February 8, 2010
February 7, 2010

dmoren: Man. I thought only two of The Who were dead.

February 4, 2010
[A]t some point it became clear that the consensus of official Washington, including many Democrats, the scribblers at Kaplan Test Prep Daily, the Great Minds at Very Serious Think Tanks, and guests at Sally Quinn’s table dancing parties, is that torture is awesome, the rule of law only applies to Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s penis, and all people who don’t have important DC jobs, and all it takes to nullify the constitution is to call someone a terraist. I don’t know how to change this, and electing the Hopey Changey guy didn’t help much. I think they’re playing Calvinbill a bit more fairly, but they’re still playing it.
January 30, 2010

textism: Rampart: Based on the Novel Octopus by Flannel

January 28, 2010
Now I think I’m starting to see how [Harvard] lost all that money. They have no idea where it came from or went to. They lose $10 billion through bad real estate investment and over-exposure in the stock market and they’re looking for it in the coffee carafes. … Harvard is like an old woman who leaves her purse in a restaurant and, when she notices, starts poking the first teenager she sees with her umbrella, convinced he stole it.

Say it out loud: iPad

lonelysandwich:

But I’m afraid I’ll only ever love the device despite its embarrassing name. And that makes me love it a little less. Apple, you fucked up.

Adam Lisagor is right: iPad is a stupid name, stupid in such an obvious way that I saw three different people on Facebook make the “if Apple makes a larger iPad, they can name it MaxiPad” joke yesterday.

But the thing you have to remember is that Apple’s product names are stupid more often than they’re great. Sure, “PowerBook” was a great name, but the first one came out almost twenty years ago. “Mac Pro” is a solid name, as is “Mac Mini”, and “Time Capsule” is a great name. “Apple TV” is serviceable, if unimaginative. But just look at the list of the other major products Apple’s introduced in the last decade:

  • “iPod” was silly-sounding when it was introduced, but the iPod brand benefited from a soft launch (Mac-only for the first year or so back when the Mac had a much, much smaller presence); people were used to the name by the time the product went mainstream. And the derivative names, like “iPod Shuffle”, “iPod Photo”, “iPod Mini”, “iPod Touch”, etc. have always been boring (with the lone exception of the iPod Nano).
  • “iWork” and “iLife” are overly-cutesy, though it’s interesting that the individual applications that make up the iWork and iLife suites actually have pretty solid names: “Pages”, “Numbers”, “Keynote”, and “GarageBand” are all great names, and “iPhoto” and “iMovie” are decent. “iWeb” and “iDVD” are duds, but, honestly, who uses those applications anyway?
  • “MacBook” sounded really stupid in 2006, and “MacBook Air” sounded doubly-stupid. It’s only because we’ve all heard the word “MacBook” approximately 8 million times since that it now seems reasonable.
  • “iPhone” isn’t exactly stupid, but it was certainly disappointingly unimaginative back in 2007—after all, that’s what everybody was calling Apple’s phone before they even knew it existed. Now, of course, it seems like the most natural name in the world.
  • “.Mac” and “MobileMe”. Enough said.

Looking through this list, it’s clear that Apple usually picks the most obvious product name it can think of, regardless of whether it sounds stupid or not: “Apple TV”, “iWork”, “MacBook”, “iPhone”. And so much the better if that name consists of an “i” prefix followed by a one-syllable word. With that in mind, “iPad” fits right in with the rest of Apple’s product line, and I predict that a year from now we’ll all have forgotten that it once sounded funny.

January 27, 2010

gelatobaby: Tomorrow is going to be awesome. Obama is going to tell us that we have no money and Steve Jobs is going to tell us how to spend it.

January 25, 2010
To tell someone that you don’t play games is to pretend that they are stupid and to make yourself ridiculous.
January 21, 2010
January 20, 2010
mrgan:

Buy apps from this giant list of excellent indie Mac software and the proceeds go to the Haiti relief effort (via reputable organizations such as Doctors Without Borders). Win-win-win.

I just bought Instapaper Pro and Tweetie for Mac (which isn’t mentioned on the Indie+Relief page, but is part of it nonetheless). In addition to those (the free versions of which I’ve used for a while), I own and can definitely recommend Delicious Library, Pukka, and Tweetie for iPhone (I also own Fetch but don’t recommend it unless you need Kerberos support).

mrgan:

Buy apps from this giant list of excellent indie Mac software and the proceeds go to the Haiti relief effort (via reputable organizations such as Doctors Without Borders). Win-win-win.

I just bought Instapaper Pro and Tweetie for Mac (which isn’t mentioned on the Indie+Relief page, but is part of it nonetheless). In addition to those (the free versions of which I’ve used for a while), I own and can definitely recommend Delicious Library, Pukka, and Tweetie for iPhone (I also own Fetch but don’t recommend it unless you need Kerberos support).

hotdogsladies: Liberal outrage seems to really heat up about 36 hours after it might have been useful.