Sarcasm and vitriol wrapped in a twee bow.
America the Overfull – New York Times
This was just a lovely written piece on the less crowded times in America. I feel it especially poignant as I look out my window across downtown Seattle, whose skyline has changed dramatically just in the last 12 years I’ve lived here and open spaces (and quiet) are getting harder and harder to find.
Uptight Seattleite (Seattle Weekly)
For those of you who wonder what it is like to live in Seattle, this gives you a good idea. Although, there should be another column (probably in the Stranger) called “Ask a sullen hipster” which would be the ying to the Uptight Seattleite’s yang.
[via The New York Times]
1080p Does Matter – Here’s When (Screen Size vs. Viewing Distance vs. Resolution)
This is a nice, simple, explanation of how the interaction of screen resolution, screen size and viewing distance all come together around the perceived quality of the TV image. The practical upshot is that maybe you don’t need the full 1080p unless you want to move your chair up to a couple feet from your TV (which just happens to be how you’ll see the set in the showroom).
These is a photoblog from an Toronto based guy who calls himself the UrbanGhost, almost exclusively of people, going about their lives. It reminds me of some of my favorite photos from Gary Winograd. Just awesome site.
Dr. Dobb’s | Microsoft Seeks RSS Patents; Blogosphere Worries | December 22, 2006
This isn’t really so surprising actually. I was at the Gnomedex where MS announced the big RSS features in Vista (didn’t really hear to much about them after that). It makes sense that they would file some patents around that stuff. However, the patents seem pretty broad given how late they came to the RSS game.
The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Regarding our iPhone
This is a quite funny sendup of the Apple product design process, except for the part where different parts of Apple actually talk to each other. When the different actual product groups meet, they probably have to be on different sides of an opaque screen with voice modulators going or something…
This is a video of Rob Paravonian doing an awesome bit. I was going to try to describe it, but just click the play button and enjoy.
I h8 you.
Sure, I have a lot more e-mail than most folks, and I understand that performance might be affected by the quantity, and for the most part Entourage still works pretty good with 200,000+ email messages (except where it hangs for 15 minutes at a time while it is doing something once in a while), but when I actually try to do the good thing, and start deleting mailboxes full of messages, it isn’t cool for you to hang there, deleting 40 messages an hour for HOURS. So, now I gotta delete messages in small batches so as not to upset whatever delicate balance there is in your poorly written software.
I guess the Entourage software interview process doesn’t include corner cases, huh?
[Update 2.24.07- Macworld finally provided a fix]
The flipside of the Seatac Airport Trees incident is the right wing’s continual battle against the non-existant War on Christmas. So the LA Times points out that this is really a nice cash making scheme for at least some on the right: ‘War on Christmas’ has a new jingle: money.
Now, as a Jewish person who grew up in an incredibly Jewish area, I used to get offended by those determined to ignore the non-Christian population of the world. Maybe because I’ve gotten older or maybe because I’ve been living in an area insensitive to Jewish culture (but not very Christian either) for the last dozen or so years, I’ve gotten used to the idea that many people don’t really have the religious connotations about Christmas that I have.
Then the “War on Christmas” comes up again, where the right wants to make sure that it is CHRIST MASS and not Christmas, and then I hate it all over again, and some store clerk wishing me Merry Christmas gets my wrath.
Wow, this seems to bug me every year: 2004, 2005
Maybe, feeling ok with it was just ’cause of the Democratic wins this November making me feel less under attack.
So to all my fellow chosen folk, Happy Belated Chanukah!
For everyone else: Merry Christmas, Happy Kwanzaa, Enjoy Saturnalia, congradulations on the Solstice and whatever else anyone may dig this time of year…