24 February 2009
23 February 2009
Some Post-Oscar Thoughts on Forecasting
Some Post-Oscar Thoughts on Forecasting
On how his model may have missed two of the awards.
19 February 2009
I scream, you scream, we all scream. Especially Alan Moore.
I scream, you scream, we all scream. Especially Alan Moore.
I for one love all the merchandising they’ve done for Watchmen. The further from the point it gets, the funnier it is. Hey kids, a Comedian action figure! Find a friend who owns a Sally Jupiter doll and play rape!
18 February 2009
Pepsi Throwback, Mountain Dew Throwback » Sugar-sweetened Pepsi-Cola and Mtn Dew without High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) » BevReview.com
Pepsi Throwback, Mountain Dew Throwback
Pepsi is going to start selling cola with sugar instead of corn syrup again. The name makes this sound like an early April Fools joke, though.
Lincoln's penny gets a new look -- actually four new looks
Lincoln’s penny gets a new look — actually four new looks
It takes 1.4 cents to make a penny.
17 February 2009
New Avengers 49
If you were looking for justification for both why decompressed storytelling in comics has worn out its welcome and why Marvel’s just ripping you off at this point by increasing their cover price, look no further than New Avengers 49. That’s Brian Michael Bendis trying to recreate a cinematic zoom, and in the process spending three pages to show three panels’ worth of action. It could have been a panel where Jarvis is shot, a panel where Luke looks through the hole the bullet came from, and panel where Bullseye is shown as the shooter. Instead, you get a panel of Luke looking out eh window, the same shot from another angle, seven panels showing the same thing, then a full page showing Bullseye. I used to love Bendis’s stories and ritually bought everything he wrote. Now I’m glad I’ve stopped. I’ll just wait for Powers trades1.
- Okay, I still love Ultimate Spider-Man.
13 February 2009
GeniusboyFiremelon: superman 2000
GeniusboyFiremelon: superman 2000
Discussion of the Superman 2000 proposal and how much of it eventually saw the light of day in other forms.
superman.nu: SUPERMAN 2000
The unmade proposal by Grant Morrison, Mark Millar, Maid Waid, and Tom Peyer.
12 February 2009
Google iPhone Sync
I’ve played around with Google’s new sync services for a few days now, and mostly it works well. Since I use Google Apps instead of regular Gmail I had to go into my administrator panel and turn it on first, then reload the mobile page a few times to get it to work. I’ve found three problems so far, two of which I’ve solved.
- Junk contacts from Gmail. When I synced I had a lot of people in my list I didn’t want. I did some pruning and this is fine now, but even when you tell it not so Gmail likes to add contacts on its own, so we’ll see how that plays out long term.
- When you enable over-the-air syncing on your phone, iTunes no longer syncs back to your computer’s iCal and Address Book. For iCal, you can use their CalDav support to get iCal to sync up on its own. My calendar needs are pretty simple so this works fine for me, but BusySync is I’m told a good utility for improving this.
- What I can’t figure out how to do is keep Address Book on my Mac updated. iTunes doesn’t pull that data down from the phone anymore, so I’ll be left having to remember when I type a new address or phone number in my phone to also do it on my computer.
So basically I’m left with less than what I had before. I can use iCal and Google Calendar, but I could do that before with CalDAV. Now my Google Contacts stay up-to-date, but Gmail already knows people’s email addresses, and for anything else my phone is where I need them.
11 February 2009
10 February 2009
Bunny
The Web certainly doesn’t need another post about how good The Wire is, but here’s a small moment I keep thinking about. Early in season three (Netflix is sending season four today), we meet Major Colvin. He’s chewing out two new police officers for not being able to properly identify their precise location. To do their jobs, they need to be able to radio exactly where they are to other officers. They get out of the meeting and the other officers make fun of them, revealing that every new recruit gets the same speech.
Flash forward half a dozen episodes. Colvin comes into the major crimes unit HQ, sees McNulty, and asks, “Where you at?” McNulty immediately rattles off the address of the building he’s currently standing in, what floor he’s on, and what corner (southwest, etc). Without telling us explicitly, the writers are showing us that McNulty was once an officer in Colvin’s district, was under his command, and learned this skill from him (and many others, one immediately concludes). We see how he’s been an effective leader who gives the cops he’s worked with skills they take into the rest of their careers. All in one short sentence.
(Full disclosure: Katherine got this before I did.)
PADD
(I’ve deleted and started this post over five times now. For some reason I can’t put words together about this topic I’m happy with.)
The Kindle 2 doesn’t appeal to much more than the Kindle did. Though I can see some uses for e-readers, and there are good arguments for their advantages, especially in saving printing and distributions costs for publishers, I really like reading novels.
What I’d like is not a book reader but a magazine reader. I actually feel guilty reading newspapers and magazines because I’ll often only read a few articles. I look at all that paper that was printed for my to read just a small percentage of the words. Sure, most of the articles are online, but the Web isn’t a great place to read newspapers or magazines. You get a column of text with maybe some embedded photos. None of the nice layout you get on the real deal. You often don’t get the sidebars or inset graphs, or if you do, they’re squeezed into what the Web can do.
I’d like to see a device with some size to it, maybe 7″×10″ or so with a color screen that can display a full page of magazine text. Give it pinch-to-zoom like the iPhone has for smaller text, and a sensor to let it flip to landscape for double-page spreads. Then you just need a subscription service (I think the Kindle already has this) where you can pull down each new edition of a publication when it comes out. Ditto for comic books. Lots of time is being spent trying to replicate comics on the Web, but reading tiny lettered text on a computer monitor feels unnatural. On a handheld device I think it’d work very nicely.
In other words, someone please invent this.
The Legion of Super-Girlfriends
The Legion of Super-Girlfriends
I’d like to say we write better female characters now.
Detective Comics #215
Scans of the (now famous) “Batmen of Many Nations” (nee International Club of Heroes) issue. I love Knight and Squire’s horse motorcycles.
09 February 2009
Google turns on Exchange for iPhone and Windows Mobile users - Ars Technica
Google turns on Exchange for iPhone and Windows Mobile users - Ars Technica
Seems like it only syncs calendars and contacts now, not push mail. I haven’t tested it out yet.
02 February 2009
Groudhog Day
I guess really it could have been any day. Groundhog Day doesn’t have to be about February 2, does it? Yet it works so well, and embiggens an otherwise strange, strange holiday. So, appropos of both the day and the film, we reconsider just how long Phil Conners was stuck repeating the same 2/2 over and over again.
- A short article with some words from the filmmakers on the matter.
- A look at some of the events in the movie and how long they seem to point to him being there.
I would point out that learning to play the piano requires muscle memory, which wouldn’t carry over from day-to-day for Phil. I don’t think you could play the piano with just the know-how and no muscle memory, but it’s a small gripe.