davextreme: December 2006

Cingular is raising its text messaging fee. If you have a contract with them, it states that you can break your contract without a termination fee if they raise rates, but you have to act within 30 days.

19 December 2006

TSA Travel Tip: Cheesecake is not a Gel

Six Apart Holiday Movie 2006

“Permalink, 0 comments, 0 trackbacks…”

The Areas of My Expertise Audiobook

Hilarious book, free right now on iTunes. (Link opens iTunes.)

18 December 2006

A Short Note About Newsvine

I got into the beta for Newsvine last night. I haven’t played with it too much, but if nothing else it does present a nicer layout than most other wire-service news portals. I’ll leave the full Web 2.0 rant to Zeldman, but I find their use of RSS a little redundant. Sure, I can subscribe to all my news using their feeds, but isn’t Newsvine itself an aggregator? Isn’t it a bit like subscribing to a feed of a feed? Don’t get me wrong, I love my feeds, but I think they have their place. Lately, if it’s a site I’m just going to visit every day anyway, I’ve started unsubscribing to its feed and putting it into my “dailies” folder.

Anyway, I’ll be playing around with Newsvine over the next week or so. If you want an invitation, comment here and I’ll toss you one. If you want to read a preview of it, there’s a good write-up here.

Security

Good piece today in the New York Times about airport security: Theater of the Absurd at the TSA.

The blog of the Indiana University PhD student referenced in the article has some good stuff, too: slight paranoia.

The case against the alleged liquid bombers in London from a few months ago has been thrown out of court, by the way. There’s little chance that this will actually mean we’ll be able to bring full-size tubes of toothpaste onto planes, of course, despite the repeated assertions by chemists that there wasn’t much of a threat there, anyway.

I like the phrase “security theater” quite a lot. I’m not cynical enough to believe that the TSA is actually putting absurd policies out there for the actual purpose of keeping us afraid. I think, really, the problem is that they’ve been given a job that’s impossible but they aren’t permitted to admit it. The best way to make sure nothing’s getting onto airplanes would be to require people to bring absolutely nothing onto the plane, and make people fly naked, but you really don’t want to see most Americans naked.

Celebrity Mii Contest results! (kottke.org)

Theater of the Absurd at the T.S.A.

New York Times piece on airport “security”.

Retailers profit from unused gift cards

“Last winter, Best Buy Co. reported a $43 million gain in fiscal 2006 from cards that hadn’t been used in two or more years.” Wow.

16 December 2006

The CW on iTunes

Apple seems to have recently added two shows from The CW to the iTunes Store. I recommend Veronica Mars, which has its current (third) season for sale.

Christmas Playlist 2006

I’ve been very carefully building a Christmas playlist for the past few years. I only add one song a year, and I only listen to the songs on the list between Thanksgiving and the Epiphany. There are now six songs on the list.

The Pogues: “The Fairy Tale of New York”. Sometimes I listen to the No Use for a Name Cover, but this original is just so damn good.
Jeff Buckley: “Hallelujah”. Not actually a Christmas song, but there’s something cold and lonely about the tune that feels to me like it would play perfectly over a sad story about being alone on Christmas.
Blink-182: “I Won’t Be Home for Christmas”. A slight contrast from the previous track.
Bing Crosby and David Bowie: “Peace On Earth/The Little Drummer Boy”. Whoever had the idea of putting these two together for this duet should get a trophy.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Jordan: “Baby It’s Cold Outside”. There are a few versions of this song out there. This one’s my favorite. I love how the song’s just a desperate attempt by a guy to get a girl to sleep over, and how she’s just trying to be a tease.
Dean Martin: “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Show!”. This year’s addition. I’ve always liked this tune, and I like the swing kick this version has.

Amazon Customers Vote Homepage

Amazon’s taking sign-ups for the Wii and PS3. Instead of first come, first serve, they’re doing a drawing.

15 December 2006

Georgia Officials Back Harry Potter

GA Board of Education refuses to ban Harry Potter from its libraries.

14 December 2006

Rush-Hour Metro Fares May Rise as Much as $2.10

Yikes. The idea here that charging more for crowded stations will get people to move to other stations is absurd. I don’t really have the option of moving my office building to a less crowded area.

13 December 2006

Two Phrases That Destroyed American Culture

“I have a theory about asshole customers: I think they only act that way because no one ever calls them on their bullshit.”

sex.com -- a url worth dying for?

sex.com — a url worth dying for?

Man, this thing just keeps going and going.

GameStop Can't Sell Wiis Either

GameStop Can’t Sell Wiis Either

EBGames and GameStop are also reportedly holding onto Wii units until Sunday.

Rumor: Best Buy Holding Wii Shipments Until Dec.17

State of the Ben

Interview with Brian Michael Bendis about comics and TV.

Flickr's excellent Xmas easter egg

Flickr’s excellent Xmas easter egg

Ho ho ho! Flickr Gifts and Upload Limit Changes

Paid Flickr members now have unlimited uploads, and standard members get 100mB a month.

12 December 2006

Green Lantern creator dead at 91

Martin Nodell created the golden age Green Lantern Alan Scott.

SECOND LIFE: A story too good to check

Clay Shirky, writing for Valleyway, on how Second Life is no different than MUDs, but the tech reporters forgot that they’ve already written the same story before again and again.

Mission in Snowdriftland

Interactive advent calendar from Nintendo.

Chasing the iPhone

MacWorld reporter on how Wall Street analysts haven’t historically really known what they thought they knew.

11 December 2006

My Charlie Brown Christmas

Voiced by the cast of Scrubs.

GROW ver.1

Fun little puzzle game.

08 December 2006

Interruptions

Just read a good piece called The Asymptomatic Twitter Curve. It picks on Twitter specifically, but the premise is that with phone calls, text messages, emails, instance messages, and compulsive RSS reader checking, we’re trapping ourselves into a world where we’re constantly distracted and can’t ever just stop and focus on what we’re doing. In the spring we fired a temp because he couldn’t stop text messaging long enough to get any work done. This isn’t very new ground here (except pointing out Twitter as the newest distraction) — people have been ranting for a long time that the best way to get things done is to stop and focus on one thing at a time.

The other day Kenjisan wrote a about a Culture of Delay. TiVo and Netflix are designed to be implements of delayed gratification, as opposed to instant, on-demand services. RSS is much like this, too. These tools do a great job of letting us not worry about what’s going on right now. I don’t have to worry about missing something, because TiVo will record it for me. I don’t have to check a given website, because Google Reader will check it for me.

The irony here is that since my RSS reader will always be checking sites for me, I know I can check it at any given moment and there will probably be something new for me to read. Instead of being a tool that lets me set my own schedule, it ends up being a greater distraction. Now, as I said, this isn’t a particularly new rant. One thing I do to combat this at work is that I have Thunderbird set to only check for new mail every 30 minutes, instead of interrupting me every time a new message comes in. See 43 Folders for way more productivity tips than you probably need.

Respect the Ratings

GameStop’s new page designed to inform parents as to how to understand video game ratings. (As if “Mature” weren’t clear enough.)

What code DOESN'T do in real life (that it does in the movies)

What code DOESN’T do in real life (that it does in the movies)

“Code does not make blip noises as it appears on the screen.”

Servers in the Movies - Our Top Ten

This seems like an unordered list to me rather than a top ten, but still fun.

The Last Gasp of a Smoke-Filled Room?

DC’s smoking ban starts January 2, but inside the Capital all rules are off.

Creating Passionate Users: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve

Sunset on Mars

Cool photo.

07 December 2006

Senators Hillary Clinton & Lieberman to Participate with ESRB Ad Blitz

Supporting education about the ratings instead of censorship is the way to go.

Fashion Incident

Four people, including the First Lady, showed up at the White House Christmas party in the same dress.

Alexandria to provide free wireless internet

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Is Back: The Complete Joss Whedon Q&A

About the new comic, which continues where the series ended.

06 December 2006

Breaking News?

While I’m on the topic of the news, I’d like to point out the lax editorial standard for what constitutes “breaking news” on CNN’s homepage. Today, a bright red banner reads, President Bush’s policy in Iraq is not working, the Iraq Study Group said in releasing its long-awaited report. Important? Yes. Breaking? No. Over Thanksgiving my dad said a friend of his had been in the gym on the treadmill, when the news flashed a “breaking news” bulletin. A few people gathered around the TV, fearing there had been a major disaster somewhere. Instead, the “news” was about a celebrity’s divorce filings.

Choose the News

One of these two stories is real news. The other’s from The Onion. I’ll give you the headline and the paragraph. You decide which is real.

One: Struggling Blockbuster Eliminates Rental Fees

Blockbuster, the flagging video-store giant that has recently resorted to eliminating late fees and waiving replacement fines for lost or damaged movies, announced Monday that it would also be doing away with its long-standing rental charges in an attempt to stay competitive in the ever-changing home-video business.

Two: Blockbuster gives free rentals to Netflix users

Blockbuster has launched a new promotion to attract Netflix users to its DVDs-by-mail service: give them free in-store movies. Through December 21, Netflix users can bring in the address flaps off their mailers and exchange them for a free rental at any local Blockbuster store.

Answer: one, two.

Cutline Theme for WordPress

I don’t use WordPress, but this theme is very nice.

Weblogs and the News

I’ve been following the story of James Kim and his family over the past week. CNN has a nice little box at the top of their developing stories that gives you the newest bullet points on a story, which made me remember something I had started thinking about when I was waiting to see if Jim Webb would beat George Allen last month: the use of reverse chronological posts, i.e., the weblog format.

When I know nothing about a given topic, which is most of the time regarding breaking news, I want a well-written article that tells me what’s going on. But when I’m following a developing story, I just want to be able to log in and read the latest, since I already know all the backstory that makes up the bulk of the article. News sites could easily include a sidebar in every story with time-stamped information, so that I could tell at a glance if anything new had happened since the last time I checked in on a story. From there, it wouldn’t be hard to offer individual RSS feeds for that category of stories, with links to the full articles for further reading.

Scientists: Water Likely Flows on Mars

Celebrity Mii contest!

Jason Kottke’s running a contest for who can make the best Mii on their Wii.

Culture Shock on Capitol Hill: House to Work 5 Days a Week

“By the time the gavel comes down on the 109th Congress on Friday, members will have worked a total of 103 days. That’s seven days fewer than the infamous “Do-Nothing Congress” of 1948.”