Silence is golden¶
548 words
After a few quiet days around here, I am back. The weekend saw Claus come and visit and us have a feast of home-made burgers. All of our flat smelled a bit greasy afterwards – but the burgers were nice. I also had to write a research report, which took ages. Somehow writing things up properly always turns out to be hard. I find it even harder in German, as virtually all the literature is in English and I had to make up the terms in German. And, however nice your editor is and how efficient TeX's commands are, entering formulæ will probably remain a pain up to the day when the computer can read your mind.
- An all burger diet and its bad consequences can be seen in an American documentary.
- Treat your eyes – to some cancer, that is –via Bill Bumgarner, who also lists interesting RSS feeds and points to those generated by iTMS.
- Enjoy Bullshit Bingo in boring meetings.
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Of course the Mac turned 20 on my brother's birthday.
Every single one's got a story to tell
: the user, the press, the billionaire, a few of the makers. - My mom sent me yet another bag for my Powerbook. A very nice one. Watch this space in the near future for the whole story.
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Nice: A map of the countries or US states you have visited. I guess a more clickable interface would be nice, but its a good idea still. Hint: Look at the image's URL to and enter the countries manually, if you find the current form too inconvenient.
(via Geek Notes)
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I meant to post this since christmas, when I gave my parents a Snood license. As nice as the game may be. It's not good at computing percentages.
- How to handle your CDs and DVDs. With about a zillion people having failed to believe me that bad to put your CDs on the table upside-down, this may be a good reference to point them at. Basically the world is such a poorly designed place that the CD has been designed too well for its own good: People don't expect things to be designed in a way that allows them to do whatever they want in a natural way. I call this Microsoftisation.
- Pierre Igot bitches a bit about OS X. And rightly so. While I don't think the Dock is too bad per se (text labels would be ridiculous IMO, it could certainly do with more spring-loadedness, speed and so on), the point about preferences files while a bit exaggerated perhaps is certainly valid and sheds light on how carefully OSX is programmed. Just as in Bruce Tognazzini's recent columns, problems that belong in different categories – bad design (subjective) vs. bad implementation (objective) vs. immaturity/piss-poor quality control at Apple (whatever) are mixed and treated as if they were similar. [And then there are the points that aren't OS X problems at all but merely Microsoft problems. Despite having suffered them before, Pierre simply can't live without the pain induced by Microsoft. Still, blaming OSX for Microsoft's lack of support for, well, anything, is going a bit too far.] Separating these issues properly would have made a much stronger point.
