Rocket Silence

This is the page I got as a result of typing in my ZIP code to get the weather report yesterday. It measures 1266 pixels wide and 678 pixels tall. That’s a total of 858,348 pixels with which they could have told me the weather. That, was  – I thought, a simple request. And apparently it isn’t. I don’t run Adblock, but apparently I should. I usually go to wunderground.com or weather.com, both of which are far more tolerable, but I thought I should make mention of this anyway.

There comes a point when a company, in this case – Accuweather, needs to ask themselves: what the fuck are you doing? Do you have that little respect for the people who use your site?

The City of Santa Barbara wishes you and your family a happy and healthy holiday season, lock up your shit.

This year, kickme444 and an assorted group of Redditors decided to put together one of the largest communal holiday gift exchanges on the internet for the Reddit community. This was no slap-dash operation, it led to the creation of redditgifts.com with over four thousand members participating in the exchange. You can read more about it at the website and on the /r/secretsanta subreddit. And yes, I finally sent mine today, so please stop sending me guilt-inducing emails, kickme444.

Today, I received a nondescript brown parcel from the UPS guy. Little did I know that it was in fact my Secret Santa gift. Please join me in the unboxing, don’t skip to the end – spoilers stink.

Sure thing, internet stranger.

It’s a book. Not another copy of “Freakonomics”, please.

This poorly written dialogue looks familiar. I’m glad somebody finally found a good use for a printed copy of Twilight.

Sh**, it’s the third Twilight book. Dick move, sir.

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• Mildly humorous idea I don’t have the initiative to follow through on: Shakespeare’s Othello reimagined as YouTube comments. #
• Lala might be acquired by Apple; hopefully they don’t destroy it in the process. It’s a gem in a sea of Web 2.0 mediocrity. #
• I’m currently staring at a PowerPoint slide with a wall of text fourteen continuous lines long. Jiminy. #
• 6 months in, it’s time for an “Operation End Fat-Assery Now” status update. Discarded 75 lbs, trimmed 8″ off waist, decidedly less jolly. #
• Be kind this holiday season, friends — otherwise you’re all getting gifts from Regretsy. #
• App Store reviews are the new YouTube comments. #
• There have been six seasons of “Dog the Bounty Hunter”; but I’m sorry — I interrupted. Please tell me more about this “God” you speak of. #
• @Mike_FTW Is that why Alyssa Milano is listed as an advisor for Square? in reply to Mike_FTW #
• WolframAlpha proves useful to the extent that it negates the six seconds it would take to launch Mathematica, and that’s about it. #
• Alan Greenspan is wearing his blue beanie for Web Standards Day – http://bit.ly/3dvtUG #

Note: this post was erroneously generated by a new plugin, but this post has comments foreshadowing to the gift described in the next post, so it stays.

When Apple announced the unibody MacBook Pro, I ordered one immediately after to replace my aging MacBook Pro. It was a great machine except for the new screen design that Apple adopted, a LED-backlit LCD seated behind a sheet of thin and highly reflective glass that made outdoor use and work in bright environments nearly impossible because of reflections.

Luckily, this week – Apple decided to offer a matte “anti-glare” display option on the 15″ MacBook Pro. I purchased one Friday night from the Apple Store and am posting a few pictures here since it seems to be mildly elusive and CTO MacBook Pros from the website haven’t shipped yet. Thus far, I’m really enjoying it. Take a look below.

It looks very similar to the pre-unibody MacBook Pro. Wider bezel than the 17″.

You can find more pictures over on my Flickr photostream.

boinged (verb, past-tense): the act of Cory Doctorow copying and pasting four paragraphs of an author’s work, writing a one sentence preface for it, calling it original content and wrapping ads around it on Boing Boing.

Example: Andy Baio was totally just ‘boinged, but it’s totally fine because BB is hip and so-not-corporate.

So – who wants a steampunk waffle-iron?

“Prove that Techcrunch did not pay @biz $10,000 to get on Twitter’s suggested friend list. They sure were not more popular than @leolaporte two weeks ago.” – Robert Scoble

Well, first. When you pull a ridiculous accusation out of your ass, I do believe that the burden of proof is on you. The issue here is that Robert Scoble has become increasingly more and more irrelevant as the whole free-money Web 2.0 “social networks as conversations” thing began to wane and he can’t handle that. For some inexpicable reason, there are a small few that actually do listen to him and we end up with gems like this.

Twitter has a feature called “Suggested Users” so people can find new interesting people to follow. It’s not really based on any true metric or algorithm as far as I can see and thus, it’s not a popularity contest in the way that Scoble would like things to be. Thus, he feels the need to accuse Michael Arrington of ‘bribing’ a Twitter founder to be on that list. Other people on the list are Veronica Belmont, Felicia Day, Kevin Rose and other assorted popular users. The problem here is that Scoble and others feel that every social network has to be open and trasparent so that “thought leaders” (and I mean that as a pejorative) can quantify their excellence through popularity and notoriety.

Robert Scoble is angry and whining because of the fact that he’s not on it. That’s all. He’s angry that nobody actually cares about what he has to say except desperate start-up owners looking for him to schill their product. Scoble has an always will be an attention grubing blogger who, much like Dave Winer, have completely lost sight of the revolutionary environment they were thought to be fostering in the early days of Web 2.0.

The quote link leads to a thread on FriendFeed which is an interesting read for the sheer ridiculousness of it all.

I can’t believe that Congress and the new administration actually passed an extension for the US Digital TV transition deadline, but alas – here we are. But look, I’ve solved the entire problem in two minutes. After the deadline, display this test card on the analog channels for one week. When old people find out their TV no longer works, they’ll call a somebody young and useful to the world and find they need a converter box or a new television in order to keep watching Wheel of Fortune and Matlock.

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You’re welcome, federal government.

First, please note that the laptop in this (intentionally absurd) ad is a MacBook Pro. Second, one of the characters actuall says “Microsoft, huh? So it’s pretty easy to use?” Really.

But that characterization may be unfair based on just one project. After all, they did release the Zune – a 30GB brown media player which stopped working for two full days when it was a leap year.

Click on for some choice samples of that Songsmith magic!

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I won’t begin to claim that Apple reinvented the music industry or make any sweeping claims, but it must be acknowledged the impact that this company has had on the the creation and consumption of music. With iTunes + iPod, Apple introduced a new and simple way for the younger generation to experience their music. Physical media was obviated through the digital distribution channels that were created through the iTunes Store. As of the last reported quarter, Apple has sold over 170,000,000 digital music players worldwide. Other consumer electronics manufacturers attempted to break into the market for digital music like Rio, Creative and iRiver – yet Apple succeeded because of attention to ease of use and aesthetics. As of January 2009, nearly all tracks on the iTunes Store are free of DRM. OTA song downloads to mobile devices is now possible without a premium price.

Apple, on the both the professional and consumer level, has simplified the creation of music. Through applications like Logic Studio (acquired IP) and the in-house developed Garage Band, creating music from pre-recorded loops and real instruments is approachable to the masses. Through the iLife suite of applications, Apple did not position Garage Band as a niche product – by offering it for free on each and every OS X machine, it took the position that music is not an exclusive art. The latest edition offers interactive lessons from renowed artists to extend this metaphor to helping anyone take on an actual instrument. No other company has done anything of this magnitude (reference the next entry).

This is officially, my favorite thing ever.

Context: Disillusioned David Archuleta fans as the winner of American Idol 7 was announced in May earlier this year. I think it was the screen-printed Archie-shirt that did him in.

SLYT video is behind the cut…

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I’m saddened so few people got my joke earlier on Twitter, so much so that I feel it necessary to explain it because it involves two excellent dramas that everyone needs to have watched in their lifetime.

First, Matt Santos was a character on the West Wing played by Jimmy Smits. Santos was a Democratic senator from Texas who ascended to the presidency on the show. Writers on the West Wing noted that Santos’ character was based on upstart Illinois senator and President-elect Barack Obama.

Jimmy Smits has a recurring role as Miguel Prado on the Showtime drama Dexter. He plays a District Attorney who has become quite fond of Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only kills those who kill others. Next, Sarah Palin, running mate of John McCain, stated in the final weeks of the election that “[Obama] pals around with terrorists”.

Therefore, “Matt Santos pals around with serial killers” is funny.