A Most Beautiful Suicide

Logo with Flare

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:47:21 -0700

Client: I already know what I want for the logo. It’s a house, with a face, and it’s on wheels with an exhaust pipe coming out of the back which is shooting out smoke in the shape of dollar signs.

Pff!

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:25:32 -0700

moltz:

When I wanted to write my fan fiction for a technology company with a market share under 5%, I didn’t need some special month to do it in!

What Moltz doesn’t realize is that CARS made every month a special month.

jimray: Stewart gets the last word in the FOX/White House...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:32:18 -0600

jimray:

Stewart gets the last word in the FOX/White House tussle

Duplicating folders automatically increases numeric folder suffix

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:27:40 -0600

This is fucking amazing. It’s stuff like this that makes you realize how much effort Apple puts into the little things.

finermac:

If you have a folder that is named “Round 1”, and you Option + Drag/Drop to duplicate it, the new folder will automatically be named “Round 2”. Do it again and you’ll have “Round 3”.

Editor’s note: Can anyone test this in pre-Snow-Leopard versions of Mac OS X? I’m not sure whether this is exclusive to 10.6.

Update: One commenter reports this works in 10.5.8 Leopard.

My school newspaper column was called Cognitive...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:55:25 -0600

My school newspaper column was called Cognitive Dissonance.

natashavc:

Senior year at ‘nutrition’. Bouncing Souls Hoody, dress code violating beanie and an overall shitty attitude. I was kicked out of my drama class this year. I also had a newspaper column called DISSIDENT DISPATCHES.

I had 54 tardies to my first period (photography) and was not allowed to walk at my graduation. I slept in that morning and then drove to the beach — which is the best way to spend your high school graduation.

A boy in a balloon

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:56:23 -0600

Yes.

A boy was reported to be in a home-made balloon that was sailing thousands of feet in the air at over 20 miles an hour. When the balloon landed, the boy was not found to be where everyone had assumed he’d be.

The worst was feared, that he’d fallen out. Shortly after contemplating this, the next answer was that maybe he was scared for letting the balloon go and had hidden, or that the entire thing was a publicity stunt by an admittedly eccentric family.

I got very sad when I heard the latter, not because I felt it was true, but because I didn’t like the truth of how quickly our society jumps to that kind of conclusion. “HOAX” they scream. “PUBLICITY STUNT” they yell, and turn it into a media circus, either way.

I guess I don’t believe it was a PR stunt or anything of that sort, because, well, I like to think people are better than that. I’m probably wrong.

But I think I’d prefer to be the kind of person who’s wrong about this kind of thing than to be the kind of person who’s right about it.

uptonic: 10GUI: New thinking in human-computer interaction...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:18:38 -0600

uptonic:

10GUI: New thinking in human-computer interaction (http://10gui.com/)

I really can’t decide if this is insightful or hooey.

moltz: [Dashboard appears to be choking on the frame so click...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:07:11 -0600

moltz:

[Dashboard appears to be choking on the frame so click through to see the video.] (Via TPM)

It’s astounding that Stewart can bang out a spot-on, devastating critique like this and CNN can still be on the air, blithely doing the same god damn thing the next day. In a rational world, the network would shrivel up and die from pure shame.

Fantastic, amazing work by the Daily Show. Why is cable news still legal?

"And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was..."

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:43:09 -0600

“

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

”

- Derek, via Mat, via merlin (via mobilhomme)

The Studio as Author: An Introduction to Pixar Week

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:27:00 -0600

The Studio as Author: An Introduction to Pixar Week :

For its first five films (save the intriguingly different Bug’s Life, which I’ll examine in more depth in a bit), the studio made films about the relationships between young children and their parents and the way those relationships shifted, changed and warped as children aged. For its next four films, the studio made films about how individuals do or don’t fit within their communities and the ways that communities struggle to encompass the exceptional individuals who pop up within them. And now, with Up and leaked plot details from Toy Story 3 as evidence, the studio is overwhelmingly concerned with mortality.

Funky balls

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:24:06 -0600

Kevin Conboy: i'm wary of this mighty mouse though
Kevin Conboy: i don't trust them
Philip Luedtke: why not?
Philip Luedtke: what do you use, a microsoft mouse?
Kevin Conboy: no i bought a mighty mouse
Kevin Conboy: you never listen to me
Kevin Conboy: but i don't trust it
Kevin Conboy: i guess i just need to clean it more
Philip Luedtke: maybe if you washed your hands it wouldn't stop working
Philip Luedtke: the ball that is
Philip Luedtke: cause I'm guessing that's what you don't trust?
Kevin Conboy: yeah
Kevin Conboy: the ball
Kevin Conboy: i don't trust balls.
Philip Luedtke: you have to clean the balls regularly
Philip Luedtke: or they get covered in funk
Philip Luedtke: you won't be able to work them up and down if they're covered in funk
Kevin Conboy: no one likes a funky ball
Philip Luedtke: and don't even think about rolling those balls sideways when they're dirty
Kevin Conboy: that's a mess just waiting to happen
Philip Luedtke: have fun with your balls
Kevin Conboy: i will
Philip Luedtke: or in this case, ball
Kevin Conboy: gingerly

Spotlight is my calculator

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 14:11:35 -0600

Me too!

mrgan:

I rarely need to calculate anything mathematically complex, but I often reach for the computer to do the sort of calculation you run into when doing layout design: split 760 pixels into 3 columns with even gutters; or, figure out what the left margin of a 215-px-wide element should be to center it inside a 490 px container.

Now, I’ll be the first to agree that you don’t need a calculator to crunch three integers. I know John Allen Paulos would wag his finger if he saw me typing “143/3” instead of quickly dividing it in my head (and if he were here, and if he knew who I was). But my problem is not a lack of mathematical ability; I’m not great at arithmetic, but I’m solid. My problem is that I don’t trust my brain’s math without double-checking it: “Ok so 143/3 is… 47 and 2/3 which is 47.666. Now let’s double-check: 48 * 3 is 40 * 3 + 8 * 3…” and so on. I don’t do this often enough to be sure of my results, so I spend too long reversing everything to see if it fits.

Using a calculator solves this; I trust the calculator. Here’s the part that doesn’t make sense to my brain, however: every calculator I’ve ever used puts my input in a sort of one-dimensional, single-number-at-a-time box. I type “143”, I hit ÷, and the 143 is gone. The insecurity kicks in again: “Wait, did I type 143? Did I really hit ÷, not ×?” I need to see my whole line at once, parentheses and all.

The first calculator that does this for me is not a calculator at all; it’s Mac OS X’s Spotlight. It’s probably not news to you, but there: you can type math into the Spotlight menu-item box (not in the Finder-window box). Programmer-y notation like “sqrt(35)*sin(4^3)” is totally acceptable.

(Brief digression: ok, Spotlight wasn’t the first calculator I used like this; Google was. But Spotlight is far faster and more accessible, so I actually use it daily.)

Somehow this combination of instant availability, guaranteed results, and visible syntax clicks for me. It’s all the calculator I need. Perhaps best of all is that if I decide half way through my typing that I really needed another “(” at the start of the whole thing, I can just jump back and type it in. Maybe this is possible with standard calculators, but I honestly have no idea how.

I’ve used many physical calculators in my school years, and while I can’t say I’ve played with too many scientific-calculator apps, I haven’t seen this kind of representation of input. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong place; maybe no one else needs this. Either way, I’m sure I’ll hear from PCalc fans. (I never bought PCalc, but the screenshots I saw didn’t show what I’m looking for. Paper tape ain’t it.)

But right now, I have my accidental calculator right in the menu bar, a two-key chord away, and I love it.

An open letter to all Bedpost users

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 15:48:42 -0600

bedpost:

Well hello there.

Chances are you had no idea this blog existed, and you have no idea who or what is behind Bedposted.com, and you probably don’t really care that much. And that’s fine. It’s the way I’ve wanted to keep it for about a year now.

You see, I’ve worked for 4 years (a long time for a web designer) at a company that was let’s just say interested in what its employees were doing outside of the office. And due to the somewhat racy and easily-misunderstood nature of Bedpost, I quietly developed it during the late hours of the week and weekends.

When I say “I” here, I really mean that. There is no “we,” no group, no set of investors or project managers or even web developers besides myself. I conceived (ha), designed and built Bedpost all by my lonesome, and the experience has been truly amazing.

I’m asked over and over again why I made it, how I came up with the idea and who I had in mind while doing it. If you’re interested, keep reading.

The night of July 7th, nine years ago, I couldn’t sleep. (You’ll see why I know the date so precisely in a minute.) While this is unremarkable in and of itself, what happened during those hours awake was kind of interesting. I managed in my fugue state to be inspired with an idea that I just couldn’t let go, so I got up and I made it. I was thinking back over my day, going through how long it took me to get to work, what I ate while I was there, what things I had done during the day, and so on. While doing so, I envisioned some kind of layer beneath everything that recorded what you were doing into a document to be read later in sort of a Defending Your Life kind of way, and it occurred to me that HTML was a pretty neat way of doing that. So I took the main data points of the previous day and codified them into an XML/HTML-type language. I even color-coded it so that when you looked at it in a browser, it resembled what HTML might look like in BBEdit. After a rough draft was complete, I went to bed and mercifully, slept.

For a couple of years, that was more or less the end of it, but the idea of quantifying the qualitative aspects of your life in a fun, clever way had grabbed ahold of me.

As these things so often happen, in 2003 another day arrived and I found myself wondering how many times my wife and I had had sex. If you’ve read any of the articles below, you’ll know that my wife and I have been together since we were teenagers in high school; we even went to prom together. This is a fact I’ve found that surprises most people.

At any rate, this magical number is unknowable, but I remembered back to my silly life-as-html thing and I did what I did before: I made something: a single-user app in PHP (awful, terribly-written PHP) in about two weeks to record our sex life in a really simple way. Seeing as how the idea is well, weird, I of course asked my wife’s opinion on whether I should build such a thing and luckily enough, she agreed to it. Which is good because I’d already started.

For about two years afterward, we watched the calendar fill up and the bar charts vary in their heights and we giggled to ourselves and we strived to make the average weekly number go up.

It was fun, if difficult to explain to our friends.

Quite a few of them, once getting over the strangeness of the idea, told us that they wouldn’t use such a silly tool, but surely someone on the internet would. To jump back a second, I need to reiterate that I was a really terrible PHP programmer. Just awful. I was not in any place to release something on the web that other people - potentially a lot of people - would use on a semi-daily basis. So I waited. I watched the blogs, I searched every few months, assuming that someone else would have the same idea. No one did (I would later find out I wrong about that, but the actual implementation left a lot to be desired and I wasn’t even aware of it until after Bedpost launched). So finally - and appropriately - while we were waiting for our third child to be born, during those quiet hours we knew would not last very much longer and with my wife’s gentle support, I started coding. The rest is basically history.

Having spent way too many words explaining the exact mental state from which an idea such as Bedpost sprung, I essentially wanted to let you know that I no longer work where I did when I started this journey and I can only hope my new employer doesn’t recoil in disgust when I alert them to my project. Either way though, this really means a renewed interest and focus on this strangely wonderful and fun-to-use thing that has been at the back of my mind for the better part of a decade.

So… Thanks. And please be patient, I have a lot of things in my head yet to build.

"...why exactly does a soda belong on Facebook?"

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:35:00 -0600

Amen:

He is adamant that he doesn’t want yes men, willing to do anything that the client wants, but strong-willed, committed people who are unafraid to express an opinion: “You want an agency to act as your conscience,” he says, “to say “that’s crap, you shouldn’t do that, we’re not doing it”. We value them far more if they value themselves—if they just become doormats we lose respect for them,” he says.

From an article in BusinessWeek about Coke’s brand resurgence and the attitudes responsible. Everyone proclaims to have this mentality, but as one of those people with strong opinions, I know that it’s rare to actually see it in practice.

factoryjoe: Are we motivating the wrong behaviors?

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:09:53 -0600

factoryjoe:

Are we motivating the wrong behaviors?

Waiting for an influx of ____________

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 12:24:25 -0600

thevest:

And the cliché of the backburner exists for a reason—sometimes things just need to sit and wait a little while for an influx of cash while you are busy doing other things. Notebooks can fill up and phone calls can be made and permission can be requested/denied/granted before the money is there, before the time is there.

Take It Back!

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:56:42 -0600

hugsformonsters:

All I know for sure is that it’s up to you to reclaim your creativity.

Photo

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:18:51 -0600

Photo

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:17:52 -0600

factoryjoe: lachstock: brianoberkirch: tedr: jyamasaki: FFFF...

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:15:41 -0600

factoryjoe:

lachstock:

brianoberkirch:

tedr:

jyamasaki:

FFFFOUND! | [image] : Alphabet killer.jpg
tedr: font pun, automatic reblog