Of Course Macs Are More Expensive… Aren’t They? – “So despite all the urban myths to the contrary, when you actually compare Apples to comparably equipped Dells, the Apples are not only tastier-looking, but they’re less fattening, too! Every single one, which I have to admit surprised me a little bit.” Skim it.
A review of Tom Friedman’s new book – “It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible.”
Watching TV makes you smarter – Nice!
Let us all pause for a moment to give proper reverance for how amazingly cool Tiger is. Apple continues to make incredible advancement in each upgrade to its operating system, and unlike Windows with each Mac OS X update my computer gets faster at the same time that it is getting more useful.
The author of Listening to Prozac explains why there is nothing “deep” or “powerful” about depression — it is a disease like any other – Specifically, he starts with people who say “what if van Gogh had been given anti-depressants?” He ends with Holocaust survivors. But now how you might think, if you don’t know much about depression.
In New York, turning the old High Line into a 1.5 mile long park – Way cooler than demolishing it. I want to see more pictures!
Flickr
The other day I signed up for a Flickr account but I haven’t uploaded any photos yet. I know its supposed to be amazing and innovative in how it displays photos in a “stream” with “tags” rather than through galleries, and it has some nice Flash-based slideshow stuff, but I don’t really get the point of it. Why are bloggers who know enough to be able to set up their own galleries flocking to lock up their photos on Flickr’s servers?
Is it just that the community nature of it (commenting, bookmarks, etc.) is what makes it so amazing? Someone please explain the point of it to me, cause I don’t get it, just like I don’t get all of the Friendster-type sites. Is Flickr a fad or is there really something to it?
Photos
Wow, I’ve been posting quite a lot of remainders recently. Well, let’s break it up a bit by throwing in some photo galleries that I finally got around to putting online. I think my finals and post-college/pre-job time is probably going to be spent going on a few adventures and spending a lot of time doing some digital housekeeping. All of these files and things really need to be cleaned up and organized and backed up.
- Apple Picking (Sept 30, 2004) – Kelli, Aaron, Beth and I went out on a pretty day near the end of fall to pick some apples. I thought I had put these pictures up a while back, but apparently not.
- Michigan (Nov 5-7, 2004) – Adam Herman owed me some money so he decided to repay me by buying me a plane ticket to come visit. 🙂 I got to see his cat, Yanna, her cat, UMich, and some local scenery. It was a lot of fun, but Adam’s car was scary. Like, strange colored smoke coming out of the vents, a windshield that wouldn’t un-fog and had a massive crack through it, etc. You have fixed that stuff by now, RIGHT???
- Hawaii (Dec 24 – 30) – This is going to be the year of fun vacations. Apparently at some point my parents realized we should really be getting out more. We went to Hawaii over winter break and I get to go to the Bahamas over finals! I wrote down my thoughts on the trip back in December, and they still hold.
Of the Hawaii batch, I’m especially fond of this picture and this one. More stuff to come, and I’ll be sure to take lots and lots of pictures at Atlantis.
Edit: Yeah, Michigan and apple picking were definitly there before, and something happened to them. I’ve upgraded to a newer version of Gallery and re-imported all the albums, and things seem to be happy again. Gonna keep an eye on things for a while and make sure all of my backups are functioning correctly as well…
Anda’s game – A good short story by Cory Doctorow based on the premise that sweatshops can exist in online worlds the same as they do in real life.
MacRumors buyer’s guide – I was looking all over for this slick page that gives info on historial trends in Apple hardware upgrades and tells when the best time is to buy new computers.
Babies who gain more weight in their first week are more likely to be obese in their 20s – Shockingly, babies who eat breast milk rather than formula gain weight more slowly. Just like all the other bad things that formula makes happen. Remind me again why we give formula to newborns?
Cost Of Living Now Outweighs Benefits – Not a good P/E ratio, apparently.
On the decline of Trivial Pursuit – Can’t say I much enjoyed playing the 20th century edition on Friday night…
Labels accuse Apple of holding back innovation in the digital music space – This is funny on so many levels I’m just not sure I can comprehend it. Apple single-handedly ignited the for-pay online music distribution industry, and still sells 70% of the songs sold over the web. Now that Apple has made the industry work, the labels want to start jacking up prices and doing other bone-headed things to screw up a good thing, but Apple was smart when they negotiated their contracts and won’t let it happen. The music industry, brought in line by a scrappy computer company that doesn’t give a shit about their revenue models, is now calling foul, and attempting to move into, of all things, the mobile phone space, because they think people will pay a lot more to buy their music over wireless networks and stick it on their phones than in a format that they can keep on their computers, on CDs, and on iPods. Brilliant.
Comcast sued for disclosing customer info – I hope the morons get what they deserve. Not sure what that is, exactly, but a nice cash payment would be a good start.
That’s it, I need one of these watches – I don’t want to pay $150 for it, though…
Washington Post on the China study – Including the first reference to any part of the report that I worked on, namely figuring out the legal aspects.