May 2008
24 posts
Cubthumping
The/My Chicago Cubs have made a business of coming back from behind to win at the last minute. They were down 9-1 yesterday and came back to win 10-9, and pulled off a 9th-inning comeback a few days ago.
This makes me wonder if, come playoff time, it’s going to be a good or bad thing that they are adept at coming back. Because to come back, one must be losing, in some cases pretty badly.
...
The lost years
I just came across the term “broadcast era” for the first time. There’s no entry for it on Wikipedia, but a Google search turns up some helpful snippets. I guess the broadcast era was “before the 1960s.” So, what have the last 50 years been called? Or have they been split up into smaller “eras”?
I suppose the Information Age is an era. So let’s...
“Sitting at somebody else’s computer and using their browser is going to become a...”
– Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation. The article superficially dicusses the importance of the web browser and gives a brief history and feature summary of the Top 4 (IE, Firefox, Safari, and Flock).
Stop
The stop button is now outdated, especially on the computer. In fact, why was it ever used, and why is it still used on many CD players?
The iPod, the Windows Media mini-player, and my Toshiba Gigabeat all have eliminated the ‘stop’ function.
(Image credit: thomwatson / licensed under a CC license.)
“The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and...”
– Emily Gould, from her long article in The New York Times Magazine about blogging. It’s a sad story about attention, identity, privacy, willpower, and heartbreak. (And yes, this blog post is so meta, I know.)
Saturday Night Live at Its Low Point - 2 years ago →
This article, from the Villiage Voice, examines the state of SNL at the beginning of its 32nd season.
Now in its 33rd season, SNL seems to be hitting its stride once again. The cast members who were new 3 years ago have worked beautifully with each other, and things aren’t looking so bad for SNL anymore, in my opinion.
The Music, Man
An Old Spice commercial once wisely commented, “Scent is the strongest sense tied to memory. How will you be remembered?” And for me, that’s very true. The smell of a damp Spring day at Duke reminded me immediately of going to summer camp in North Carolina almost 10 years ago. The smell of freshly baked cookies will transport anyone to their childhood kitchen. But, my sense of hearing is a...
I have almost a gigabyte of Barenaked Ladies on my...
The music files for my favorite musical artist (Barenaked Ladies) account for 841MB of filespace on my computer. Twelve of the 13 CDs have been purchased in a kosher manner.
What musical artist takes up the most space on your computer? And how much of that music has been purchased online or in stores?
ThingsYoungerThanMcCain.com →
Minimum wage, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the area code are among many other shockingly-younger-than-McCain things.
Being There
“Being there” is considered an integral part of life. Here are some examples I thought of:
To properly understand a joke, “you had to be there,” where the joke was told.
To properly support your favorite team, you have to be there, at the game.
To properly enjoy a band’s music, you must be there, at the concert.
To properly contribute to discussion, you have to...
“Because I do not believe government should control the doctor/patient...”
– Ron Paul, from his LinkedIn profile. It’s a pretty good representation of the “talk the talk and walk the walk” principle.
King GMail, or: how to make a game-changing bad...
I got a beta invite to Zenbe today. It’s a service that promises to “enlighten your email.” I was very excited about it, mostly because of a recent TechCrunch post that raved about it.
TechCrunch says that I should “spend a few minutes clicking around Zenbe and you’ll find that it really does deserve the ‘zen’ moniker.” Well, I didn’t even spend a...
“In one of Chicago’s poorest communities, McCarter has provided the knowledge,...”
– from a blog post by Will Okun, a Chicago Public Schools teacher. The post is about how attendence “trumps intelligence, work ethic and economic background as the most important indicator of achievement versus failure.”
His argument is that students only need to look forward to one...
Do you remember your password's birth?
I remember where I was when I came up with the password I now use for two-thirds of my accounts. Do you?
(I was in my middle school’s computer lab #2.)
My Favorite Tweets →
Besides the fact that all sorts of normal people (i.e. non techie geeks like me) are joining it, there’s something else that’s cool about Twitter. At first I didn’t like it, but I now really enjoy the option to mark a tweet as a “favorite.”
Check out mine - I mark, on average, about 2-3 per week. You should, too. It’s a way for your followers to get to know...
