So I read daring fireball by John Gruber and enjoy the little snide comments about the current tech item of the minute. So the current news item is the new photos of this previously unphotographed tribe living in the amazon.
John’s Comment:
Someone needs to let these people know about the upcoming new iPhone.
Funny funny shit. Nice to see that he can recognize the frivolity of the same industry that he works in. Good job.
I like the green party. I would like them to win someday, although I am not sure they have their act together yet. And as I was reading Rodney’s post about the candidates that are in the running for the green party nomination, I went to all their sites.
As you may know, I am a web developer by trade, so I am often more critical of sites than the average bear. That being said, the Green Party will never get ANYWHERE at this rate.
Number one, Jesse Johnson. Not sure about his logo from a design point of view, but I AM sure that it should not be that pixelated. Header and footer design are a bit lacking in terms of style. Not liking the font either. But I REALLY don’t like how the navigation is present only on the home page, and is gone on every other page (although there is a ‘back to the home page’ link). Seriously, dead end every click? And needless to say, it doesn’t pass validation.
Number two, Kent Mesplay. Not sure what year it is, but is isn’t 2008. Those buttons are nice and smooth. The header takes up the entire ‘above the scroll’ area. Awesome. Table layout. No doctype? You can imagine how validation went.
Number three, Kat Swift. oooookkkkkk really? This is your bid for the president of the united states? Really? Your index page doesn’t even have your full name on it. Perfect for SEO. The blog link is first and foremost, but it is off site. And written by someone else. Design wise, I won’t even start. Again, tables (surprised?). And Doctype is also missing. Serisouly. It is tabbed nicely, so that is a plus. White and yellow text on a black box with a green background is not a plus. My eyes are still adjusting. I’ll stop here.
Number four, Cynthia McKinney. This one actually looks like they used photoshop, so that is cool. Not sure on the middle hump top shadow thing, not sure what light source could actually create that. I guess I am supposed to think the green box is coming TOWARDS me. But the other buttons on the page have lighting effects that don’t support that. Glowing text is a good use of a filter in the aforementioned photoshop. ALMOST had the heavy header thing working, but for some reason stopped shy of full width. The even have a gradient in the background. Would have been cooler if the background and the content box worked better together. They are the only one with an RSS feed, which is good. Not updated too often, but hey, they have one. Table layout. And this is the ONLY site I have ever seen were w3c couldn’t complete the validation. Oddly enough, this seems to be due to a comment in some script. The calendar link takes you to another site, with a totally different look and feel. I wish they had done some more styling of the text in the site. But really, this is the best (?) site of the bunch.
So this is the current state of the Green Party’s candidates.
Getting all my tax stuff together and over to my accountant and I was reviewing everything. Being that my father is a CPA he sold some of my apple stock off this year to diversify my IRA a bit.
I bought Apple stock on 10/24/2000 at $10.44/share. I sold it this year at $190.28/share. Nice.
Now if I had only bought more than the few shares I did, as I bought under 100 shares. Oh well.
I have long wondered why we haven’t seen a restaurant where I order from a touch screen and the foot is brought out to me. I think part of the reason is personally I don’t like being ’served’ all that much, being waited on. Not that I can’t handle it, but I just don’t care. Not to say that I don’t have positive experiences with wait staff, but I could do without it.
So I always thought that a place where you place your order via a touch screen or something would be dope. Then have a runner bring the food out. Still have a staff to refill water and bus tables. And a call button would be good, but that would be it. Then I can do what I wanted to do all along at the resturant: eat and hang out with the person/people I came with.
When I would propose this idea to friends/family, I was always presented with the ‘but where is the social interaction?’ and ‘but that seems so cold and lonely’, etc. The same response I used to get to the concept of peapod, netflix, etc. Am I to understand than that people are willing to be more inconvenienced doing mundane albeit necessary tasks so they can revel in the social interaction with the cashier at the grocery store? The blockbuster employee?
Having been a grocery store employee, I am not sure I agree with that. While I tried to be friendly, primarily because it would make my day go faster, it was hardly the interaction that I would get excited for. And I have known blockbuster employees. They rarely liked their job, and they were rarely over 20.
My retort was always that the time savings from eliminating the time suck of many ‘low quality’ social interaction level tasks, like grocery shopping, movie rentals, brick and mortar shopping, etc would free up time to create ‘high quality’ social interaction, like dinner parties, play dates, hanging out with friends, etc.
Of course my parents still scoffed at the concept, but I maintain it is true. And with that time savings, some friends and I could go to this new automated resturant: Baggers restaurant in Nuremberg. While it is kind of a hike from chicago, it is the kind of place I would be all about. He even has an automated track system to deliver the food. I am not sure that is necessary, but I am sure that will be a draw for customers, so I am sure it will make people more inclined to visit.
I am not sure that I see the design/implementation of the track system to be cheaper the cost of food runners alá my idea anytime in the first few years of operation, but I am sure that wasn’t his plan. I would like to see his place take off and do quite well. I would like to see more resturants like this. I will admit I always kinda thought that japan already had such restaurants, although I don’t recall seeing any when I was there or reading of any however I haven’t looked too hard.
So while I don’t wish that every resturant goes the way of Bangers, I would like to see some here. I would give it a shot. Anyone know of any here in Chicago?
wordpress 2.5 just came out and I’ll agree with everyone else, it is quite nice. And the instantupgrade plugin worked perfect. 2.5 also offers atuo plugin updates, which is good for lazy people like me.
win win win.
if you google jesus zombie, I am number 5. which is fine. but wth threadless is somehow above me? threadless is too big. I should do some SEO optimization on this page just to see what I can’t achieve…
I have been trying a few different browsers lately, as the firefox memory usage drives me insane. Sure, I go insane slowly, but seriously.
Aside from firebug/web developer/Stylish not working, it is great. Seems faster, and the memory footprint is WAY better. This MIGHT be due to the above mentioned firebug/web developer not working. heh. This is the current winner.
I gave flock a try again, and it is ok. The toolbar on the left is nice, although it could be improved. It is so… staccato in its presentation. I am currently using it or facebook, twitter, and youtube. I am also not sure that the top of the window is the best way to sift through media. That being said, I did just, as I wrote this, opt to update my twitter, and I went to flock. I could have just as easily gone to the twitter dashboard widget. hmmmm… The other problem is it seems that flock suffers from the memory footprint growth problem as well.
I was excited about the small size of this browser. I can handle a stripped down browser for some stuff. The only issue here is that sunrise seems to quit unexpectedly ALOT. Like I can’t really evaulate the memory usage since it never stays up that long. And I am not hitting any crazy sites either. The link preview image and the bookmarking image are cool features. The window resize tool on the toolbar is nice for development. But seriously, crashing is a big problem. I’ll keep watching it as it matures.
I think I am going to stay with firefox for most of my stuff, due primarily to the firebug/web developer feature set. But since those are not yet working in Firefox 3 Beta, I am going to keep playing with the others. Perhaps I’ll change my mind for everything that isn’t development.
So rebecca’s dad wanted to convert some vinyl to CDs for group of friends….. he was using a turntable plugged into the mac, but since the turntable wasn’t line level, it wasn’t working… I initially told him to find a cheap receiver at a garage sale and use that as a preamp… A bit later in the day, I was at costco with rebecca and her mom, and they had this usb turntable, so we grabbed it for him.
It was easy enough for rebecca’s dad to use right away, included audio software (both simple and advanced), both mac and PC, and USB and line level outputs. It isn’t amazing or anything, but it works. I am going to borrow it and rip a bunch of my vinyl that I have been missing. Should be fun to have all that old chicago punk from my high school years readily available.
So we saw Lars and the Real Girl last night… It was actually pretty good… We had seen a segment on HBO’s Real Sex a few years ago about the company that makes the Real Dolls, and it was honestly kinda crazy. The movie follows this dude who has social issues, and one day he starts toting this doll around as if she is a real person that can talk and whatnot. So all the people around him actually play along with it. I enjoyed it. Obviously not a ‘big screen required’ kinda movie… but it was enjoyable. I would recommend it.
Side note… I hate it when websites don’t use title and meta tags correctly… for example… google the title… the top 3 include the IMDB page, the trailer on apple.com, and then the ‘official’ site… which has a title of ‘Lars and the Real Girl - Coming Soon’ … which is dumb, since the movie is already released, and the site itself acknowledges that. Then the lack of meta tags on the page combined with the fact that the page is entirely flash means there is actually NOTHING to show on the google description. Seriously, really?