Believe it or not, I have only owned 16 of the top 100 gadgets of all time. And thank God they included a Tickle Me Elmo in the list, because that should innoculate me against another useless collecting habit.
Author Archives: Jeff Porten
H.L. Mencken, on W (prophetically)
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
If you’re lucky, you can have it in 798,966,720 ms
Can someone please explain to me why, when you change your Yahoo! marketing preferences, you are required to please allow approximately ten (10) days for this change to take effect? “That’s the time it takes to fill in our marketing request form with a #2 pencil, and ship it ground from our web servers to the guy with the Teletype who enters it into our Offshore Marketing Database SAN.”
Note to Yahoo: please allow ten days for me to reconsider next time I think about purchasing one of your services.
The Apple Product Cycle
Editors of popular Mac magazines hail the new device as the next great step toward our utopian digital future. Fortune publishes another glowing fluff piece about Steve Jobs, proclaiming him to be the great visionary behind all technological innovation. Business Week publishes an article stating that unless Apple immediately releases a Windows version of the new product its market share will continue to shrink and Apple will be out of business within six months.
Ninatabulation
You probably have to be utterly blue state liberal to find this amusing, but I thought it was a hoot. Via How We Work:
Hirschfeld has engaged in the “harmless insanity,” as he calls it, of hiding [his daughter’s] name at least once in each of his drawings. The number of NINAs concealed is shown by an Arabic numeral to the right of his signature. Generally, if no number is to be found, either NINA appears once or the drawing was executed before she was born. The NINA-counting mania is well illuminated when, in 1973, an NYU student kept coming back to the Gallery to stare at the same drawing each day for more than a week. The drawing was Hirschfeld’s whimsical portrayal of New York’s Central Park. When the curiosity finally got the best of me, I asked, “What is so riveting about that one drawing that keeps you here for hours, day after day?” She answered that she had found only 11 of 39 NINAs and would not give up until all were located. I replied that the ’39 next to the signature was the year. Nina was born in 1945.
Next: Oxygen Found To Be Beneficial to Health
Via Reuters, the latest research from Penn:
Men and women often decide in minutes who they want to date, and base that decision on largely superficial factors, new research from a speed dating service suggests.
Apparently their research standards have gone down since they stopped braining live monkeys.
John Draper slags Napster
Over at Daring Fireball, John Draper consults his magic 8 ball on why Napster won’t dent the iTunes Music Store.
My question: 10,000 songs is just under 42 days of non-repeating music, at 12 hours per day. This would be a bit longer than a month. So does anyone really think of “filling my iPod monthly” as a selling point? Most of what you go through the trouble to select and download, you’re never going to actually get to.
But my entire music library would fit easily on an iPod shuffle, so maybe I’m not the guy to ask.
TiddlyWiki is mind-blowing
Go to TiddlyWiki. Bounce around the site for a bit and enjoy its interesting user interface. So far, just another wiki implementation.
Now, save that page you’re playing with as a local HTML file. Close your browser window. Open the file. Note that it’s exactly the same. Whole thing is self-contained within your browser.
Reattach lower jaw to head.
The one thing that makes this less than orgasmic (well, if you’re as into information tools as I am) is its horribly painful save method (which the author apologises for), and the charming feature that since your browser won’t recognize a changed page, it’s all too easy to close the window and lose everything you’ve worked on. But still… wow.
Some sesquipedalian fun
If you’re a bit disappointed that success in life no longer involves acing the SATs, stop by the Difficult Analogies Test. Really, though, I’m only blogging this so I can brag that I scored 23/30.
I want to be Andrew Greig when I grow up
Simply breathtaking. As reported by I, Cringely:
There is no desktop PC in Andrew’s house. Instead, he runs a Linux thin client on a Sharp Zaurus SL-6000 Linux PDA. Sitting in its cradle on Andrew’s desk at home, the Zaurus (running a special copy of Debian Linux, NOT as shipped by Sharp) connects to a full-size keyboard and VGA display, and runs applications on the server. Another cradle, monitor and keyboard are at Andrew’s office, where he also doesn’t have a PC. Walking around in his house, the Zaurus (equipped with a tri-mode communications card) is a WiFi VoIP phone running through the Asterisk PBX and connecting to the Vonage VoIP network. Walking out of his house, the Zaurus automatically converts to the local mobile phone carrier, though with a data connection that still runs back through Vonage. At Starbucks, it’s a Wifi Vonage phone. At Andrew’s office, it is a WiFi extension to the office Asterisk PBX AND to Andrew’s home PBX. That’s one PDA doing the job of two desktop PCs, a notebook PC, and three telephones.
Yeah, but what about that wireless TV? How does that work? Andrew’s server runs Myth TV, an Open Source digital video recorder application, storing on disk in MPEG-4 format (1.5-2 megabits-per-second) more than 30,000 TV episodes, movies and MP3 music files.
Anonymous HP employee, on Carly Fiorina
“Fiorina never understood that you have to spend a little money to make money. That’s why HP went from a respected, innovative company that made quality products to one that makes most of its profits off printer ink.” Quoted in Technology Review.
The geek approach to organization
The same discussion that led me to the deranging panic also took me here, where I learn with interest that I’m not the only computer professional who has had “learn to drive” on his to-do list for 15 years.
Which reminds me, two of my favorite places these days are Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, and its corresponding Google discussion group. Fascinating discussions, ranging from how to use emacs as a project planner, to setting up a CVS system to allow “multiple computers, one calendar”, through the merits of manila folders versus clasp envelopes as part of a GTD filing system.
Phrase of the day: deranging panic
I don’t want to think about how many of these behaviors I exhibited in college. (But not anymore. Nosirree, bob.) Adapted from Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor, 1989.
Gripped by an almost deranging panic, he’d then decide to sacrifice the first two days of that final week to the making of another timetable. This time for someone who had to pack three months of revision into five days.
Because five days now had to accommodate three months’ work, the first thing that had to go was sleep. To prepare for an unrelenting twenty-four hours a day sleep-free schedule, Rimmer would spend the whole of the first remaining day in bed – to be extra, ultra fresh, so he would be able to squeeze three whole months of revision into four short days.
Watching the grass grow
I’ve been playing around with iCalViewer for a few days now. It’s an interesting hack which pulls your iCal calendar and splashes it across your desktop, below your windows and icons, but riding above your background screen.
Right now its best feature is that it’s making it easier for me to keep timeblock appointments with myself to get things done; harder to ignore something when you can see it creeping up to the “now” line all day long. But even if it weren’t particularly useful, it still gets plenty of points for looking cool.
One more stimulant on the agenda…
Just got a call at 2:10 AM from a friend of mine—a usually stolid and reserved friend—who was bouncing off the ceiling giddy. The purported reason? Red Bull and vodka, mixed in with his usual quota of alcohol for the evening. Guy’s state was altered enough that I wondered if someone had spiked him with something harder and less legal.
So I’m going to have to give this a shot sometime, without the alcohol. Working theory: mixed in with my usual estimated daily intake of 18 mg of nicotine and 1,890 mg of caffeine, the only effect I’ll see is a lighter wallet. Either that, or my head will explode.
Chris Welbon on Cingular
“To call Cingular’s technical support ‘incompetent’ is to do a disservice to incompetent people everywhere.” Quoted from Macintouch.
Al Gore takes the gloves off
Al Gore’s speech is worth watching just to prove that the guy can give a stemwinder. Also because it’s not every day when you hear anyone calling for the resignation of half an administration. But it does leave me wondering: Al, where the hell were you?
How a virus can ruin your life
If you need any more evidence why it’s dangerous to criminalize communication, read this. Maybe Jack is lying. Maybe he’s not.
Apparently most Americans don’t get their news from Earth.
Fifty-seven percent of those polled “believe that before the war Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda,” and 45 percent “believe that evidence that Iraq was supporting al Qaeda has been found.” Moreover, 65 percent believe that “experts” have confirmed that Iraq had WMD. “Among those who perceived experts as saying that Iraq had WMD, 72% said they would vote for Bush and 23% said they would vote for Kerry….
Among those who perceived experts as saying that Iraq had supported al Qaeda, 62% said they would vote for Bush and 36% said they would vote for Kerry.” The reason given by respondents for their views was that they had heard these claims from the Bush administration.
From a report issued by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland, quoted in Salon.
101. Giving us this rich opportunity
From the Center for American Progress, 100 Bush mistakes for the next time he’s asked.