February 2010
67 posts
“They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”
“It was Buffalo Springfield.”
“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ” —How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker
“It was Buffalo Springfield.”
“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ” —How Paul Krugman found politics : The New Yorker
Converting Body Movements Into Electricity - NYTimes.com →
nytimes.com
“A first application might be in shoes, to produce enough power to keep a music player or phone charged. But the eventual goal would be to make a flexible power generator that could be implanted in the chest or elsewhere.”
I am Iron Man.
Peeve
When, how, and where did the unusual and grating affectation of starting an answer with the word “so” originate? I dislike it beyond compare.
Q: How do you turn the TV off?
A: So the remote control has a button to turn it off.
Do I find it irritating? So yes.
“This is the fundamental problem with software as a service – you don’t own it, you don’t control it, and there’s no recourse to the providers like Ning. It’s why I like to have my own cloud. Cloud computing, software in the cloud, these terms are names for the same basic idea. Digital Sharecropping. You’ll get the resources you need for little or no money and you can produce value there for you and yours, but you never own it, you can’t take it somewhere else, and you have very little bargaining power for changes. This is why Facebook is so troubling.”
—How Ning made me a chump and how you can avoid it
“Asked about the reasons for not having broadband at home, almost half of respondents cited a prohibitive cost, and almost as many said they were uncomfortable using a computer. Forty-five percent answered “yes” to the statement, “I am worried about all the bad things that can happen if I use the Internet.” Others said they viewed the Internet as a waste of time.”
—One-Third of U.S. Without Broadband, F.C.C. Finds - NYTimes.com
Text in bold is my favorite new phrase.
Text in bold is my favorite new phrase.
“Let’s not mince words: Google is not very good at design. The cacophony of its recent designs in Wave and Buzz are proof positive that Google’s single most valuable contribution to strategic design, its sparse search page, is but a distant memory now. Welcome to the Microsoft Ribbon-land.”
—Buzz launch wasn’t flawed, Google’s intentions are « counternotions
Windows Phone 7 Series →
windowsphone7series.com
Gruber sez: “What a great product name. Not a mouthful at all.”
“SOCIAL MEDIA IS ALREADY DEAD…Or at least, what it once was is no longer possible, thanks to marketers, salesmen, politicians, and other self-serving entities. When you’re sitting there telling your client that social media is going to help them sell more products or gain more popularity on the Web, you may be correct, but you’re missing the whole point of “social” media. We can’t even call it that these days, it’s more like “commercial” media. I stopped watching television many years ago after tiring of all the manipulative sleaziness. For awhile there, we enjoyed a Virtual Utopia here on the Web, sharing with each other via blogs and then more so with social media. It’s sad, to say the least that the sellouts have taken over, but fortunately there are many “microcosms” of online communities that still try to keep it real. If you are lucky enough to be included in a genuine community of inspired and passionate people, then congratulations. I would definitely focus my efforts in that area and work to keep the scene alive.”
—A Few Steps Back • Perishable Press
Minimal Mac Touche
I sometimes think Minimal Mac is trying too hard with its “What we believe in/Not what we believe in” schtick. (A belief system? C’mon. Get back to work.) But I did like their smug comparison of the Office ribbon…
with the TextEdit toolbar…
as a reminder that TextEdit can save docs as Word.
“It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we’d found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken…Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible - Facebook’s login page.”
—How Google Failed Its Users and Gave Birth to an Internet Meme
Fascinating.
Fascinating.
