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Apple Keynote Safety Dates

[via gizmodo]

If there is one rule for mac die-hards, it is do not buy any apple product in December or July. The reason why is simple: Apple makes big product announcements in August (at WWDC) and in January (at MacWorld). There are sometimes smaller announcements sprinkled throughout the year, but you gotta buy that new mac sometime, right? Gizmodo has created a nice calendar for those of you who can’t wait this year. The important dates: December 26th (you can still return and pay a 10% restocking fee) and December 30th (you can get the price difference without a fee if the price drops).

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The Dresden Dolls


remind me why I listen to so much instrumental music.

I’m listening to “Yes Virginia” right now for the first time and the lyrics are coming straight out of the battered notebook of a high school goth wannabe.

They have great musicianship and a great branding thing with the costumes and whatever, but the minute I catch any of the actual words I feel dirty (like as in not clean) for even listening.

To hear this thing done much better go pick up the first Rasputina album instead.

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tools and ideas for your blog

Add Links for Del.icio.us, Digg, and More to Blog Posts at ExplodingBoy
I was looking for how to do this simply for WP, and here it was!

Creating a Basic Print Stylesheet at ExplodingBoy
I haven’t done this yet, I have to see the interaction with my blog pages, but I will when I get a chance.

LightboxJS V2.0
A useful script for showing images on top of your pages, now with fancy shmancy effects.

ThickBox on jquery.com
this is similar to LightBox functionality-wise, but adds a lot of support for non-image types. It’s based on the jquery javascript library which looks like it might be cool.

Alternative Style: Working With Alternate Style Sheets at AListApart
Nice article on switching stylesheets at runtime.

The Trackback List plugin and Making comments stand out on Tamba2: I was interested in figuring out how to show trackbacks separately and these two articles were very instructive.

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SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check – Valleywag

SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check – Valleywag

As someone who was very involved in the second wave of virtual worlds on the internet (it depends if you count Habitat or MUDs as the first wave or not), I’ve watched them periodically come up and die again with amusement. It was always obvious the first time around, that it wasn’t a technology problem. Sure, Alphaworlds, Black Sun, Microsoft Virtual Worlds and V-Chat (my project) could have looked better or been slightly more responsive, but their main failings weren’t polygon counts. The main failings were all about having no reason to exist. none. They were novel, they were amusing for a short time, but they didn’t really bring much to the table that wasn’t there before. In the end it was just providing a new way of text chat. Adobe Atmosphere came out, gave me and the V-World’ers I know a laugh, and then died looking for a market.

Then came Linden Labs. Especially when the first details came out, I was really unimpressed. It seemed like a technology built by cyberhippies with nothing new to offer except some vague notions of on-line togetherness. I read some articles about it, and then ignored it, expecting it to go away soon. It persevered though and grew. They took their economy seriously and started selling real estate and making it possible for people to easily make a living within world (neither of these things was their idea, both have been done before). They started making large deals and announcing incredible usage (not profit) numbers. Of course, it is all a sham. The above article does a nice job skewering the Linden Labs numbers. Does this mean Second Life is a failure? Nope, even their (corrected) meager numbers are quite nice. Does this mean that Second Life is the first viable (long term) virtual world? Well, depends on if you want to count the on-line RPGs. Those were successful and have been around a lot longer. The question is if a purpose-less (non-game) virtual world can make it.

I guess we’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out.

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Amazon makes an unintended funny…

a message from Amazon about items in my shopping cart:

Please note that the price of The High Price of Materialism has increased from $10.85 to $11.32 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

Please note that the price of The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don’t Need has increased from $10.40 to $10.79 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

Please note that the price of Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture has increased from $10.20 to $10.65 since you placed it in your Shopping Cart. Items in your cart will always reflect the most recent price displayed on their product detail pages.

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crazyness

So, I’m staying a nice hotel in the self-proclaimed capital of Silicon Valley. Of course, they have hot and cold running internet (wireless and wired!), but there is no outlet with 10 feet of the desk (where the wired internet is). Unless, of course, you move the bed away from the wall and unplug the clock.

morons