Sunday, October 31, 2004

The Internets Vets for Truth: Pretty fast mirror of just about every recent political QuickTime of the last few months (including "Fahrenheit 9/11", "Going Upriver", John Stewart on Crossfire, etc.) I watched the John Stewart clip twice. (via jwz)

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

SMOP

In the future, every storage component will be like iDisk — synchronized mirror of an online drive.
In the present, iDisk lost two weeks of my data.

Good Apple. Bad Apple.

Monday, October 25, 2004

forget the hemisphere

The box is unexpectedly small and easy to carry. Tools needed to setup the computer: a knife and a penny. A knife cuts the round transparent seals, a penny opens a battery compartment on the keyboard.

There is one wire — from the power outlet to the computer. Wireless power doesn't scale.

The screen is just the right aspect ratio and the right size. And it does have two degrees of freedom, if you count turning the computer.

Estimated setup time, from opening the box to listening to music from an iDisk: less than ten minutes.

The hiccups: BlueTooth handshake with the keyboard takes too long. The annoying registration form. No screen-cleaning cloth! iTunes skipping a few times and crashing once (that's serious, but I'll completely replace the memory chips anyway.)

I start to sound like an Apple groupie.

Friday, October 15, 2004

Team America: World Police

I liked the puppets (but I am a fan of puppet sex — I enjoyed Avenue Q as well.) Good songs. Uneven screenplay. I really wanted them to avoid a happy ending somehow, but oh well. 3 stars.

Tuesday, October 12, 2004

information wants to be free

The US News ranking of the best graduate schools in Computer Science is freely available from a Berkeley site. No premium subscription required.

Go Bears!

Monday, October 11, 2004

brandname etymology

Reading through a list of required materials for a drawing workshop, I discovered that Caran d'Ache is a Swiss writing materials brand. In Russian, karandash means pencil. There even was a famous clown whose stage name was Karandash. I always thought it was a Turkish word.

Meanwhile Blogger is getting closer to Xerox.

Update: it gets interesting. Karandash, originally karatas, is indeed a tyurksk or Turkish word meaning "black stone", according to this well-researched article. Company name was secondary. Thanks albars.

Sunday, October 10, 2004

the odds

JFK -> Manhattan and Manhattan -> JFK rides both featured a Russian-speaking driver. Both played the market. One was a full-time trader until the market crashed and wiped him out. The other believed that the market was controlled by men who didn't like George W. Bush (evidence: economic slump just in time for Bush's presidency.)

At least I safely got there and back.

Tuesday, October 05, 2004

all the base belong to...

but youforgotpoland.com!

An alphanumeric universal namespace. First-come, first-served. Get your dotcom while they last. (via alicez)

Monday, October 04, 2004

wall time

An atomic, radio-controlled clock on the wall says it's 4:03. Everybody else and their Powerbooks think it's 4:07. Who do you trust?

pyra lives

Throughout my career, I have been lucky: I had good bosses. Ev, good luck in whatever you choose to do next.

Friday, October 01, 2004

logotype


:Dynin

(prompted by turchanka)