neorants

Check out this slide show at Discovery Tech. Not just because it’s interesting, which it is, but because of this mind-boggling sentence on the last page:

Pearson conducted this experiment and some related studies on more than 11 participants.

So… 12 then? Usually, when I see some scientific study that says it’s been conducted on “more than” X participants, the number is in the hundreds or thousands. Or, you know, at least more than 11.

So, a WordPress app is now available for the iPhone, and this is just a quick post to try it out.

So I just saw this article over at Network World about Denon’s $500.00 “Denon Link Cable,” which is just an ethernet cable, and a short one at that. Sent the link over to my buddy, who goes by the nick Brash Brazen. I’ve known this guy nearly all my life, and ever since I made the jump to the Mac back in 2000 or so, he’s given me grief about overpaying for hardware (which, I’ll add, is a myth, unless you build you own box). He is notoriously… frugal… and thinks Macs are a waste of cash. But I’ve discovered he has a skeleton in his closet, and the evidence is here, in all its typo-ridden IM glory.
Continue reading ‘$500.00 Ethernet Cable’ »

This resignation letter from Flickr cofounder, Stewart Butterfield, to Yahoo has to be one of the most amusing resignation letters I’ve seen.

So, I originally posted these buried about 5 levels deep in a digg comment thread. I figured nobody would ever see it there, so here it is. This is a slightly modified amalgamation of my response to someone’s sarcastic statement of “Yes, my company sucks. A Fortune 500 company,” and another response to a different user. Sometimes I don’t know why I bother surfing digg. But it’s an addiction.
Continue reading ‘My Frustration With The Enterprise Mentality’ »

I’d been commenting not too long ago to a friend that something which was so subtly well-done that you sort of take it for granted is the character animation in GTA IV, during cinematics and just in-game interactions, characters move like actors would in a movie, not like puppets. This is why. The video is pretty amazing.

Billions of electronic-eating ‘crazy rasberry ants’ invade Texas. These ants make Them sound tame. To a geek, anyway. Destroy the city, just stay away from my iPod!

I thought this was a reskinned iTunes until I enlarged the image. I don’t know anything about the app itself, and I do see they have a few features iTunes doesn’t, but still, the resemblance is uncanny. I know there are only so many ways to do a music player UI, but they may at least wanna make the top portion less carbon-copied.

So lately I’ve been playing skate. It’s a skateboarding game, kind of like the Tony Hawk games, but better. Let me first say that if you had asked me whether it was better on the first or second day I played it, I might have expressed a somewhat different opinion, because the game’s learning curve is steep. The control scheme is called “flickit” and its name comes from the fact that most tricks are executed by pulling the analog sticks on the controller in one direction, then flicking them in another direction quickly.
Continue reading ‘skate.’ »

Often, as I’m reading articles discussing the rollout of new mobile phone networks, or next-generation access to the Internet, I’m frustrated by the punditry that accompanies them. Frequently statements are made about how the U.S. “lags behind” Europe and Japan in terms next-gen network deployments, and very rarely are these statements given proper qualifiers, which leaves the average U.S. citizen wondering why we are so far behind the curve. Let me explain why the problem is one of profitability, not one of technology.

Continue reading ‘Why U.S. Networks “Lag Behind”’ »