Category: observations

An interesting review of a product that the reviewer admits “no one needs”: just as its market is collectors and enthusiasts to whom all manner of ephemera appeal, this application might be a must-have.

Look hard at that graphic. This is a splash screen for a beta—something that will never be seen by more than a handful of people. Note the bullet hole, the magic marker graffiti, the scratched-out slogan, the haphazardly placed logo sticker.

Linux users, think about this image the next time you download a release version of a product without a comprehensive sample configuration file or with “cosmetic” bugs. Windows users, think about this the next time you see a poorly drawn 16-color icon or toolbar graphic in a multi-hundred dollar commercial software package.

The review is more a riff on the “climate of excellence” that Mac users — and developers — have built around their platform. Siracusa hammers his point home again and again that what Apple offers in those comparatively overpriced boxes is a first-class experience. Stuff just works and, dare I say, is even fun to use.

Perhaps an iSight camera is going to move a little higher up my list of purchases.

Pythagoras:

“It is only necessary to make war with five things; with the maladies of the body, the ignorances of the mind, with the passions of the body, with the seditions of the city, and the discords of families.”

washingtonpost.com: SAD Reflects a Season of Drizzle and a Day of Defeat:

It has been a SAD week in Seattle, city of rain, darkness, caffeine, secularism and an 82 percent majority that voted in vain to fire President Bush.

Interestingly, Seattle ranks as the fittest city in the US and the capital of the least (officially) religious “with a quarter of the population reporting no church identification.” Of course, the president has no church affiliation, either, so we’re no less religious than he is.

We’ll survive: if you can handle the winters here, man-made gloom is manageable.

Now playing:Reservations by Wilco from the album “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”

Well, what a pleasant surprise. An old debate adversary — now a fellow member of the community at GrabTheMic — sent me an iTunes gift certificate for a generous sum. So something good came out of Ohio, for me anyway . . .

Now it’s up to me to be gracious in defeat. It seems I should stay in practice . . . .

Any idea why Yahoo!, et al, don’t disintermediate this service?

TinyURL.com – where tiny is better!:

Are you sick of posting URLs in emails only to have it break when sent causing the recipient to have to cut and paste it back together? Then you’ve come to the right place. By entering in a URL in the text field below, we will create a tiny URL that will not break in email postings and never expires.

Who really wants to copy — or worse, type — this mess: http://photos.groups.yahoo.com/group/freecycleseattle/lst?.dir=/1912+Smith+%26+Barnes+piano&.src=gr&.order=&.view=t&.done=http%3a//briefcase.yahoo.com/ ?

Shrillblog: The FACTS Have Joined The Order of the Shrill!!:

[T]he Bush administration has said:

* It’s not a big deal. (Di Rita, 10/24)
* It’s the Iraqi’s fault. (McClellan, 10/25)
* There was a lot going on, so we might have missed it. (McClellan, 10/25)
* We’ve found lots of other less dangerous explosives. (McClellan, 10/25)
* The Pentagon only learned about this a few days ago. (McClellan, 10/25)
* U.S. forces completely searched the facility several times after the invasion. (Di Rita, 10/25)
* The explosives were taken before the U.S. got there. (Di Rita, 10/26)
* This NBC story proves that the explosives were indeed missing when U.S. forces first arrived. (Pentagon official, 10/26)
* Oops, NBC pulled their story; their reporter’s group wasn’t the first on the scene. (AP, 10/26)
* Oops again, the troops didn’t search the facility — they were in combat. (MSNBC, 10/26)
* We never found any explosives. (Pentagon official, 10/27)
* We have satellite pictures of trucks at the bunkers, maybe taking the explosives. (Di Rita, 10/27)
* Oops, wrong bunkers. (Global Security, 10/28)
* The Russians took the explosives. (Shaw, 10/28)
* The troops didn’t search hard enough. (Giuliani, 10/28)
* Kerry hates the troops. (Bush, 10/28)

Google Search: who should I vote for:

Interesting. So who has endorsed Bush? Even the Economist has come out for Kerry (after backing Bush in 2000 and Dole in 1996), saying “It was a difficult call, given that we endorsed George Bush in 2000 and supported the war in Iraq. But in the end we felt he has been too incompetent to deserve re-election.”
Now playing:The Chain by Fleetwood Mac from the album “Rumours”

Which way will the ball go?:

If any of you were lucky enough, you know the answer to this question because you did in fact fall out of the car and know exactly which way you went flying across the pavement as the car turned away in front of you.

I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather guess or cipher out the answer to a question, rather than be hurled out of a moving car into the street . . . .
Continue reading “define “lucky””

Since I found an Internet café inside this castle in the south of the Czech Republic in 1998, it’s been apparent that Internet is available, for all intents and purposes, everywhere.

By everywhere I mean “everywhere a North American is likely to travel in the world.” But also many other places. In areas where travelers congregate, inevitably wiley local entrepreneurs recognize the market opportunity, and Internet cafés — sometimes dozens of them — spring up around traveler populated areas. And in areas where there are fewer travellers, there is often less local infrastructure, and therefore more of a need for shared Internet access.

A great writeup on a recent foray into Croatia and what the traveler saw there. See also this on mobile phones abroad . . .