September 2009
42 posts
Surprisingly Free : Apple rejected my iPhone App,... →
OpenRegs app gets a rejection, a fix, and ends up back in the queue.
2 more weeks (hopefully) and OpenRegs will be live…
Congrats Jerry on the new site!
That Irritating "Democracy in America" Blogger...
A bit ago I mentioned that once a week or so someone blogging behind the “Democracy in America” blog at The Economist shows up and curb stomps the magazine’s good name. Well, he or she popped up again today in this recent article about the cap-and-trade climate change bill.
I have no idea about, and so no quarrel with, the numbers the CBO, Paul Krugman, or even Glen Beck point...
Positive progress towards AIDS vaccine! (or,... →
A trial vaccine in Thailand, in an initial round of testing, cut the infectiousness of the disease by almost a third! Not a silver bullet, but huge progress! This is a great day.
Moderate progress towards smashing the HIV/AIDS virus is something really worth celebrating, but its also a chance to step back and think about three other things that the development of an end of the HIV/AIDS virus...
WatchHorrifically bad software demo becomes performance art
Far, far, far more awkward than The Office at its best. Best moment might be at 18:00 when the demo leader says hes going to put something on for the audience to watch while he works out a technical problem, and it turns out to be something sorta like Vegi-tails w/ more Jesus
Or the part when the demo-er is desperately telling the players...
An Attempt at an Explanation of Pop Capitalism
popfop:
Aesthetically, the two Orange Juice music videos below sum it up for me in my head but I take it that isn’t enough for any readers of this blog. They are most definitely, however, great examples of pop capitalism.
To start off with, the term pop is the key. As Richard Hamilton’s pop manifesto (see debut post of this blog) points out, pop art is a celebration of the mass produced, the...
WatchWill Wilkinson and Joseph Heath on Bloggingheads.tv discussing the economic fallacies of the left and the right.
An old interesting goodie. The most interesting line is when Will Wilkinson says something like:
“When you look at both the economic and social spending measures, you see that Denmark is pretty much Hong Kong with a giant social welfare system tacked on top”
Both of...
I Can't Takes No More (or, a homemade Tumblr...
I’ve been using the official iPhone Tumblr app for a while now, and I like it a lot, but there are a couple of irksomes bits of it. Specifically:
1) When I click on a link, I’m taken to the webpage w/in the app, instead of externally
2) Its all-but-impossible to edit or reblog a post w/in the app
3) The app doesn’t quite feel “100%” right. Its because large...
congratulations new student council rep!!!!
Kelsey: i don't think i told you, i decided at the last minute to run for student council rep just because i was like "fuck it, its not like i have any pride left to loose"
Me: what??? no you didn't tell me
Kelsey: we like, complain to the admin about shit like waterfountains
From a former student government member to a current one, I have some advice: try to get the school's representatives to bring snacks to the meetings. Thats always the best part.
And, hey, congrats!
PESAuthorizeNet submission and response classes
I just finished a first pass at cleaning up these Cocoa Authorize.net submission and response classes that I’ve been using in a couple of projects. They don’t do anything incredible, but do provide a nice, clean, and simple way of adding integration with Authorize.net in an iPhone or OSX app.
I’m releasing it under the MIT License because why the hell not right? I use so much...
WatchOnion News Network - Report: Growing Ranks Of Nouveau Poor Facing Discrimination From Old Poor
Austria Observation #3 (or, Kebabs and Weiners)
One really great thing about being in Vienna is that I can drink three beers with lunch and eat nothing but bread and meat all day without coming across as a degenerate. The fact that I could also chain smoke in class, piss in the street and walk around a small pack of dogs without cleaning up after them and still say the same is besides the point. The common diet here is pretty incredible,...
KittenApp: Now Free →
At the good suggestion of Jerry Brito I’ve made KittenApp free. I’ve got a couple of exciting iPhone apps in Apple’s queue right now so it seems silly to charge for this jokey app. So, anyone who wants to love their kitten from the road, enjoy some free KittenApp
PHP Abstract Podcast Episode 46: Paul Tomlinson on... →
If you’re interested in hearing interviews with about PHP ORM classes, this will be the best one you’ll hear all week.
Norman Borlaug, possibly the person who has done... →
Norman Borlaug’s inventions in the field of bio-engineering are estimated to have saved over 245 million lives, or, almost one person for every American alive. Not even Bono can compete with that.
“Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists...”
– Richard Dawkins by way of Julia Sweeney talking about how incredible and impossible our existence is
Austria Observation #2 (or, Julia Sweeney and...
One thing that sticks out in my mind about Austria is the subways. They’re quick, they’re relatively cheap and they’re safe enough that parents could probably leave their kids down in while they’re at work and spend the euros they would have spent on child care on pretzels and cheap beer and the Austrian version of DCFS probably wouldn’t give a whoot. But the...
keyboardr | Pat Dryburgh →
jerrybrito:
Keyboardr is a search engine that doesn’t require the mouse at all. Simply type in your query, and instantly results from Google, YouTube, and Wikipedia appear. Very cool user interface.
You got your Quicksilver in my search engine! You got your… (etc.)
This is sweet. If only it wouldn’t open up the chosen results in a new window. greasemonkey to the rescue!
Additional Mew (or, MewTwo)
Some older Mew material thats just as great, if not even better:
Am I Wry? No - Mew
Special - Mew
WatchZero Punctuation - Tales of Monkey Island
For anyone else who grew up w/ Lucas Arts adventure games, he hits the nail on the head
Austrian Observation #1
I’ve only been here a few days, so other than grocery shopping and some long walks around I don’t have all that much to report, but I’ll say this: Internet is apparently a resource that must be aggressively rationed here. Folks in Vienna love these 3G USB dongles that you sometimes see folks using in the US. Their pricing system, though, makes you think that they’re...
“Its like back when the anti-(Iraq)war movement was at its height a few years...”
– snyderp
Please read my full post on this subject. Thanks.
(via robot-heart-politics)
I understand what you’re saying, but my main point is that when I read people commenting that some protesters are opposed to Obama because they’re racist, it tells me a lot more about the former...
“What this is really about is race. That’s all there is to it.
(not targeted at...”
– (via Anni and someone named marco)
“I have good news and bad news. Let me tell you the good news first. I found...”
– Character from Mother 3 / Earthbound 2 telling you about a cool new weapon
ever had salmonella?
Uhoh, you got the ‘nella. Only cure: you gotta sleep with a virgin, or some such.
Feel better soon!
Pre-Trip Jitters
On the tarmac, waiting for the flight crew to shut the doors, etc. A bIt terrified but, also excited, not about going to Vienna (being at the edge of any trip always makes the trip feel like an unnecessarily elected ass-ache) but of (voluntarily, un-compensated-ly) rewriting ToneTune’s instrument display classes in the air. Which at least, in the middle of all this uncertainty and anxiety,...
Re: Those rich government workers (or, the... →
I guess its amusing to the anonymous Economist blogger, but it seems strange that a magazine that (rightfully) trumpets the (relative) efficiency of the market to turn around and defend the fed’s use of job security as a hiring bargaining chip.
Its anecdotal sure, but I have two friends who work for the federal government now, and both love to share horror stories about older peers who are...
Crazy Belmont Man (or, how the other 51.1% lives)
I was in NY a bit ago staying with a friend from high school, Hayley Stokar, in Washington Heights, and after a couple of drinks and some general arm-chair-politician-bullshitting my friend surprised me when she told me about something that’d been bothering her. She is a pretty left of center person, but not in an irritating Michael Moore way. To resort to Woody Allen/Annie Hall...
