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...