A brief exchange at Starbucks:
Me: I’d like an iced chai, medium. I mean grande.
Barista: It’s OK, I speak both languages.
(At the hotel coffee shop during Westercon.)
Category: Life
Two “Critiques” That Aren’t
I am so tired of “critiques” that boil down to one of the following:
- I have no use for or interest in this, therefore no-one does or should.
- Pop culture was so much better during my formative years than the crap they put out today.
These are, to put it mildly, a load of bull.
1. So you don’t have a use for it. Other people have different interests than you do. They also have different needs than you do. You might not need a roto-rooter, but a plumber is going to find it very useful.
This one really infuriates me when it comes from supposed techies. So you don’t have a use for a touchscreen with your giant desktop setup with a wall of six monitors. That doesn’t mean touchscreens can’t be useful on, say, handheld devices, or a small wall unit in the kitchen. There’s a reason this xkcd strip rings true.
2. There was plenty of crap back in the day, too. You’ve just had time to forget the mediocre, while the good stuff has stood the test of time. Not everyone who wrote plays during Shakespeare’s time was a great playwright, and not every movie produced before Star Wars was a great work of art.
Plus, y’know, they were your formative years. Of course you’re going to like stuff from that era better, because that’s what shaped your tastes.
The $250 Magnifying Glass
You know you’re a geek when you take a photo with your camera and zoom in on the display instead of looking for a magnifying glass:
OK, perhaps a bit overkill, but now I have this cool close-up picture of a broken watch pin.
Incidentally, it’s harder than I expected to buy just a replacement pin. I can find watchbands easily, but just the pins? I’m going to need to do some more looking. Not that it necessarily matters, since I seem to have misplaced the unattached half of the watchband — I may need to replace the whole band anyway.
If I do, this time I’m making sure I keep the remaining pin as a spare.
Links: Doomed Data, Web Services, WTF Textbook Questions & More
An experiment: I’ve modified* Twitter Tools to create digest posts as drafts instead of publishing immediately. That gives me a chance to edit a week’s worth of random thoughts and links down to the interesting stuff, clean things up a bit, expand things that could use more detail, and remind myself of items that I wanted to write more about later.
If it works out, and if the plugin still offers digests after it’s rewritten to use OAuth, I’ll probably use this same setup to make sure I keep on top of linkblogging at Speed Force.
*It was pretty simple. I just looked for the function that creates digests, then changed the post_status from publish to draft.
The Links
- Why information storage is hard: The Universe Hates Your Data.
- Interesting analogy: Facebook, Twitter, and the iPhone aren’t quite ecosystems. Maybe it’s better to think of web services as governments. (via ma.tt)
- WTF of the week: A book I was looking at on Amazon didn’t have any active discussions related to it, so Amazon showed me some random forum threads. They included this question on used textbooks: “Is it Ok if I used it to bludgeon several people to death with it?” Be sure to read the responses. [Edit: Amazon’s forums have been shut down.]
- I love how Twitter’s status blog describes Wednesday morning’s outage as “high whales.”
- Dear CNN: A 4.0 earthquake in California, especially one that didn’t cause any damage, is not breaking news. It’s more like business as usual. (It’s worth noting that a full day later, they haven’t updated the story with anything substantive…probably because there isn’t anything to add!)
- Very cool: the Sci-Fi Airshow is a gallery of photorealistic images of spaceships from various science-fiction TV shows and movies set at, well, an air show. (via Bad Astronomy and SciFi Wire)
Link Archive 2010
Some interesting links I encountered over the last few months, between the time I stopped importing Twitter digests and the time I started using them for linkblogging.
Election/Patch Day
My calendar lists last Tuesday as “Election Patch Day.” (We had a state primary election, which fell on Microsoft’s second-Tuesday-of-the month schedule for releasing software updates.)
I guess you could consider elections to be patches keeping the government up to date.
Edit: On the other hand, there are usually two or more competing “patches” that disagree on how to fix the problems, and even what needs to be fixed.
National Park Service vs. Robots From Space
If you went out to the movies in the US during 2009, there’s a good chance you saw a turn-off-your-phone PSA in which a movie about “robots from space” tries to negotiate blowing up Mount Rushmore.
In a case of life imitating art, the National Park Service is currently battling Transformers 3 — a movie about robots from space — over just what they can and can’t do with a national monument!
Okay, you can’t blow up a national monument, but…
Bill Line, Park Service spokesman, said the producers “have asked to do some things that simply are not done on the National Mall,” among them staging a “car race” along the Mall’s gravel paths and flooding it with artificial light in order to shoot at night.
Apparently it’s not unique to Transformers 3, but a fairly frequent battle between the park service and film producers, which means Sprint’s video isn’t just a funny story, but a bit of an in-joke to those familiar with the industry.
Hmm, any chance the new movie will have a chorus singing “Robots from space!” in the background?