Reality TV: I'm watching it, because it's often funnier or more exciting than scripted shows. I don't watch sitcoms anymore. The good reality shows have funnier one-liners and more interesting personalities than I'm going to find in the seventy-eighth season of "Will & Grace". The good reality shows' storylines are less predictable than most scripted shows, and the characters are often more interesting.
I'm really sick of people grouping all reality TV together and dismissing it as a lump. Just like with scripted TV, there are different types of reality shows of varying quality. Just because "According to Jim" is kind of lame, does that mean "Battlestar Galactica" isn't worth watching? Hardly. One is a sitcom, the other is a sci-fi drama. One is about pandering to the lowest common denominator, the other is about quality storytelling.
Some broad categories of reality TV are Competitive, How-To, and Candid. Examples of each type would be "Survivor," "Trading Spaces," and "Real World." Each category has its good and bad shows, and there are enough out there to suit any taste. But if I can recommend a few for the reality-show skeptic: - America's Next Top Model: come for the beautiful girls, stay for the wacky cast of judges who steal the show - The Amazing Race: travel around the world, it's one of the best-edited shows of any kind on TV right now - Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee: it's supposed to be serious, but it's funnier than any sitcom; this lady just ain't right
Whenever I need to go shopping at a nice store, I put on all my most expensive-looking jewelry and best shoes and carry a nice purse. It does make a difference in how I'm treated, because the salespeople think I'm someone with money. People respect money.
Three elderly men were sitting around complaining about getting old. "These days, I wake up at seven, sit on the can, and it takes me half an hour to take a shit," said the first old man. "You think you got it bad?" replied the second. "I wake up at six-thirty and it takes me an hour to take a shit." "Not me," said the third. "I shit like a bull and piss like a racehorse every morning at seven on the dot. Of course, I don't wake up until eight."
It definitely pays to build your site correctly from the get-go. I worked on one site where flashy javascript was requested for the homepage. But you can't have mouseovers in a handheld - no mouse!
So I just attached a stylesheet with the attribute media="handheld", and now all the divs that would display one at a time on mouseover in a regular browser display all at once, in a list, on the handheld. Simple to do when all the presentation is done with a stylesheet in the first place.
The fact is that more and more people are getting to the point that they would rather write for everyone but IE rather than just IE.
True. I usually make sure a layout works in standards-compliant browsers first, then add in CSS hacks to make it work in IE. For personal projects, if a particular feature (e.g. adjacent sibling selectors) isn't available in IE, IE users will just have to live without the extra pretty. For work-related projects, I have no choice but to implement bloated workarounds to mimic what should be simple style declarations.
By any chance did the company you worked for have a, um, "meatball" as their logo? #1 and #4 sound a lot like a consulting gig I worked on a few years back.
A great indication of when you should quit your job is when you wake up every morning and dread going into work.
Or when you realize you're watching Murphy Brown reruns every morning to avoid going in to work.
I never should have taken that job in the first place (cemetery sales, commission only), but I was tired of not having an answer to "What do you do?" I was tired of telling people I was looking for a job or doing temp work. Then I learned that it's just as bad to have a job you're embarrassed to talk about. I think part of that embarrassment came from knowing that I took the job out of social desperation to avoid looking like a failure around the crowd I was hanging out with at the time.
So I quit, worked part-time at Six Flags and went back to temping and eventually back to school. I stopped worrying what the snooty stuffed shirts thought of me and was happier.
(And I enjoyed much schadenfreude when one of said stuffed shirts lost his fancy consulting job and ended up a cashier at Kroger.)
Most of the people I know (both personally and online) who watch the O.C. are women in their 20's and 30's. But the advertising during the show looks like it's aimed at high school to college-age.
So I guess that says that Episode III will appeal to the MTV demographic with lots of tricked-out machines and rich, whiny sorority girls.
Yes, that's part of the reason I enjoy reading old sci-fi. For example, in Heinlein's book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress he is amazingly prescient about computer networking. However, he also has people still using microfilm and slide rules.
Really? I live in Columbia and have never seen this, not in Bi-Lo, Publix, Kroger, Piggly Wiggly or Earth Fare. What grocery stores are you shopping at?
I've always thought that Peter Hamilton's sci-fi novels contained a believable future. His Greg Mandel trilogy takes place in post-warming England, which is a balmy, tropical place (that of it which is still above water, anyway).
The owner of a new Moe's Burritos on campus was considering putting in WiFi. Then someone pointed out to him that it would encourage people to just hang out in there forever, not necessarily buying anything. He decided that WiFi was not a good idea right now - it's hard enough to find a table in there as is, and they have pretty quick turnover.
I wonder, though, if offering free WiFi just during their slow times (3-6) would be worth it?
An interesting take on making "digital paper" work. I'm familiar with eInk's process, which is both similar (in that it uses a current to bring the ink to the surface) and completely different. I've been waiting for years for someone to make a commercially viable digital paper, and while the demos continue to get better, it seems we're still not quite there yet.
I would expect Verizon and Cingular/AT&T to turn campuses into battlegrounds More often than not, when I walk by the student union at the university where I work, some cell phone company has a table set up out there with a big promotion going. They're definitely aggressive about courting new customers.
Could it be that some people are very bright, have good memories, AND can do well in high pressure situations?
Or it could be that some people don't find standardized tests stressful. I've always done well on standardized tests and now I wonder if it's partly because they never psyched me out. I didn't care whether or not my SAT scores were perfect, they just had to be "good enough." Likewise, I took the GRE just in case I decided to go to grad school - I wasn't trying to get in anywhere - and ended up doing really well. Perhaps if someone had threatened to kill me if I missed more than one problem, I might have succumbed to stress.
I read an article (I believe it was in the Times Online, can't find it now) that described how North Korea was dissolving from the inside out. People are escaping the country across several borders, and infighting is eating away at the ability of the ruling group to stay in power.
I can't imagine what they hope to accomplish by this new announcement, other than to perhaps go out with a bang rather than a whimper.
I managed to eventually kill the C64 we had growing up. I noticed that when I smacked the counter it was sitting on, the computer made a neat ringing noise. After doing this every so often for a while, the C64 stopped running so well, and then died. Fortunately, we were able to replace it with a C128. I didn't try to make the neat sound with that computer. By then, I suspected that it was bad for its internal workings to go "Binggggggg!"
I am currently workign on a project where PDAs would be used in the industry.
Me too, which is the only reason I have a PDA. It's a Dell PocketPC, purchased by the company I work for solely for interface testing. I thought I might actually use it for more than QA purposes, but so far it's just sat there, literally gathering dust, connected to my PC by a cable. I turn it on when I need to make sure that the mobile stylesheets on the web app are working, then forget about it until I need to test something again.
I've thought about actually using it, but then realized that there's nothing I need it for. My phone has a calendar and stores phone numbers, and I can check my work Outlook account via the web. The PocketPC with no wireless is just about useless.
A ruggedized PDA is useful to emergency personnel who use it as a mini computer they can take to disaster sites and input information. Phones can serve that purpose sometimes, but voice interfaces don't work for all applications.
Replying to say that the journalist who wrote the article is named Alan Clendenning, according to this page which shows the byline for the article.
He's primarily a business writer, with an occasional focus on international business in South America, which is probably why he took this story. I don't see any other technology-related stories carrying his byline, which is probably why he had no idea who Barlow was.
On the one hand, probably not the most authoritative source for what happened here. But on the other hand, probably a good perspective on how the average U.S. Business Guy might view the proceedings in Brazil.
I blame the AP reporter who wrote this article for not doing his homework. It begins, "John Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, told a gathering inside a packed warehouse that poor nations can't solve their problems unless they stop paying expensive software licensing fees."
People reading this in the Business section of Foxnews.com are going to go, "What? Why is this old hippie talking about technology in Brazil?" If he had been identified as the co-founder of the EFF, Barlow would have sounded more knowledgeable and legitimate. Frankly, the tone of the entire article makes me think the person who wrote it has a great deal of contempt for the FOSS community.
The best place to buy RAM for Macs is datamem. It's inexpensive and good quality, and if they don't have your model listed you can call them and talk to an actual person and figure out what you need. The physics dept. at the university where I work buys all their Mac memory there. Apple charges way too much for additional memory, and you sound like the kind of guy who can install it himself.
Slashdot Mirror
Reality TV: I'm watching it, because it's often funnier or more exciting than scripted shows. I don't watch sitcoms anymore. The good reality shows have funnier one-liners and more interesting personalities than I'm going to find in the seventy-eighth season of "Will & Grace". The good reality shows' storylines are less predictable than most scripted shows, and the characters are often more interesting.
I'm really sick of people grouping all reality TV together and dismissing it as a lump. Just like with scripted TV, there are different types of reality shows of varying quality. Just because "According to Jim" is kind of lame, does that mean "Battlestar Galactica" isn't worth watching? Hardly. One is a sitcom, the other is a sci-fi drama. One is about pandering to the lowest common denominator, the other is about quality storytelling.
Some broad categories of reality TV are Competitive, How-To, and Candid. Examples of each type would be "Survivor," "Trading Spaces," and "Real World." Each category has its good and bad shows, and there are enough out there to suit any taste. But if I can recommend a few for the reality-show skeptic:
- America's Next Top Model: come for the beautiful girls, stay for the wacky cast of judges who steal the show
- The Amazing Race: travel around the world, it's one of the best-edited shows of any kind on TV right now
- Semi-Homemade Cooking with Sandra Lee: it's supposed to be serious, but it's funnier than any sitcom; this lady just ain't right
Whenever I need to go shopping at a nice store, I put on all my most expensive-looking jewelry and best shoes and carry a nice purse. It does make a difference in how I'm treated, because the salespeople think I'm someone with money. People respect money.
Three elderly men were sitting around complaining about getting old.
"These days, I wake up at seven, sit on the can, and it takes me half an hour to take a shit," said the first old man.
"You think you got it bad?" replied the second. "I wake up at six-thirty and it takes me an hour to take a shit."
"Not me," said the third. "I shit like a bull and piss like a racehorse every morning at seven on the dot. Of course, I don't wake up until eight."
Now, I'm usually up around nine, or even a little before
Me too. Unfortunately, I'm supposed to be at work by 8:30.
It definitely pays to build your site correctly from the get-go. I worked on one site where flashy javascript was requested for the homepage. But you can't have mouseovers in a handheld - no mouse!
So I just attached a stylesheet with the attribute media="handheld", and now all the divs that would display one at a time on mouseover in a regular browser display all at once, in a list, on the handheld. Simple to do when all the presentation is done with a stylesheet in the first place.
all that matters is that we have to LOOK productive 24x7
And that's why Lynx is wonderful. A DOS-looking terminal window always looks productive.
The fact is that more and more people are getting to the point that they would rather write for everyone but IE rather than just IE.
True. I usually make sure a layout works in standards-compliant browsers first, then add in CSS hacks to make it work in IE. For personal projects, if a particular feature (e.g. adjacent sibling selectors) isn't available in IE, IE users will just have to live without the extra pretty. For work-related projects, I have no choice but to implement bloated workarounds to mimic what should be simple style declarations.
By any chance did the company you worked for have a, um, "meatball" as their logo? #1 and #4 sound a lot like a consulting gig I worked on a few years back.
A great indication of when you should quit your job is when you wake up every morning and dread going into work.
Or when you realize you're watching Murphy Brown reruns every morning to avoid going in to work.
I never should have taken that job in the first place (cemetery sales, commission only), but I was tired of not having an answer to "What do you do?" I was tired of telling people I was looking for a job or doing temp work. Then I learned that it's just as bad to have a job you're embarrassed to talk about. I think part of that embarrassment came from knowing that I took the job out of social desperation to avoid looking like a failure around the crowd I was hanging out with at the time.
So I quit, worked part-time at Six Flags and went back to temping and eventually back to school. I stopped worrying what the snooty stuffed shirts thought of me and was happier.
(And I enjoyed much schadenfreude when one of said stuffed shirts lost his fancy consulting job and ended up a cashier at Kroger.)
Most of the people I know (both personally and online) who watch the O.C. are women in their 20's and 30's. But the advertising during the show looks like it's aimed at high school to college-age.
So I guess that says that Episode III will appeal to the MTV demographic with lots of tricked-out machines and rich, whiny sorority girls.
you can either challenge their decisions in court (assuming that someone isn't already)
Fortunately, somebody is: Court Debates Anti-Piracy TV Technology
Yes, that's part of the reason I enjoy reading old sci-fi. For example, in Heinlein's book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress he is amazingly prescient about computer networking. However, he also has people still using microfilm and slide rules.
Really? I live in Columbia and have never seen this, not in Bi-Lo, Publix, Kroger, Piggly Wiggly or Earth Fare. What grocery stores are you shopping at?
I've always thought that Peter Hamilton's sci-fi novels contained a believable future. His Greg Mandel trilogy takes place in post-warming England, which is a balmy, tropical place (that of it which is still above water, anyway).
The owner of a new Moe's Burritos on campus was considering putting in WiFi. Then someone pointed out to him that it would encourage people to just hang out in there forever, not necessarily buying anything. He decided that WiFi was not a good idea right now - it's hard enough to find a table in there as is, and they have pretty quick turnover.
I wonder, though, if offering free WiFi just during their slow times (3-6) would be worth it?
An interesting take on making "digital paper" work. I'm familiar with eInk's process, which is both similar (in that it uses a current to bring the ink to the surface) and completely different. I've been waiting for years for someone to make a commercially viable digital paper, and while the demos continue to get better, it seems we're still not quite there yet.
I would expect Verizon and Cingular/AT&T to turn campuses into battlegrounds
More often than not, when I walk by the student union at the university where I work, some cell phone company has a table set up out there with a big promotion going. They're definitely aggressive about courting new customers.
Could it be that some people are very bright, have good memories, AND can do well in high pressure situations?
Or it could be that some people don't find standardized tests stressful. I've always done well on standardized tests and now I wonder if it's partly because they never psyched me out. I didn't care whether or not my SAT scores were perfect, they just had to be "good enough." Likewise, I took the GRE just in case I decided to go to grad school - I wasn't trying to get in anywhere - and ended up doing really well. Perhaps if someone had threatened to kill me if I missed more than one problem, I might have succumbed to stress.
I read an article (I believe it was in the Times Online, can't find it now) that described how North Korea was dissolving from the inside out. People are escaping the country across several borders, and infighting is eating away at the ability of the ruling group to stay in power.
I can't imagine what they hope to accomplish by this new announcement, other than to perhaps go out with a bang rather than a whimper.
I managed to eventually kill the C64 we had growing up. I noticed that when I smacked the counter it was sitting on, the computer made a neat ringing noise. After doing this every so often for a while, the C64 stopped running so well, and then died. Fortunately, we were able to replace it with a C128. I didn't try to make the neat sound with that computer. By then, I suspected that it was bad for its internal workings to go "Binggggggg!"
I am currently workign on a project where PDAs would be used in the industry.
Me too, which is the only reason I have a PDA. It's a Dell PocketPC, purchased by the company I work for solely for interface testing. I thought I might actually use it for more than QA purposes, but so far it's just sat there, literally gathering dust, connected to my PC by a cable. I turn it on when I need to make sure that the mobile stylesheets on the web app are working, then forget about it until I need to test something again.
I've thought about actually using it, but then realized that there's nothing I need it for. My phone has a calendar and stores phone numbers, and I can check my work Outlook account via the web. The PocketPC with no wireless is just about useless.
A ruggedized PDA is useful to emergency personnel who use it as a mini computer they can take to disaster sites and input information. Phones can serve that purpose sometimes, but voice interfaces don't work for all applications.
Replying to say that the journalist who wrote the article is named Alan Clendenning, according to this page which shows the byline for the article.
He's primarily a business writer, with an occasional focus on international business in South America, which is probably why he took this story. I don't see any other technology-related stories carrying his byline, which is probably why he had no idea who Barlow was.
On the one hand, probably not the most authoritative source for what happened here. But on the other hand, probably a good perspective on how the average U.S. Business Guy might view the proceedings in Brazil.
I blame the AP reporter who wrote this article for not doing his homework. It begins, "John Barlow, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, told a gathering inside a packed warehouse that poor nations can't solve their problems unless they stop paying expensive software licensing fees."
People reading this in the Business section of Foxnews.com are going to go, "What? Why is this old hippie talking about technology in Brazil?" If he had been identified as the co-founder of the EFF, Barlow would have sounded more knowledgeable and legitimate. Frankly, the tone of the entire article makes me think the person who wrote it has a great deal of contempt for the FOSS community.
The best place to buy RAM for Macs is datamem. It's inexpensive and good quality, and if they don't have your model listed you can call them and talk to an actual person and figure out what you need. The physics dept. at the university where I work buys all their Mac memory there. Apple charges way too much for additional memory, and you sound like the kind of guy who can install it himself.
Wait till they release Tiger
Good advice. If you know a new OS is about to come out, wait until the new system you buy will come with it installed.