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The editorial board at the Cleveland Plain Dealer produced a singing editorial after two of the newspaper's reporters were thrown out of a public meeting last week. I liked it a lot, but not all of the Plain Dealer's readers did. One asked:
Does anyone think its a little bit petty for a newspaper to be engaging in such childish antics. Is the old "corrupt politician" headline not working anymore?
[via Seth Godin's blog, which has a pointer to its origins]
The real estate hustlers were denying the housing bubble long after it became obvious, just as Web 2.0 hustlers now deny the existence of another technology bubble. When that becomes the subject of an artful YouTube parody, you know it's time to sell.
A lot of the humor in this comic will be lost on anyone not steeped in computer and programming culture, but it's very good, proving once again that drawing talent has nothing to do with being a good cartoonist. Here's how the creator, Randall Munroe, explains its origins:
I was going through old math/sketching graph paper notebooks and didn't want to lose some of the work in them, so I started scanning pages. I took the more comic-y ones and put them up on a server I was testing out, and got a bunch of readers when BoingBoing linked to me. I started drawing more seriously, gained a lot more readers, started selling t-shirts on the site, and am currently shipping t-shirts and drawing this comic full-time.
The first item I came across perusing the forums was a discussion of "to disappear up one's own arse":
Sad to say, that's a phrase I know all too well from personal experience.
The blogger at Successful Software says he created a fake program that doesn't run, "Awardmestars," and it won 16 different awards from software download sites. Many Web sites selling software display icons from these download sites proclaiming that their programs have earned a "5-star rating":
The obvious explanation is that some download sites give an award to every piece of software submitted to them. In return they hope that the author will display the award with a link back to them. The back link then potentially increases traffic to their site directly (through clicks on the award link) and indirectly (through improved page rank from the incoming links). The author gets some awards to impress their potential clients and the download site gets additional traffic.
I like some of the comebacks on Slashdot:
He's obviously missing the point. Among all of the software that does nothing, his is clearly the best.
and
You think that's bad, the guy in the next office to mine has a coffee cup that reads "World's Greatest Dad!
Perl is a programming language that has been compared to "line noise" because it can (but doesn't have to be) written like this: undef $/;open(_,$0);/ \dx([\dA-F]*)/while(<_>);@&=split(//,$1);@/=@&; $".=chr(hex(join("",splice(@&,0,2))))while(@&); eval$”; I have no particular talent for it but have found it invaluable for processing data, parsing text, automating email, generating documents and more. Just the fact that I was amused by this video and am posting it here is a sign I'm suffering from a Perl-induced form of mental illness:
Would you rather read the thoughts of this guy:
This guy:
Or this guy?
Tell me your impression of the author of Notes from a Teacher doesn't change based on which photo of him appears on his blog. Incidentally, I retrieved the old photos from the Internet Archive. The author, Mark Hamilton, a journalism instructor in Vancouver, explains that the latter is "as close to reality as it gets," but clearly reality is what you make it.
Some press criticism is bogus, but this comment by a reader of this morning's Web update, "Car runs into cemetery; woman hurt," was dead on: typical shoddy reporting by the CJ. Not one mention of the hundreds found dead at the scene.
So says The Wall Street Journal:
In the age of Google, being special increasingly requires standing out from the crowd online. Many people aspire for themselves -- or their offspring -- to command prominent placement in the top few links on search engines or social networking sites' member lookup functions. But, as more people flood the Web, that's becoming an especially tall order for those with common names. Type 'John Smith' into Google's search engine and it estimates it has 158 million results. For people prone to vanity searching -- punching their own names into search engines -- absence from the first pages of search results can bring disappointment. On top of that, some of the 'un-Googleables' say being crowded out of search results actually carries a professional and financial price.
I'm guessing this isn't a problem for Rupert Murdoch.
The Trixie Tracker is for the obsessive, overly attentive, data-driven parent:
Trixie Tracker crunches simple daily input into rich, informative charts, graphs and striking visual summaries. You can use the software to record sleep, diapers, bottles, solids, medicine, nursing, and pumping activity. When you sign up for an account, you'll choose a personal web address which will become your Trixie Tracker Site. As you start recording events you'll better understand your baby's daily patterns and needs, and you can share that information online with family and friends.
There's a free trial but it costs $14.95 for three months. But how much data do you really need to understand a cycle like this: Sleep, eat, poop, sleep, eat, poop, sleep, eat, poop…
Computer-assisted reporting figures in the plot of the Halle Berry/Bruce Willis journalism thriller Perfect Stranger, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Reviewer Roger Moore says the actor Giovanni Ribisi "plays Miles, the creepy computer-assisted-reporting nerd" who helps Berry's character Rowena "alter her online identity, crack into e-mail and instant message accounts and 'set up' the ad guy with the wandering eye." I've read elsewhere that this movie, which I haven't seen, paints a false picture of journalism. That's obviously the case in this instance, because everyone knows computer-assisted reporters aren't creepy nerds -- we're innately sexy and charismatic.
The author of Indexed draws simple diagrams on index cards to illustrate life's fundamental truths.
You can often say more with a simple graphic than a complex one. The blog 4-block world shows the way.
