April 2010
1 post
Why I Stopped Listening to Cory (And Think You...
Cory Doctorow has written something and it’s making the rounds in my twitter feed. At first I ignored it, but it’s been retweeted enough times now that I want to respond. But it’s going to take more than 140 characters to do so.
In a sense, I agree with Cory. Apple did not create the iPad for him and it does not meet his needs or desires. Therefore, he should not buy one.
If...
February 2010
2 posts
I've been thinking about task management
I’ve been thinking about task management this week. I’ve been trying to figure out why I’m so bad at it and what I can do to solve it.
My bigeest problem has sort of been thrust upon me: I have tasks scattered throughout different systems. Some are in TFS as either bugs to fix or features to add. Some are in my Exchange email box. Some are in my gmail email box. Some are in...
There Are Other Worlds Than These
Often, I imagine horrible and awful things. I’ll be driving down the road and my brain decides to play a movie of my getting into a crash. Or I see a push-pin and my brain pictures it shoving into my eye. Ow.
And for the briefest of moments, I’m not sure which is reality and which exists entirely inside my head.
And I wonder: what if the Many Worlds hypothesis is correct. What if,...
December 2009
1 post
The Christmas Miracle, A Fiction
In the beginnings of the World were the Old Ones. And from the Chaos, they forged the lands and the seas and the heavens.
From the energies of this great work sprang lesser creatures. Humans and animals. Fel Demons of the darkness and great Titans of the light. And so the Demons fed on the Souls of the Humans and the Titans warred with the Demons on our behalf and drove them back into the Chaos.
...
October 2009
4 posts
VT220 Emulation
Thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, I stumbled across <a href=”http://sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/”>this guy who made a TrueType Font file of the glyphs that a VT220 would draw.
I then fiddled with colors for a bit until I could approximate that amber glow I remember so well from my childhood.
And I ended up with:
It’s great. The only downside is that the font file...
As God As My Witness, I Thought Turkeys Could Fly
Over at Slate, Emily Bazelon wonders what kids get out of magic acks. Her conclusion is that a child simply wants to puzzle out how the magician accomplishes his feats as opposed to sitting back and simply being amazed like an adult might.
It’s an interesting idea (if somewhat under-explored in all of twelve hundred words). Indeed, her notion that a child is only interested in “How do...
Ships
I’m a sci-fi fan.
More than that, I’m a space opera fan. I have a thing for space ships, whether they’re Federation starships or runabouts, Imperial Star Destroyers, little snub fighters, generational ships, or even giant cylinders sent out by God himself (yeah, I didn’t like the ending of the Rama series either).
I’ll admit: when the camera lovingly pans over the...
An Open Letter to the Planet
Dear Earth.
Hi. It’s me. James. Yes, yes. The stupid looking one.
Anyway. I know we haven’t really treated you very well since the Industrial Revolution (personally, I blame the British) and you have every right to be pissed at us. But lately, we’ve been trying. Remember the Crying Indian? That was great. And we gave a Nobel Prize to Al Gore. And have you noticed all the...
September 2009
3 posts
Game On?
I like video games. I’m not particularly good at them and I rarely beat them, but I like them.
Of course, I don’t like all of them. I don’t really care for first-person stuff at all (I make an exception for Portal because it’s Excellent). As a rule, I tend towards the less reflex-intensive genres: RPGs, turn-based strategy, empire-building, etc.
The problem with these...
Spoiler Alert
With the second season of Dollhouse gearing up, the Girl and I took the time to re-watch the first season in glorious Blu-ray. I’ve been thinking about the show a great deal (a side-effect of Joss’ work which is both a blessing and a curse) with most of my thoughts centered on any of three topics: an analysis of the show as a work of art and entertainment (primarily about how it did...
A Small Love Letter To My Library
I can’t remember a time when I was growing up that I wasn’t a regular patron of the Florence Public Library in Florence, SC. Every year, at the start of summer vacation, my mom would take me to the library and I would walk out with a huge stack of books (I usually took as many as they’d let me). I’d read them over the next couple of weeks and then we’d go back and...
August 2009
2 posts
But you don't have to take my word for it
[Ed: Over the course of a couple of days, I read the primary health care bill before the United States Congress with the intention to blog my thoughts. It turns out that I had too many thoughts to reasonably fit into a single blog post. So I’ve decided to split it up into multiple entries. There will be at least two; probably three.
This post uses the bill to start figuring out just what’s...
Laws and Sausage
[Ed: Over the course of a couple of days, I read the primary health care bill before the United States Congress with the intention to blog my thoughts. It turns out that I had too many thoughts to reasonably fit into a single blog post. So I’ve decided to split it up into multiple entries. There will be at least two; probably three. This post provides an introduction to the bill and my...
July 2009
3 posts
Because it's next
[Edit 2009-July-20, 19:53GMT Added source for number of taxpayers in the United States]
“Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal?” asked President Kennedy during a speech at Rice University in 1962. The answer he gave then still rings true:
“We choose to go to the moon…and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard., because...
The NYTimes blogs discuss how Microsoft and Bill Gates have put seven Feynman lectures online. The actual site, Project Tuva, runs on Silverlight. But that’s Microsoft for you.
Apple's WWDC vs. Microsofts' PDC
I’m still getting new post-WWDC Apple development podcasts.
They’re mostly “There was this really cool thing that I can’t talk about! And there was another cool thing I wish I could tell you! And they’re going to blow you away with this thing that is under NDA.”
Contrast this with Microsoft’s PDC. Almost immediately after the conference was over,...
June 2009
1 post
My Obligatory Serious Post About Mark Sanford
John Dickerson asks why there’s so much “disturbing glee” directed at Mark Sanford. I’ve seen a few other calls not to use this “personal tragedy” for “political gain”. That’s nonsense.
Mark Sanford is a man who made a mistake. And it’s not even a mistake that affects me since I’m neither his wife nor his mistress. So if it were...
May 2009
6 posts
When my mom got a fancy digital camera, I set her up with Google Picass. I’m a big an of iPhoto on my Mac and had heard good things about Picasa. And given that Picass looks like a clone of iPhoto, I figured it would work about the same way.
It doesn’t. iPhoto stores pictures in an opaque database in a bundle (a bundle is a folder on OS X which appears in the Finder as a regular...
A tiny wobble reveals a massive planet - The Bad Astronomer
Stories like this are exciting and awe-inspiring (the newly discovered planet has six times the mass of Jupiter!) and humbling: the more we find out about the universe, the more diminished we seem as a species. We’re NOTHING, man.
But mostly, these stories depress the hell out of me. Because humanity will almost certainly never be...
After a good and energetic day yesterday, I find myself super tired again today. I think I really need to get into a routine of exercising regularly. I’ve heard that that helps.
Of course: who wants to exercise when they’re this freaking tired?! Maybe this is a good reason to buy Wii Fit? Everyone seems to like it.
Vending Machine Does Not Contain Pop-Tarts
Severity: Medium
Priority: High
Symptom: Vending Machine Does Not Contain Pop-Tarts
Expected Result: Vending Machine Would Contain Pop-Tarts, Allowing Me To Purchase One
Actual Result: Vending Machine Contains Oreo Cakesters Where The Pop-Tarts Normally Go
Steps To Reproduce:
Approach vending machine carefully
Count out at least 85 cents ($0.85) of change (for example: 3 quarters and 1...
Highlander films, ranked in order of preference.
Highlander
This is the only Highlander film that has ever been made.
Star Trek films, ranked in order of preference
The Wrath of Khan
First Contact
The Voyage Home
Star Trek 2009
The Undiscovered Country
The Search for Spock
Generations
The Motion Picture
The Final Frontier
These are all the Star Trek films that have ever been made.
April 2009
13 posts
The Post That Makes Reality Wish It Wasn't
I’m contemplating buying MegaRace from @gogcom when I get home. I doubt it will hold up, though. I do have a particularly strong memory associated with it, though.
I was about 11 or 12 and we were in Warner Robins, GA visiting family.We were staying with my aunt and she had recently bought a shiny new Packard Bell computer. One of the pack-ins for the computer was MegaRace: I guess the Bell...
To summarize Joe Clark’s latest blog entry (recently featured on Daring Fireball): If evidence contradicts with what I believe in my heart about design, the evidence is wrong. I don’t have to prove my assertions or provide any evidence of my own because I know I am right. Period. And I will not provide comments on my blog because the last thing I want is someone presenting facts to me....
Sugar on a Stick
Ars gives a quick hands-on on the Beta release of Sugar on a Stick — I have been intrigued by the idea of Sugar since I first started reading about the OLPC project. I love the idea that they’re rethinking UI metaphors for children that have never seen a computer before.
I think, perhaps, that they’re not going far enough with it. They have an opportunity to rethink EVERYTHING....
Kids in the Office
I can’t imagine how boring it would be for a child if I brought him/her to work with me. It’d be all sorts of awful.
When I was a senior in high school, we had shadow day. I shadowed a web dev at the local software company (insert ACS shoutout). I watched him type for a few minutes and then he gave me a Javascript book to read.
Then his manager bought me lunch at Red Lobster and I...
“In 2009, it’s still a chore to find out from the internet what time the grocery...”
– Steven Frank thinks a bit more about what the post-desktop-metaphor world might look like
Short Urls and Tumblr
When automatically posting to twitter, tumblr uses its own short url scheme (hashing this posts url to something a bit less intelligible). Which is good. There’s been a bit of a blowback against short URLs lately, but twitter needs the shortest URLs it can get. Providing your own canonical short links effectively mitigates most of the criticism about URL shortening services (except for the...
The Game Boy is 20 years old today
Ars is celebrating the Game Boy’s 20th birthday today. Like pretty much EVERYONE in my demographic, I have fond memories of playing Tetris on that beast.
Indeed, when I got my DS, the first game I bought for it was Tetris. And once I had a phone that could play games, Tetris was the first download. It’s almost inconceivable to me that a hand held gaming device would not have Tetris...
If pot is legalized, I expect increases in tax...
Every year, the federal and state governments make fortunes off of alcohol and tobacco. Yet: not only are we throwing away all the taxes we could be making off of marijuana, but we’re spending TONS of money arresting, prosecuting, and jailing people whose only crime was getting high on pot. The savings from not doing that anymore by itself would be a huge economic boon to the United...
Listen
This Just In
I was able to put the Tumblr iPhone app into a repeating-crash-loop. So much win right there.
1 tag
More Complaining
In order to make tumblr not show me updates from strangers I don’t care about, I have to follow someone else. So I have to find someone who created an account and didn’t use it just to have a bit of silence.
What a wretched user experience. It’s a shame the basic idea behind tumblr is so compelling. Because the implementation is leaving a lot to be desired.
1 tag
I wouldn't be me if I weren't complaining
Ok. So I managed to get this tumbleblog set up. Tumblr fought me every step of the way.
Did you know you can only have one tumbleblog? Yep. You wouldn’t be able to tell it from the way that tumblr proudly displays a “create a new tumbleblog” right on your dashboard, though. But if you try to do it, it will create something subtly different from the first tumbleblog (i.e.,...
FirstPosts++
FirstPosts++ So, I’m changing things up again with yet another tumblr blog. (I had to delete my old one because tumblr is dumb. Oh well.) Because I wasn’t blogging at my other blog (found at http://jameswilliams.me/blog) yet felt that I should be. Also, I had something to say that was too long for twitter and yet not long enough for a real blog post. So I mulled it over and decided that a tumblr...