SoulFu has been released: Aaron Bishop Games (Home of SoulFu).
SoulFu (Secret Of Ultimate Legendary Fantasy Unleashed; really) is a new game by the original developer of Egoboo.
Monthly Archive for April, 2007
I just fell out of love with Google. It hurts a little (j/k), and I’m kind of surprised.
Adsense logins are distinct from Google/gmail logins — at least, they were. Google has recently decided that you need to make your adsense login officially a “real” Google account. Okay — I’m all right with that.
However, there system refused (refused) to let me map my existing gmail/google account to my adsense account. It simply denied me; it had some vaguely unhelpful error about this already being mapped, which doesn’t make a lot of sense — why ask me to “upgrade” to a Google account if I’m already mapped to Google account?
I just created an entirely new, extraneous Google account, just for adsense. After 25 minutes of trial and error and wasting time.
I can’t think of one good reason I should be prohibited from using my normal Google account as my Adsense account. It’s truly bewildering.
It can only mean that Google is doing this because it somehow makes life more convenient for them, and apparently what is convenient for me (or any other user) is not one of their concerns.
Yes, I know this probably sounds a little like whining, but — come on. This makes absolutely no sense. I am honestly really annoyed by Google for the first time ever.
I guess whatever it was that made Google different… is gone.
This is a great project: The Geekster Moleskine is an external hard-drive built into a hollowed-out Moleskine.
Not sure how a unit like this would survive in the long-term, but it sure looks cool.
It’s quite clear that the entire clearification site is an advertisement for Windows Vista. It’s also extremely entertaining. Demetri Martin is a very funny person. If you know him, you can tell him I said that. I’m sure he gets that a lot, but maybe he’ll appreciate it.
So… yeah. I think I just put a Windows Vista ad on my website. That’s all right, I think advertising like this should be encouraged. I’d much rather watch something funny that has a little logo in the corner than a traditional ad that goes, These are all our features, we are superior, you will be assimilated! or something.
Everyone has different ideas how software should work, how to fix it, make it better, what is wrong with it, and why, but it seems that it’s unanimous that Software does, in fact, have a problem.
- Scott Berkun on Why Software Sucks and what to do about it.
- Artima has a discussion of this same Scott Berkun article.
- An old snippet from DaveNet on the same topic.
- Librenix has this to say on Why Software Sucks.
What is most interesting to me about these articles is that no one feels the need to “prove” that software sucks. There is no need perceived to build a case for that assertion, to cite examples, or to show how it logically follows that virtually all software does, in fact, suck.
It is taken as a given; the authors treat it the idea that Software Sucks as self-evident.
Hmm…. that’s probably not a good sign.
The last article cited has what I thought was a fairly good analogy:
If a student architect could design a skyscraper, push a button, and have some futuristic genesis device instantly construct the building at virtually no cost — and at no danger to anyone — and with perfect components throughout, would he not do so? Further, imagine that with a push of another button, the entire building could be reduced back to its constituent atoms.
I’ve been listening to a lot of Tom Waits recently. A song whose refrain keeps getting stuck in my memory is that of Georgia Lee from 2000’s 1999’s Mule Variations. A bit about the song (I’ve read the song’s context in several places, but this was the best summary I could find online…):
[Waits] wrote it after the body of a 12-year-old girl was found not far from his house.
If I remember the story correctly, she’d been dumped there in a patch of trees, and her death barely made the newspapers. It was around the time of the Polly Klaas case — or during some other search for a photogenic white girl — and Waits was disturbed at the thought that kids like Georgia Lee don’t get as much ink because they’re black or poor or troubled or not photogenic or … (source)
Continue reading ‘On Not Answering Questions, and Georgia Lee’
Andrew asked: What has Google done to edge out Microsoft for the esteemed title of giant gorilla? Said another way, what has Google done right where MS has done wrong?
Well, take a glance first at the “Microsoft is Dead” article that Paul Graham wrote… He’s the one who articulated this particular point, I was basically just echoing it because I think his observation is essentially correct.
One of Paul’s main points is that when he was starting software companies, Microsoft was the one to fear. He notes that with the new generation of startups he helps now, it doesn’t even occur to them to fear Microsoft, and it may even be hard for them to understand why anyone would fear Microsoft.
I don’t know if I could say “Google did x right” and “Microsoft did x wrong.” I expect it’s more complicated than that. But I’ll try, anyways.
Continue reading ‘What Google Does Right, What Microsoft Does Wrong’
So, I just went and ordered a CD, for the first time, from cdbaby.com; (I picked up the newest by a local artist, Tom Feldmann and the Get-Rites — highly recommended).
The confirmation email blew me away:
Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.
A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.
Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Friday, April 20th.
I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
That… is… awesome.
It’s totally absurd, of course; and I’m not about to complain if a third party investigation of their facilities shows that my CD was not really polished by a team of 50 highly trained professionals, etc, etc.
But regardless of the correspondence of the email to reality, it’s absolutely brilliant. Coolest confirmation letter of an online purchase that I’ve ever had.
And it definitely served it’s purpose, as I’m now raving about it on the web.
Somebody should tell Tom Peters about these guys; he tends to get all fired up about this sort of thing (for good reason — because it’s so rare).
Google maps has added a cool new feature: My Maps.
If you look up a location, you’ll now have the option in the “information balloon” to add it to My Maps. On the left, you’ll see a tab with the same name. It’s extremely intuitive; you just click to add the place, then you can name the location, move the marker slightly to more accurately pinpoint the location, and even draw lines and shapes if you want to.
Very slick.
Paul Graham took some criticism for his “Microsoft Is Dead” article recently, but I think he is right on in respect to his main point — for new startups, Microsoft is no longer the company to beat or to fear: Google is.
secretGeek reveals The Truth About Lisp:
Learning lisp will alter your life.
Your brain will grow bigger than you ever thought possible.
You will rewrite all of your applications in just a handful of lines
Society will shun you. You will shun society.
You will become disatisfied with everything and everyone around you.
Lisp is so simple to learn that you can learn lisp in just a few minutes. I just learnt it now while I was waiting for a bus.
Hilarious. I actually really love Scheme, a Lisp variant, and think that in some ways it can help you to understand some concepts (at least — I feel like it helped me. I think. Where’s the kool aid, again?).
That being said, The Truth About Lisp is a bang on parody about some of the more outlandish zealotry that seems to follow Lisp around. My favorite line is:
Paul Graham himself was completely written in lisp, by an earlier version of himself, also written in lisp, by an earlier version of lisp.
Priceless.
