Zzot!

From Monday’s Colbert Report. You’ve got to be really secure in your audience to make a typography joke:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Operation Humble Kanye

Colbert at Christmas
Colbert Christmas DVD

Green Screen
Bill O’Reilly Interview

Raves | Tagged Colbert Raport, Comedy Central, Typography | Permalink | No Comments

Once I really started trying to catch up, it look less than a day. Here are a few observations I made along the way:

1. Progressive lack of sleep¹ combined with jetlag does not seem to help this process. The day that it took me only a small part of was Monday.
2. I’ve got quite a few feeds that can be disposed of quickly for various reasons:
   • A couple of them are (I assume) broken, because most or all of the feed pops up as unread whenever a new item is added or (sometimes) just because it feels like it.
   • For some sources, I have to subscribe to multiple, overlapping feeds to get all the stuff I’m interested in.²
   • Some have such a low S/N ratio that I either don’t bother with them and hit Mark All as Read³ or I tend to skim the item titles a page at a time looking for stuff I care about rather than spacing through everything.⁴
3. Unsurprisingly, you notice how much material is repeated in feed after feed far more when you’re reading most of a week’s items rather than a couple of hours worth.

At any rate, I’m back to my old daily process of asking myself why I’m subscribed to so many feeds that are full of crap.

1. This has been a problem for the setup week for Caraoke’s first showing every year we’ve done it. [↩]
2. Wired is the poster child in this category. [↩]
3. Mail order sites dominate this category. [↩]
4. VersionTracker is the poster child here. [↩]

Life | Tagged Catching Up, RSS | Permalink | 1 Comment

I sort of “went dark” this week. I was in Los Angeles for a few exhibits we worked on for the LA Auto Show. We flew out Monday and returned Friday. At some point on Tuesday, I was definitely caught up in NetNewsWire for iPhone. By Friday morning it had been at least a couple of days.

Today, I started with over 3,700 items to read.

Here are my options on how to deal with this:

1. Spend an unspecified number of days doing nothing but reading “news”.¹
2. RSS Bankruptcy. While we’ve all heard of the email variety, I figured someone, somewhere had already filed under Chapter RSS — I was right.
3. Unsubscribe from a lot of feeds, combined with #1 or #2.

You could certainly argue that gathering that many items in a few days clearly indicates #3 be applied immediately,² I’m starting out with #1 interleaved with the rest of my life because its the least destructive. More to come.

1. Some of it certainly qualifies as news. A lot of it doesn’t. [↩]
2. …and I’d be somewhat inclined to agree [↩]

Life | Tagged Auto Show, Catching Up, iPhone, RSS, Travel, Work | Permalink | No Comments

Sure, I know how to do this, but would my Mom?

Rants | Permalink | No Comments

Here’s my first round of comments on the new iPhone software:

• Remote is what the iPod application should have been from the start…and still isn’t.
• Since I heard about it, I thought real-time sync with MobileMe would be what made the package worth $99 for a lot of people. Having played with it for a few hours, I still think that, with one glaring exception — Windows. I could sync calendars to Outlook, or I could sync them to Outlook. I was syncing them to Outlook for about 20 minutes, and then I couldn’t stand it anymore.
• You can only set the category of a contact when you create it, just like before. What’s new is that you can do the same when creating an appointment.
• There’s still no custom alert sounds (as far as I can tell), and you still can’t set the New Mail sound, generally or per-account (or per-contact, or per-anything else useful).
• I don’t know what your App Store is showing, but mind is showing zero downloads for every app that I look at. Including apps that I’ve installed (and thus obviously downloaded).

Weblog | Tagged Apple, iPhone, MobileMe | Permalink | No Comments

A couple of days ago I finally checked out my current site on my PC at work. Sure, I could have tried IE7 through the magic of Fusion, but I don’t have my History of Internet Explorer VM on my MacBook Pro. I like their products as much as the next geek, but seriously — where the hell is my snapshot manager?

Anyway, my website. I learned something important when I looked at it in both IE6 and IE7. Okay, I learned two things. First, the background was more peculiar in IE7 than IE6. Strangely, the background was doing what it was supposed to in IE6. In IE7, on the other hand, the entire page flipped from the main background to the footer background whenever the top pixel of the footer was above a certain point.

Second, the color was wrong. If your monitor’s color reproduction matches the one I have at work, the simple, light green gradient is gone, and The History of Human Nausea expressed as a 182 byte PNG takes its place. Otherwise, things looked okay. I haven’t decided yet whether I’m going to switch to colors that degrade gracefully or just declare certain monitors as too lousy to bother with. I’ll probably fix the IE7 issue though. Eventually.

Site Info | Tagged Color | Permalink | No Comments

The Good

All of the extensions that really matter to me work in the latest Firefox 3 beta.

The Bad

Notice, I said beta, not release candidate. A couple of them work in the latest RC.

The Ugly

I can still use extensions.checkCompatibility to get me through until they’re all flagged to work properly again.

Weblog | Tagged Firefox | Permalink | No Comments

In an earlier draft I was going to put some witty joke in here about lawyers being out of control. I finally came to my senses — obvious jokes aren’t jokes at all, they’re just annoying. Now, if only I had an intro to put here that I didn’t think was stupid:

You shall, in your sole discretion, avoid the excessive use of the Online Game so as not to disturb your healthy and sound life. KONAMI will not be liable for any social, mental, physical damages caused by the excessive use of the Online Game. Any troubles and/or conflict of interests among the users of the Online Game shall be resolved among such parties and KONAMI does not assume any liability or responsibility regarding such troubles and/or conflict of interests.

That was all in the first half of the EULA Scroll Box From Hell™. The second half, which was cheerfully titled “BASIC TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR USE OF KONAMI ID”, had four sections. These sections were called, and I swear I’m not making this up, Chapters. At what point, exactly, does your life go so wrong that you could write multiple chapters of legal restrictions, attach it to a game, and think this was a good idea?

Rants | Tagged EULA, Games, IANMTU, Idiocy | Permalink | No Comments

Aside from the normal messing around with my style sheets, I added an early version of a Pepper I’m working on this week. I had a QuickTime checker in there before, but it was triggering the information bar in IE. Sure, “works in IE” isn’t exactly my driving concern here, but still. Let me know if you see any new¹ errors, warnings, or lost goats wandering around my website.

Speaking of IE, I haven’t looked at my latest style sheets in IE, so the whole place could be an unintelligible mess for all I know. Visually, I mean. You know — for different reasons than it usually is.

1. …or are “still seeing old” for that matter. [↩]

Site Info | Tagged Color, Mint, WordPress | Permalink | No Comments