Unbelievable! I couldn’t make this stuff up:
Yes your eyes are not decieving you. Apparently the genius known as Windows XP is having trouble installing the SYSTEM!! I’m typing so hard I think I might hurt my laptop, so I am going to stop now. Grrrrrr. Appparently, despite a small setback setup should complete in “9 minutes,” we’ll see.
Contrary to About a Boy, and despite the quite fine gadgets that were in that movie, the conclusion that everyone comes to that no man is an island also rings true in an economic sense. I just read a clever passage in a book by P.J. O’Rourke, which I’ll post more about later:
A pencil is a simple object, but there’s not a single person in the world who can make one. That person would need to be a miner to get the graphite, a chemical engineer to turn graphite into pencil lead, a lumberjacj to cut the cedar trees, and a carpenter to shape the pencil casing. He’d need to know how to make yellow paint, how to spray it on, and how to make a paint sprayer. He’d have to go back to the mines to get the ore to make the metal for the thingy that holds the eraser, then build a smelter, a rolling plant, and a michine-tool factory to produce equipment to crimp the thingy in place. And he’d have to grow a rubber tree in his backyard. All this would take a lot of money. Yet a pencil sells for nine cents
Obviously he becomes more frivilous as it goes on, but I thought it was a nice take on Milton Friedman’s pencil example in illustrating the importance of division of labor. Now I need to go get back to something I’m good at.
Brad Delong has a nice write-up of modern frustration with the monetary aggregates called Vulgar Monetarism. It addresses a number of important points, and its main flaw is in ignoring the more modern (this decade) measures of the money supply. If anyone in further reading I just found a good paper called How Should We Define the Money Supply ? – Austrian Versus Monetarist Approach.
If you browse the photolog you’ll notice a few new features on it. Most significantly, you can now vote on pictures, rating them -1 through 10 according to how much you like the picture. When some more votes start rolling in I’ll implement something that shows the top rated photos. Second I’ve made it so it displays the time and date the photo was taken right above the photo. You have always been able to access this info through the ‘properties’ link but that’s a clunky way to get to it.
There seems to be a bug on the root photo page where the first type you go to it nothing shows up. It is fixed immediately if you just reload, but I can’t seem to track down what is causing the problem. Email me or comment if this is happening to you. Cheers :).
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Just when you think Mac users are smarter, something like this comes out.
In summary, the day was wonderful. The company was pleasant, the boat was spacious, the pictures came out great, and I even caught a fish. With all that, the highlight of the day was definitely the jet skis, which I probably spent about 2 hours or more on. The Yamaha WaveRunner I was on had a speedometer, and I’ve decided there is nothing quite like speeding across a glass–still lake at 52 miles per hour with the wind cooling the healthy sun shining down on you. I am so tired I can hardly type, so it’s going to be an early night for me.
It’s waaay to early in the morning and I am preparing to spend the rest of the day on a boat catching fish (or at least trying) with a line and hook. No power, no A/C, no connectivity. Taking camera so look for some snapshots tonight. Until then, I bid the civilized world adieu. 🙂
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One thing they still need to work on though is there posters. From a design standpoint, many of their posters have shabby typography and often consist of nothing more than putting a few star faces dominating over a simple element from the movie. There is little in the way of intrigue or elementary design elements that capture you attention, besides the blaring face of a super-star you’ve seen ad nasueum in magazines, newspapers, and on the web. One of my favorite posters I’ve seen in a long time is this one, which is really a work of art. Ocean’s Eleven is obviously a movie with tons of star power, however the poster actually cuts off their faces, leaving us with a strong sillouette of their lower bodies and a large, slanted 11 that leads the eye downwards to their illustrious names. The overfeel is one that matches the movie, cool and debonair, and the typography really matches that. A lot of the same elements are present in this poster which has similar feel and colors, though I don’t think is really avante-garde enough to capture your attention like the first one. Then, they lost it with the typical and clichéd lining up of the biggest names in the movie, each with a unique and strange look on their face and in an odd position. Finally they totally messed it up with a poster that completely throws away any of the better elemetns in the earlier posters. First, you have the same tired names paraded at what I’m sure what thought of as an eye-catching angle, then, more seriously, they have completely mangled the logo in some strange half-faded font which looks better suited for O Brother Where Art Thou than a hip Las Vegas-centered movie! The colors, mood, and most importantly the typography in the last poster don’t match the movie at all, and could have come from any cookie-cutter design shop in the country. Next time you’re at the theatre take a look at the line of posters on the wall, and you’ll be amazed at how similar and badly done they all are; we really need more with thoughtful and well-executed design like the first one above.
Whenever you or I have the privilege of giving a movie theatre around six or seven dollars just for a ticket to see a movie, the American consumer is frequently getting less for his money. I have not been to a movie in the last four months or so that did not start with at least five minutes of commercials. Not previews, blatent commercials, be it for Coca-Cola, the Army, a video, or some other item that has little to nothing to do with the either the movie you’re about to see or a movie not released yet. I’m sure that the theatre recieves oodles of money for every ad shown to such a captive audience, yet they have not chosen to pass any of this profit on to consumers in the form of lower ticket prices. The movie industry is not weakening, in fact quite the opposite is happening, with there being more blockbusters that make more in their first weekend then some movies have made in their entire existence. If the movie theatres shifted the price of the tickets down it would increase quantity demanded and potentially push long term demand higher in the long term.
One reason I’m not complaining too much \though is that I have been repeatedly impressed with the quality of many of the movies in theatres lately. Sure, the occasionaly flop with no plot makes it through, but by and large I’ve been seeing well-developed stories with dynamic characters and impressive cinematography
Oh how I like it when they make the spam clever:
Amazon claims they ‘lowered the hurdle’ with their free shipping offer….at Buy.com we just ran that hurdle over with our free-shipping truck.
Apple – Mac OS X: Amazing. Even as a Windows/Linux dork I can’t help but appreciate the attention to detail and aesthetics that went into this operating system. Some of the neater features include the new Sherlock, which they cleverly bill as “Web services for the rest of us,” and Rendezvous, a combonation of auto-discovery and Bluetooth/WiFi. Rendezvous is the most exciting to me because it’s a precursor to what I’ve been predicting will happen with Apple and Bluetooth; hopefully we’ll start seeing a lot more Bluetooth products on the market soon!
I’ve been very popular with the UPS guy the past couple of days, getting a package yesterday and two today. The package yesterday was a small one from SonyStyle, and is a second battery for my GRX-570. This is nice because espescially as work other places than my desk more and more using the 802.11b my battery life on the Sony, while certainly better than the Toshiba that preceded it, is still a limiting factor. This requires unplugging the combo drive from the hot-swap bay, but doubles thet time I can spend out. The main concern right now is a can’t find the little plastic piece that covers up the rest of the bay when the battery is in there. I’ll put up some pictures tonight.
The other packages both came from Fossil. The first is a wallet that I saw in their online store and just couldn’t resist it. On that note they have one of the best designed and easy-to-use online stores I’ve ever had the pleasure of being exposed to. So in summary I was a good capitalist and voted with my wallet. (haha)
The second is actualy one of Fossil’s new line of PDA watches. This is, quite honestly, something I wouldn’t have paid for but they sent one down that I am going to review for HPUG. More on that later.
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I have bad news, and weird news. The bad news is that my desktop (Gamebase) is sick, very much so. It all started when I installed the .NET update and firewire card in the same reboot, and went downhill from there. At one point explorer.exe (start bar, etc.) wouldn’t start because of a missing DLL file, then IE wouldn’t work, but Mozilla would. Then I noticed that about half of my Windows directory had become corrupted, and had about 200 missing DLL files. After doing a home-brewed fix and simply copying them over from computer number 2, a few more things worked, but still it was patchy. After a reinstall of XP, now it simply won’t start, and freezes on boot. *sigh*
Anyway this is a wonderful oppurtunity to renounce Microsoft and convert the box to all-GNU/Linux workstation.
Now for the weird news: Taking the main hard drive out of my desktop (a 40GB Fujitsu) I noticed there was something written on the side. Closer examination revealed a name, Lucille. Now I’m not sure at what point or what state of mind I was in when I named one of my hard drives, but I hope it never happens again. I’m going to stick to the story that it’s a tribute to B. B. King, and leave it at that.
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From Rachel: NPR : Wait Wait — Which Newsmaker Are You?
YOU’RE BILL CLINTON
You’re smooth. You can sell anything to anyone. You can tell lies with a smile that’ll melt the hearts of those you’re lying to. At the same time, you require boat loads of unconditional love to compensate for your deficiencies. People spend their entire lives and fortunes trying to bring you down. Someday, they might just succeed.
This has got to be one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time. Basically, it’s a Dutch show where they conduct humorous torture tests on different products. First off, the Dutch language is one of the strangest things I’’ve heard in my life, and that alone made the video worth it, but also they torture test my phone, the T68 from SonyEricsson. You can watch the stream here (WMP link, broadband), or with RealPlayer here. Forward to about 20:30 to see the water thing. For those of you without broadband, let me paint a picture:
Basically they’ve set up what looks like two showerheads, and they give the phone in question to the host of the show who stands under the two showerheads and talks. They did this for about 15 minutes with the T68 and it was still running. At one point they bring him a glass of Coke and he sticks the phone in that and it keeps going. After about 15 minutes I think they got bored, and the guy goes ahead and throws the phone into a bucket of water. Where it keeps going. The phone actually went for another three minutes completely submerged, all the time with that prerecorded voice they had on the other of the line talking. Thinking back the only way I can think of them being on hold that long is if they called Sony tech support :).
Okay, I’m over the hot emotions from yesterday’s (or this morning’s) Dreamweaver “experience,” but in reexamining my Dreamweaver ban I don’t really see any loss of productivity. I do about 95% of my coding by hand, usually in HomeSite, but in the past I’ve found Dreamweaver to be useful for times when I’m cutting/pasting large amounts of text, or putting images in, but I have to admit that is easier to simply to just drag an image onto the page then manually typing the tag with the image diminsions, etcetera. But these are all things are available in Homesite, albiet hidden under some dialogs.
Anyway, today I begin my quest for the perfect editor. I want a small, fast, and easy-to-use marvel of programming that will make the most arduous tasks a breeze and not bother me with unecessary fluff. Thinking back there were several things I liked about editing code in DW, specifically the code hints that would come up, allowing you to enter things without actually typing them. I liked how when you used a PHP function it would tell you the proper attributes, and their order; I liked the way you could glance at things in design mode to make sure everything was kosher, and it would even pull include() files in, a templating technique I use quite a bit. So in addition to all that, here is my wishlist for this editor I will find:
If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.