<rant>If I get one more frickin email about Black Friday from an American who sends me a "personalized" message then wishes me a Happy Thanksgiving and talks about standing in line at some ungodly hour, I'm going to puke. Take three seconds and look at the "About Me" on my blog. It's clear I live in Toronto, ON.</rant>
It seems like forever ago that driving into Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel was an adventure (OK, I know it still is, but bear with me). Upon arriving in NYC one was almost surrounded by panhandlers and squeegie guys. They' re still around of course, but not nearly as often, and maybe now in different places (there's always a guy walking along the east/northbound Cross Bronx just after the GW Bridge) but it's not as constant as it once was.
Not as constant, unless like me you spend a lot of time driving around the Township of Woodbridge, NJ. Now, let me clarify - it is not panhandlers knocking on the windows looking for change. It is people collecting money for charities. Again, let me clarify - I have nothing against donating to charities - in fact, I think it's an important thing to do. But lately it feels like every time I stop at a traffic light someone is knocking on the window looking for money. Maybe it's some high school team, a fire department, alzheimer's research, whatever. All worthy causes, yes, but I really wish they would stop essentially panhandling. For starters, I usually don't carry a lot of (if any) cash on me, so I feel guilty for not giving them anything. Plus, I'd almost feel compelled to give to them all if I give to one.
Maybe they can start soliciting donations on Facebook and Twitter.
http://www.au.kddi.com/seihin/ichiran/kishu/sh005/index.html
Fucking FINALLY someone has come out with a phone featuring a simple, clean design and a camera better than 2 megapixels. Every season, the major providers (DoCoMo, au and Softbank) release their new phone lineup, and I was beginning to be very disappointed with the Japanese cell phone market over the past year or so. Everything brought to market lately has been of one extreme or another; too flashy, too many features and really expensive, or very plain, boring, shitty camera etc. And the colors! Absolutely abysmal! I'm sorry, but I'm just not interested in your ugly-ass $500 phone that only comes in purple, champagne or light pink even if it does have HD TV capability, a 12 megapixel camera, waterproofing, etc. I've been waiting for something in between, and once again Sharp comes through. Now I just have to wait for that pesky Softbank contract to end. Two more months. I'm counting the days...
If you want to dance, chill, or ride around town on your orange moped, I suggest you pair these activities with music crafted by Alan Palomo. He is the funky synth driven force behind bands Neon Indian - a solo venture - and Vega. Both bands have given Alan royalty status - at least in my mind - even with only one of his projects having released an album. The prior mentioned release would be that of Neon Indian. We're still waiting on a Vega release date, which should be dance floor ready the second it hits shelves. These bands - especially Vega - have inspired me to revisit an experiment I've always wanted to perform. In the town I'm from, finding a bar that plays good music - especially on the dance floor - is really hard to come by. The best bar in the world, The Joynt, here in Eau Claire has a jukebox, which is cool, but let's focus more on the dance aspect. My experiment is the go into a dance bar that plays strictly top 40 jams and throw something like Vega on for a song and see how it does. Would the drunkies stop and become dumfounded by something that's not yelling at them in auto-tune or would they continue to rub their denim together? I think it's the latter. I'm going to steal something from Liz Lemon to help explain. Dancing is like sandwiches, they exist everywhere. Everybody loves a sandwich no matter where you're from and the same goes with dancing. While we might dance to a different tune we all like to dance. So instead of feeding the drunkies McDonalds dancing, let's give feed them Subway dancing. Because in the end, a lot of people just listen to what is put in front of them. Why not insert some good music once and a while and see how everyone reacts to it. If it backfires who cares at least we tried. Now go back to eating your 99 cent McChickens. So, sorry to go on a rant, but somehow this all seemed cohesive with Neon Indian and Vega when I began writing. Now I'm not so sure. Anyways check out the tunes below. I'm willing to bet that it'll get your body moving. In the mean time experiment. Throw this on at the next drunk get together and see what happens.
Come diceva Petrolini quando qualcuno dal loggione lo importunava: “Io non ce l’ho con te, ce l’ho con quello accanto a te che non te butta de sotto”. Ecco: gli italiani sono quelli accanto a lui. Berlusconi è finito, il berlusconismo no”.
Luttazzi pronostica la caduta del re a Marzo. Al vedum.
This is all pretty understandable: it’s easy to define community in terms of what we’re not. A common enemy focuses and drives us. Competition can take a positive form: when it’s friendly and constructive both communities benefit.
Lately, though, I’ve noticed the tone of the arguments in the Django community getting nastier — especially when it comes to Rails. Again, I’m far from innocent in this regard: I’ve certainly done my fair share of Rails-bashing, and I regret it.
Neat article - seeing Rails from a Django persons view.
Much as I'm loving Ubuntu 9.10 and greatly, greatly appreciate all the hard work the Ubuntu team puts into building what I consider to be the finest desktop OS in the world (I'm seriously in awe when I think of the work involved and the fantastic end result), I have to point out one major mistake that was made with this release: the decision to replace Pidgin with Empathy as the default IM client. There's a discussion about they whys behind the decision here, but it seems in this case abstract technical decisions won out of usability decisions, which in the end isn't good for anyone.
My major annoyance with Empathy is as follows. If someone IMs me, I receive a popup notification in the top right-hand corner of my screen. Great. If, however, I'm not looking at my screen when the notice pops up, the only way to know someone IMd me is to look at my contacts list for a blinking icon. Completely, utterly terrible usability. Pidgin pops up a new tab in my chat window when someone IMs me. That's as it should be. That's how IM works, folks. Do your homework and don't change paradigms that don't need changing. I shouldn't have to worry about scanning my contact list every time I step away from my computer to see if someone IMd me when I wasn't looking.
Yes, I know, I can change applications; I've already re-installed Pidgin, and my apologies to anyone whose IMs I didn't respond to for hours this week. But with such a major usability annoyance I can't fathom why the "better integration with the desktop environment" rationale would make Empathy the default IM client in Ubuntu.
So more than anything this is to ask "WHY?" and to beg the Ubuntu team to actually USE the programs they supply as defaults instead of making decisions solely for under the hood technical reasons. Users don't care about the integration blah blah, they care about knowing when someone IMs them.
It's not that hard frankly! I've attached a graph showing the last three months of followers and following for the @web_cardiff account, and you can see the pattern clearly: The green line is the bot. It follows a bunch, waits a few days and unfollows those who didn't follow back. Repeat. (My graph isn't 100% accurate, but you can see the numbers for yourself: followers / 'friends'.)
What do you think? Is this bad practice? In this case, the information isn't bad - a few links go to the owner's site, but most point to genuinely useful resources. Friendly spam or useful resource worth promoting in this way?
