Electric Apricot. Looks good; basically, a “Spinal Tap” for jam bands.
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
I suppose I’ve been using Twitter for a few weeks now; more so in the last week or two. It’s not a long time, but Twitter is not a complicated application. Here are some thoughts.
I haven’t gone and looked for interviews with the founders or other stories about Twitter, but in my own humble estimation, Twitter is based on the assumption that communication is valuable, connections are valuable, and the two together are more valuable. Twitter’s creators may put it differently, but I’d be very surprised if the meaning would vary much. Twitter is a social network, period, on where you have only three avenues of expression:
- Your profile.
- What you actually say.
- Who you are following.
Twitter Blocks looks cool. One of several new features.
For a long time, I used the term “Web 2.0″ only grudgingly. Then I became completely fed up with what I saw as a needless amount of empty hype, and refused to use the term entirely. I even penned a short piece of satire on it, something I rarely indulge in, called The Emperor’s New Web. I waxed eloquent — or, at the very least, I waxed — on how empty, hollow, and useless the “web 2.0″ label was.
Certain applications of the term still annoy me, but at some point, I think that I and the majority of the “web 2.0″ naysayers basically just accepted that the term was here to stay, and gave up. How did this happen?
Continue reading ‘How “Web 2.0″ Overcame The Hype’
Awhile back, it seemed that everyone (relatively speaking) was talking, for a day or two, about Bacn, the problem you didn’t know you had with the name you don’t want to use.
Bacn, apparently, is the huge new problem caused by the number of emails you get daily from services like twitter, facebook, myspace, etc, which are notifications you actually do want to know about (ergo not spam), but which are still an annoyance to have filling up your inbox.
Continue reading ‘A Solution To “Bacn”’
I have to admit it: I have thought on more than one occasion that this exact scenario would eventually wind up as the plot to a cheesy Hollywood romantic comedy.
Apparently (hard to believe), it actually happened. Summary: a couple meets, chats online about how lousy their respective marriages are, eventually arranges to meet, and discovers that they are each other’s respective spouses. (Am I the only one who has ever thought that if the plural of mouse is mice, the plural of spouse should be spice? Maybe.)
Of course, in the Hollywood version, they fall back in love with each other while drinking Mountain Dew and standing in front of a Federal Express billboard after an exciting and hilarious chase scene through Macy’s. In real life, they are getting divorced. This is why people go to the movies, they are much tidier and more pleasant.
- IBM has released Lotus Symphony, a free office suite for Windows and Linux, into the world.
- From the “Memes that inspire other, sillier, parody memes” department: LOLTHULU. YA R’LYEH.
- This young man has created a cool Accordion script that he would like to share with you. Well, come on then; you should download it and use it, otherwise his feelings might be hurt.
Steve Yegge recently published his own “Tech News” post, the first and (according to him) possibly last. If he could keep this up once a week he could probably quit his job at Google and start a tech version of The Onion.
My favorite of the set:
Man Dies Waiting for Eclipse to Launch
A software engineer in San Jose, CA was found dead at his desk yesterday, apparently having died while waiting for his Java editing program, Eclipse, to finish its boot process. Coworkers say the engineer came in that morning vowing to “get Eclipse working on his box or die trying.” The last thing anyone heard him say aloud was the cryptic comment: “I see the splash screen is appropriately blue.” Nobody knows what he meant. The man was then thought to have fallen asleep, but hours later it was discovered that the engineer had died suddenly of apparent natural causes. The forensics team’s investigation that evening was reportedly interrupted unexpectedly when the dead man’s Eclipse program suddenly finished launching. The team tried to interact with it to see if they could find clues about the man’s death, but the program was unresponsive and the machine ultimately had to be rebooted. At this time, the police commissioner says there is no evidence of foul play, and they currently believe the man simply died of either boredom or frustration.
This post was sparked by an interesting post about Rails creator DHH. As such you may want to read it first; you can go there now, if you like. I’ll wait.
All done? Decided not to bother, confident that I would sum it up anyways? All right; you know best.
Continue reading ‘On The Tech Celebrities We Love To Hate’
