I’ll be fine.”

And here I am, going to bed at 1 AM when I have to wake up at 7. Tomorrow might suck.

This is not good.

Just got my first Firefox 3 permanent-tooltip bug.

Do they ever fix any bugs over there, or are they too busy making standard interface components “awesome”?

From Tumblr Staff:

Testing: Dashboard Notifications

We’re trying out a new feature and are really curious to hear what you think.  

Notifications appear on your Dashboard for things like new followers and reblogs.  It still has some glaring holes, but we’ve been loving this feature for discovering new people on Tumblr.

You can enable Notifications on your Preferences page.

Think of how well an airline that offered in-flight heroin would do servicing a nation of heroin addicts.

— Ricky Van Veen, on airlines with in-flight Internet access (via jakoblodwick)

Soap-sniffing

Big selection

Hypnotized by the Slushy machine

OK, last one

Does anyone know what this response means? Is he implying that Tiff’s hair isn’t naturally black? (if so, he’s wrong)

George Carlin dies at 71

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

One of my favorites: George Carlin on air travel.

This isn’t that “What’s the deal with airline peanuts?” crap. It’s Carlin doing what he does best: hilariously dissecting language and euphemisms.

Since YouTube sucks, this was split:

• Part 1
• Part 2

17 minutes total. Not work-safe language. You can get 100% of the value of this by just listening to the audio.

Jakob Lodwick:

I’ve unfollowing people on Tumblr because there is simply too much good stuff. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of world-class food. I cannot keep up with all the people I am interested in.

I’m having the same problem. So don’t take it personally if I unfollow you.

Another great one on euphemisms. (thanks, azspot)

I feel like corporations exist so we know what not to do

— Eric Lodwick (via Jakob)

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers – people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And, now, they’re coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.

— George Carlin (via azspot)

Soulver: The most useful program I use every day that nobody has ever heard of.

It’s always open as a math scratch pad, and I use it 90% of the times I would have otherwise launched Calculator or a spreadsheet.

The Nothing Card

I don’t know what it does. It was brought to my attention by a reader who suspects it has no function at all. I think he may be right.

From Dan Rutter’s blog — the same guy who writes Dan’s Data.

The most common word in search queries is “photos”. Number two? “Fotos.” The associated words indicate that people are usually searching for pictures of naked women and cars.

Blog readers don’t click on ads. Most ads are clicked by confused, lost, nontechnical people who arrived from a Google results page and think that the ad will take them to what they were really looking for. (This is why domain-squatting with ad pages is so profitable.) Many blogs have disabled ads for everyone except Google referrals without losing significant income. Many others have started showing more ads to Google referrals.

Nobody ever donates with those PayPal Donate buttons.

The majority of SEO is bullshit.

There are a lot more confused, lost, nontechnical people using the internet than any of us realize. And they greatly outnumber us.

Most internet use in the U.S. is during the workday by people browsing at work (when they’re supposed to be working). Younger people use social networks more, while older people play Flash games and read gossip sites more. Traffic on most sites drops significantly on weekends, especially popular travel weekends.

If President Bush was handling his own email a decade ago even though he has staffers who can take care of that sort of thing for him, why isn’t John McCain doing it now? I find it troubling when anyone isn’t curious enough about this whole Internet thing to try it out in this day and age. It’s kind of a big deal.

— Why Johnny can’t Google (via azspot)

99% of readers can stop here; this column is for people who have a great website or intranet.

— Jakob Nielsen: How to Make an Already-Great Design Even Better

Amazon EC2’s disk performance is disappointing, even with the Large Instance’s advertised “High” I/O performance.

It’s fine for running webservers and anything that’s mostly CPU-bound, but it can’t keep up as a MySQL slave on a frequently-updated database.

From Justin Johnson:

Gary The Puppet’s Magical Internet Adventure (watch in HD)

Created for Media Kitchen and Venture Day. I guess it was shown on a big screen for a bunch of important people, which is awesome.

Shot on Steadicam by Kyle Fassenella, Directed and Written by Me, starring Gary the puppet (Ben Ross, Erik Beck). Shot on location at Tumblr, Next New Networks, Gawker, College Humor, and CBS Interactive.

I’m in it. Not in a typecast role.

From strelau:

Hey did you know that the GitHub Blog has RSS?

At least it’s clear.

Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality. It involves the compromise, the art of what’s possible. At some fundamental level, religion does not allow for compromise. It’s the art of the impossible. If God has spoken, then followers are expected to live up to God’s edicts, regardless of the consequences. To base one’s life on such uncompromising commitments may be sublime, but to base our policy making on such commitments would be a dangerous thing.

— Barack Obama (via azspot). Quote of the decade.

I just unfollowed a few people on Tumblr, not because they didn’t interest me, but because I enjoyed perhaps one in five things they said. Far too much noise. I’d like to see more bloggers actively trying to refine the way they blog, rather than just treating blogging as a passive platform.

— unalone. This is why I hate feed-import abuse. I want you to think about what you’re posting and edit yourself a bit — not just blindly import everything you do on every other service and assume that it belongs everywhere.

Graham is getting pretty good with the mini-Etch-a-Sketch.

unalone:

topleftpixel:

653 frames were shot within about an hour and put together to make the video. To watch the HD version check out the vimeo page

Congratulations on your success with the Wii. Really. Despite my doubts, it continues to sell well — so well, in fact, that people still can’t reliably buy one anywhere. I recognize that you’ve shipped twice as many Wiis per month, on average, as Microsoft has shipped Xbox 360s. But the Wii was released 1.6 years ago.

On launch day, it was hype. That’s good. But 1.6 years later, the perpetual shortage is just an annoyance to people who want to buy your products.

I’m one of the 24 million Wii owners. I’ve been massively disappointed in the pathetic, shallow game library. My Wii has been played about three times in the last year, and I usually forget that I even have one. But you recently released a game I’d like to buy: Wii Fit. Even though it’s $90, I still want to buy it. If it had good multiplayer (it doesn’t), I’d buy two.

But I can’t buy it. Anywhere.

I’m trying to give you money. And you won’t take it. That kinda goes against the way successful businesses are operated.

Some of your customers are so devoted, and have so much time, that they’re willing to call around and travel to multiple stores for the chance to get one of your products. That’s a huge pain in the ass. Most people don’t care about you that much. I sure don’t.

The eternal shortages are no longer cute.

Love, Marco

People who have actually met Jakob will recognize that this is a shame.

If I hadn’t met him before, I can’t guarantee that I wouldn’t have joined in the mockery and insults. I’ve probably made a lot of bad judgments of people in the past based on limited, misleading views of them from their online content. People have judged me similarly.

It’s inevitable. Just like IMs and SMS are frequently misinterpreted because they don’t convey vocal and facial cues, people’s blogs can’t accurately convey what they’re like in person as an actual friend or colleague.

I’ve had the privilege to meet many people in real life after having “known” them on the internet for a while. In every case, some of my major assumptions about their actual personalities were wrong.

Now I’m keeping that in mind before I think, say, or write something nasty about someone who I only know on the internet.

energyface:chloesanchez:spiegelman:blakeley:icanhaswar

I just reblogged my own blog on my blog to promote my blog to bloggers.

— reblogged from Travors’ blog onto my blog to help promote his blog to other bloggers and add a free blog post to my blog in the hope that other bloggers will reblog it and promote my blog

(via boringloser)

Jakob does get made fun of relentlessly but we’re all just learning out here in cyberspace about how to have real lives both on and off the computers. You weren’t meant to know what people say about you when you’re not around. Now it can easily be published in a ‘hate’ site devoted to you which remains forever and can be called up any time by anyone anywhere. It’s hard to imagine that that one sweaty fat guy in his underwear who’s jealous cause no one reads his blog so he started a campaign against you isn’t the whole internet when you are the one under attack. But then you remember there are 6,704,845,726 or so people in the world, most of whom couldn’t give a toss about you. Even if a couple thousand were to hate you it’s still not that many.

— Dawn

Jim’s Big Ego - She’s Dead

Just listen to the first line before scrolling past. You’ll be hooked.

All I can deduce from David’s desk contents this morning is that last night, after I left, something happened that was worth 3 cups of hot sauce (?) and an entire bottle of root beer, leaving the huge bottle of gin unopened.

Today on Tuneage:

…And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead - Relative Ways

It was October of 2002.  The Beltway Sniper had just been caught and I, along with my friend Kate, were traveling to a local hippy hangout where we would then board a bus en route to Washington DC to attend a peace rally.  We were running early so on the way we stopped at a used CD store.  After perusing the selection for all of fifteen minutes I had settled upon 3 artists that I had kind of, sort of heard of before.  I settled on …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.  

We rode in a chartered bus all night from Ohio to our nation’s capital and while my cohorts, many of them older, sang their favorite songs of peace and love and happiness there I sat with my red Sony portable CD player listening to a band called …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead.  

Love it. This is my experiment album this week, after a few-week-long dry spell.

Well why not?

I am not going any of the parties because I don’t like the meet&greet&talk-nothings.

— Mareen Fischinger

joelaz:

Violent Femmes - Crazy

It’s cover day Friday.  This week, the Violent Femmes cover Gnarles Barkely’s Crazy.  Odd combination, but it works.

Photo from Violent and Crazy on MySpace

I love the Violent Femmes. I had no idea they were still around.

Apple could not have made the iPhone application testing and deployment process more convoluted and difficult.

I’ve been coding against a DOM parser, which works great in the simulator… but the real iPhone OS only has expat.

I was so close.

I hope it isn’t that important that you rinse ultra-strength Drain-O after 15 minutes instead of forgetting about it and taking a nap for 2 hours.

Enjoying my small bottle of wine with my small wine glass. (Full-sized bottle and pint glass shown behind for scale.)

Wine is best enjoyed frequently in small quantities. There are plenty of great reasons why so many cultures enjoy wine with dinner every day.

The culture of free, seductive as it is, is destructive to everyone involved. Everyone is undercutting everyone, until nobody is making a profit. At best, the winner is the group that can survive off of (usually meager) ad revenues.

— Matt Maroon: Bubble 2.0

The Big Picture: Mississippi Floodwaters in Iowa

Using my own iPhone app on a real iPhone for the first time is fulfilling.

It’ll be even more fulfilling on Monday when I’m on the train, underground, with no reception and no unwatched video podcasts, and I want to read something.

And it’ll be even more fulfilling when Apple fixes the bugs and horrendous performance in the WebView class.

Jessica and David wanted a picture at the last meetup, but there was no light and I didn’t have my 50, so most of the pictures were blurry and awful.

This was my favorite. They may not think so. I’m willing to take that risk.

…when you can get an 8-core webserver for $300/month.

(the “Dual Xeon 5335 - SATA” from The Planet)

One of those currently serves a large portion of Tumblr’s database requests (although we got the SAS disks and more RAM). The CPU power this comes with is ridiculous.

I think the sale ends today, then the price goes back to the regular $400, which is still a ridiculously good deal.

Via yourdp:

Via craytonc:

Rock Band 2 Announced for Sept Release!

I just wet myself.  Great interview here.

IGN: As someone who has played a lot of RB with three friends at a party, it’s a real pain to get everyone into a band and ready to play. Are you streamlining the plug-and-play aspects?

Teasdale: One of our biggest focuses of the design team has been to make the game “party safe.” We’ve made navigation improvements to Rock Band 2 across the board based on the feedback we’ve been getting both from fans on forums as well as from our own personal experiences at Rock Band nights.

Thank you!

This is the only significant problem we’ve had with Rock Band parties. It’s great that they’re actively listening to feedback and improving it.

The interview confirms some other good news: downloaded songs will be cross-compatible between Rock Band and Rock Band 2.

I love that this horrendous offense is in an article entitled The 10 Commandments of Web Design, which chastises websites for common abuses such as “Thou shalt not clutter” and (cough) “Thou shalt not hide content.”

There were probably more, but I didn’t read page 2.

(link via soupsoup)

This may have been interesting too, but I don’t care enough to go past their stupid barrier.

Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras (thanks, John)

If I put my whole ass into things, my potential to accomplish great things increases exponentially.

— Sharing Time