Life Lesson
Today's life lesson: Never underestimate how productive you can be when the alternative is doing something you really don't want to do.
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The Jeeves-ification of Search
Back in the days when AltaVista and Netscape were relevant names, there was a search engine called Ask Jeeves. The idea behind it was that unlike other search engines at the time where you'd type in a word or phrase and get served up a list of sites that contained that verbage, queries to Jeeves could be formulated as a question. i.e. "How do I fix my toilet?" In retrospect, Ask Jeeves was…
Yarr Harr, Fiddle-Dee-Dee
I was typing up a lot of thoughts this morning about the common practice of taking inherently time-hardy information and media, and forcibly turning into ephemera. Namely because: I recently discovered an app called Ribblr where you can buy and sell knitting and crochet patterns. However their whole selling point is the fact that they go out of their way to write and format the patterns in such a…
Timberdoodle
Many years ago, I stumbled across this video: The American Woodech. If that link ever dies, it's basically a funny-looking bird overlayed with somebody making disgusted "blech!" sounds while Rossini's Ranz des Vaches plays in the background. Of course I sent it to everyone I knew. But then I got to wondering Okay, but what is that bird, really? Well it turns out the funny-looking bird is an…
Getting Old
One of the things nobody ever mentions about getting old is that you’re eventually forced to watch much younger people try to emulate the culture of your youth, and get it wrong. And they don't even notice.
The Commodore 64
So I recently inherited a Commodore 64. It feels wrong to consider that my first computer, since I was so young that my interactions with it were pretty much limited to Dad loading up Big Bird's Special Delivery for me. (Besides, I always give that distinction to the Macintosh Performa 575 we got at Christmas in '94.) It had a problem, though: Some time in the mid-90's, it was taken out of storage…
Thoughts on Thoughts
The other day, I stumbled upon Thoughts . Might have been through another Bear blog? At any rate, Thoughts is a very simple blogging site where you have a single page and entries appear with the newest on top. It's meant for short messages, but there's technically no character limit. The site owner describes it as "it's basically like twitter, but nobody can @ you". Twitter for curmudgeons!…
On Making Things
One of the ways I think art school kind of ruined me is that it got me into the mindset that if I’m going to make something, it has to be something other people will like, because making stuff that I like is not interesting. And that's not just some internal self-doubt thing, I actually learned early on that whenever I made stuff I liked or enjoyed, it did not do well in critique, so I basically…
New Old Internet
I’ve been searching for nice, plain blogging software lately. This is a total old person rant here, but 20 years ago, the internet was a much simpler place, and I mean that in the sense that websites were something that your average non-programmer person could easily have and tinker around with on weekends. Now, it feels like everything has 5,000 features you don’t need, uses at least three…