Starting today, I’m going to remove all my personal information from Facebook and “unfriend” everyone. I’m responding to a pair of status messages that appeared on my profile over the last few weeks, though I didn’t put them there. (John calls them “phantom status messages.”)
According to the site itself, the messages were both submitted “via [...]
Posted by Chris in Technology on December 30th, 2009 | No Comments »
Looking at my to-do list today, I noticed for the millionth time how two key attributes of a task seem to be either redundant or in conflict: its due date and its priority.
It always seemed to me that you should only need to assign one or the other. If you have a deadline, then what [...]
Posted by Chris in Business, Science, Technology on November 30th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
A few years ago, I started a project to build something I’d wanted for a long time: a simple device that could read Wikipedia articles and Project Gutenberg texts. I called it a WikiBub. The point was to create something dirt simple on the cheap, instead of the usual “convergence device” that does everything (and [...]
Posted by Chris in Making Stuff, Technology on October 28th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
I often see a word in print long before I hear it pronounced. That’s fine for most words—”antidisestablishmentarianism” isn’t actually that hard to deconstruct—but it can get me in trouble sometimes. For years I thought misled was pronounced “mizzled”, and I never did decide how envelope should sound.
Now that’s going to be a lot easier, [...]
Posted by Chris in Language, Technology, Web 2.0 on October 6th, 2009 | No Comments »
In 1998, Apple came out with an all-in-one computer. At the time, all-in-one computers were stripped down CPUs crammed onto a monitor case. The term made people expect something ugly, cheap, and difficult to upgrade. What they got instead was the iMac. It was revolutionary, and it inspired copies all across the industry.
In 2001, Apple [...]
Posted by Chris in Technology on September 3rd, 2009 | 1 Comment »
While doing regular WordPress maintenance today, I finally bit the bullet and changed the post permalinks to something a bit more human-friendly. For example, the old and new URLs for a recent post are:
http://globalspin.com/2009/05/22/1531/
http://globalspin.com/2009/05/livable-streets/
A bit nicer, right? Here’s the tricky part: the old URL still works, redirecting automatically so no one need get lost on [...]
Posted by Chris in Blog, Technology on August 5th, 2009 | No Comments »
Brad just pointed out that Google Reader added new features familiar to Twitter and Facebook users: marking a post as something you “like” and setting a status message. They didn’t remove similar features, though, so the result is a blur of options:
So when I want to remember something, do I “star” it or “like” it? [...]
Posted by Chris in Technology, Web 2.0 on July 16th, 2009 | 2 Comments »
From “Jackson dies, almost takes internet with him” at CNN last week:
How many people does it take to break the Internet? On June 25, we found out it’s just one — if that one is Michael Jackson. The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the [...]
Posted by Deb in Cosmetically Enhanced Vertebrates, Journalism, News/Media, Oddly Enough, Technology, You have got to be kidding on June 29th, 2009 | No Comments »
How did Twitter become crucial infrastructure? Seriously, wasn’t it just a month or two ago that Ashton Kutcher and Oprah threatened to drain all possible credibility out of the service? Wasn’t there much wailing and gnashing of teeth? So how did we get from there to the state department asking Twitter to delay a maintenance [...]
Posted by Chris in Government, Oddly Enough, Technology, World on June 19th, 2009 | No Comments »
This is a test of the Scrippet plugin for Wordpress, which would help me render bits of scripts and screenplays and such. I’ll be tweaking this until it looks OK.
INT. RESEARCH OFFICE – DAY
SMITH stands next to BILLY, who is seated at his desk. Billy hands him a fat folder.
BILLY
I don’t even think you’ll need [...]
Posted by Chris in Blog, ScriptFrenzy, Technology, Writing on June 12th, 2009 | 1 Comment »
