Category: quote of the day

Those that believe that they did not evolve from lesser primates probably haven’t, yet.

[From South Carolina GOPer Apologizes For Calling Michelle Obama A Gorilla — And Says She Started It | TPMDC]

[sigh]

The whole reason I picked up 1984 off the dusty shelves in my family’s summer house was that I needed something to read and it was clearly science fiction, unlike most of the other books on the shelf.

[From Making Light: “But this is good!” “Well, then, it’s not SF.”]

Have I mentioned how I hate genres or categorizing fiction? Arranging by color is at least defensible, as long as there are few edge cases (where does ecru go? is it white or a light brown?). There’s considerable disagreement over how to define the genre, even w/in the Making Light commentariat, so it’s not just me who finds the lumping and splitting unproductive. I agree 100% with this:

For a lovely defense of genre in all its forms, read Michael Chabon’s essay collection Maps and Legends. I’m sure he was delighted to have won the Hugo and Nebula; the Edgar (for which The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was also nominated) would have made it a trifecta.

[From Making Light: “But this is good!” “Well, then, it’s not SF.”]

As noted here I think one way to help stanch the bloodletting at newspapers would to leverage the online ad space (unlimited inventory, multimedia ads, targeting, loyalty/rewards programs) to help support the print editions. Looks like the Miami Herald is doing just that with it’s Super H News:

  

A tip o’ the green eyeshade to Johnny Mahone for sending this along.

Q: Do you kindle?
A: I don’t know, I’ve never tried.

I have seen exactly one of these in the wild vs who knows how many iPhones. Anyone have any firsthand experience with one? V.2 looks a lot better, if a little imitative. Not sure I see the value in a single purpose device though. If that’s all it does, do I want to carry it around all day?

Lots of stuff seems to have stopped working properly over the last few months. The tech support/forums are full of unanswered variations on the same questions I have on the same issues. If they don’t care, why should I?

So I’m a bit hardline when it comes to blocking people . . .

I don’t see the value in using Flickr as whacking material: I expect it means all the more, er, useful sites are blocked, but why do that at work? I think it would be much better to let people go wherever they want and if they wander off to places they shouldn’t, then take steps, just as you would if they were wasting company resources.

I’ve known people who frequented strip clubs on their lunch hours and who spent an awful lot of time scouring the interwebs for porn (I remember one guy who determined to burn it all to CD in case it somehow disappeared: have that many CDs been manufactured?).

She’s right to do this, of course. Shame some people are unable to grasp the subtleties of a naked form used as something other than a glandular stimulus.

I used to work with the brother-in-law of the author of this book:

but never knew about the work being done there, the school-building and generosity (or recompense?) being done in the wild regions of the Karakoram and Himalayas.

The fellow I worked with is the only person I have met who has summited Mt Everest and afterwards launched an improvement project of his own, cleaning up the refuse and debris left by climbers.

Users of the popular (10,000 users or so) reminder/organization service will have to go back to pen, paper, and forgetting pretty soon.

Today marks a fork in the road for this particular startup. Values of n, the company behind Stikkit and I Want Sandy, will be closing its doors. Both services will going offline at close of business (5pm PST) on Monday December 8th, 2008.

[From Values of n Blog: A fork in the road]

My comments to that post:

I feel like all the input and suggestions made by Sandy users, as well as the day-to-day reliance on it (how else to make it better) is being dropped on the floor. I guess ownership is a vague concept in web services. Does the person who owns the rackspace own the service? Or is it the people who actually make renting the rackspace necessary? Or is the programmers who built it, not knowing how it would work in real life?

Yes, the service is free, but no one asked the users who added value by engaging with it to pay for it or otherwise keep it going.

I will be thinking twice about any other services like this: I hadn’t really gotten one before this and it seems unlikely I will again.