Whenever I visit a Dreamwidth journal and leave it open in a tab, I always find myself wondering why I was looking at the Debian GNU/Linux website. For possibly obvious reasons:
I can’t imagine how I keep mixing up a dark red 1½-turn counterclockwise spiral with a dark red 1½-turn clockwise spiral! 😀
Twitter writes that link length shouldn’t matter, but the zillions of URL shortening services out there show that, for now, it does.
But why?
There are two main reasons to shorten* a link:
Right now, with Twitter messages limited to 140 characters and links forced to share that space with the rest of the post, URL shorteners are critical. But they’re working on a plan to accept longer URLs, and specifically shorten them for SMS messages. The full link will be available on the Twitter website, desktop clients, and other platforms that don’t have that hard and fast limit.
That will cut down on the demand for shorteners, but they’ll still be useful.
For one thing, there are other microblogging platforms out there like StatusNet.
For another, there’s email.
IIRC, the first URL shorteners launched because email programs often break up really long lines, including really long URLs. In plain-text messages, that leaves links not just unclickable, but inconvenient even to copy and paste, because you have to copy each line separately and paste them together. This will continue to be an issue as long as people continue to put visible URLs in email.
And then there’s the human factor. It might not be easy to remember http://is.gd/cGE8V, but it certainly takes a lot less time to write it on a scrap of paper than http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/07/hard-to-port-eject-goose-eject/.
Which of those URLs would you rather type on your keyboard? Or worse, on your mobile phone?
*In this case, I mean making it really short and cryptic. There are plenty of reasons to keep links readable and sort of short.
There are several things about Proposition 16 (on tomorrow’s California ballot) that just make me say, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
1. The ad campaign is horribly misleading. They’re promoting it as “Your Right To Vote,” but it has nothing to do with your right to vote. I guess “Making it hard for local governments to get into or expand the electricity business” isn’t snappy enough, but that’s what it actually does: it requires governments to hold additional elections (or piggyback on already-scheduled elections) if they want to get into the electricity business.
Whether it passes or not, your voting rights aren’t affected at all.
2. It’s oddly specific. If you look past the main slogan, you’ll see them talk about making sure governments don’t spend large amounts of money without voter approval.* But it only applies to the power industry. And it’s sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric, the largest power company in the state.
That’s sort of like deciding that theft is a problem, but only making it illegal to steal from your house. If the problem is governments spending huge amounts of money, why focus only on one industry?
The whole thing comes off as being very self-serving, like Microsoft sponsoring an initiative to require a popular vote if a city wants to switch from Microsoft Office to Google Docs or OpenOffice.org.
*Of course, when you think about it, we approved the people making the decision when we voted them into office.
So, remember this photo of a door labeled “This is not a door?” Last year, someone else sent a picture of the same door to FAIL Blog. Then a week ago, someone submitted mine to Friends of Irony, where Katie spotted it a few days later.
Here’s where things get interesting.
On both sites, people were absolutely convinced that it was “obviously” photoshopped.
*headdesk*
No, it’s real. It’s in a small business complex at the corner of Newport Ave. and Irvine Blvd. in Tustin, California. You can go there and look if you want. And of course there are the two photos taken from different angles.
The obvious conclusion is that people don’t really know how to tell whether a photo has been manipulated. At least on FAIL Blog, some of the doubters had reasons, even though they amounted to not understanding perspective.
I was tempted to post a comment linking to this XKCD strip (My hobby: insisting that real-life objects are photoshopped), but settled for requesting a photo credit instead.
If you’re going to get a custom license plate, be creative. What’s the point of putting “WHITBMW” on your white BMW? I can see that! At least say something about your car. Even something like “I♥MYVW.” (No, I haven’t seen this one specifically.)
A flier picked up at Sprouts, all about how to find the perfect drink to go with cheese. There’s a website, too: CheeseCupid.com lets you start with either a type of drink or a type of cheese, and find its perfect mate.
They even have an iPhone app. 😯
I guess the Cheese Information Center just wasn’t hitting the target.
Remember the Battlestar Galactica cake? For last night’s LOST finale, Katie made an authentic DHARMA Initiative chocolate cake, and pizzas with the Swan and Orchid logos.
The cake is chocolate, with homemade buttercream icing (vanilla for the background, chocolate for the design). The pizzas have an outer ring of sausage, with bell pepper strips for the I Ching. The Swan logo is cut from a bell pepper. The Orchid is cut from a tomato, and placed on the pizza after baking.
For more views, including in-progress pictures, close-ups, and making-of commentary, check out the LOST finale food photos on Flickr.
