Author Archive
CNN’s Holograms Not Really Holograms
It looks like CNN’s holograms really aren’t holograms at all, but television trickery:
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like the images are actually “projected” onto the floor of the CNN studio so that Wolf can actually talk to the person, you know, in a face to face. So it’s not quite Star Wars just yet. Only after computers merge the video feeds together do you get a coherent hologram + person scenario
Marc Andreessen Meets Barack Obama
We asked him directly, how concerned should we be that you haven’t had meaningful experience as an executive — as a manager and leader of people?
He said, watch how I run my campaign — you’ll see my leadership skills in action.
Some political snippets from around the webosphere
According to Nicole Wallace of the McCain campaign, the American people don’t care whether Sarah Palin can answer specific questions about foreign and domestic policy. According to Wallace — in an appearance I did with her this morning on Joe Scarborough’s show — the American people will learn all they need to know (and all they deserve to know) from Palin’s scripted speeches and choreographed appearances on the campaign trail and in campaign ads.
And also, on Palin’s attack on Obama’s community service:
Remember, Jesus Christ was a community organizer. Pontious Pilate was a governer.
(comment in a blog)
I love good p0wnage.
iPhone GUI design template
teehan+lax has released a marijuana advertisement thinly disguised as a comprehensive iPhone widget template that you can use to design iPhone UIs.
Anything to get you to stay
This morning I was at the airport for a one-day business trip to San Francisco and found myself standing in a Starbucks line. It was a really long line, given the captive audience. Anyway, one of the Starbucks employees was working the line and taking peoples’ orders. When she got past me, the lady behind me (obviously dismayed at the length of the line) asked how long it would be.
“Five minutes max,” she answered. It didn’t look like a five minute line to me. So what did I, as a responsible consumer, do? Pull out my iPhone and start the timer, naturally.
Actually, I’m not really that anal retentive when it comes to buying coffee, but since getting up way too early put me in a mean mood coupled with just having read a Joel Spolsky article article on the subject, I thought I’d have a little fun.
According to Joel, it turns out that the barista taking orders from the line (called an expediter) wasn’t there to speed the process up, which one might naturally assume:
Expediters are not really there to see to it that a customer’s order is filled more quickly […] Rather, expediters exist solely to prevent people in line from giving up and wandering off, maybe to go to the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner.
I can corroborate that. It took 6 minutes and 14 seconds to get my drink.
More on the Antikythera Mechanism
The Antikythera Mechanism is quite possibly the first analog computer ever implemented. The New York Times reports that:
[…] scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.
Why do I care? Because it has such a cool name, that’s why.
Pure gold
Mr. Gates wanted Mr. Buffett’s input on whether to drop options in favor of restricted stock at Microsoft. [Gates] recalls asking: “How will employees respond to getting a lottery ticket that gives them a definite amount instead of one that could amount to nothing or a ridiculous sum?”
Mr. Buffett’s reply, according to Mr. Gates, was: “My wife would rather have a ticket for one fur coat, than a ticket that gave her two or nothing.”
I think I’m going to spend quite a bit of time reading this blog. I figure if you want to know what goes on in the mind of a guy who’s seen the big time, Marc Andreessen’s blog is as good as any.
How Pownce shoots itself in the foot
I want to like Pownce, I really do. It seems like, if used right, Pownce might be a good replacement for the problem-plagued Twitter (which I love dearly). However, there are still several deal-killers.
Any micro-blogging-like service that is invented after Twitter will have a big problem to overcome: many people already have their social networks defined there. For Pownce to be as popular at Twitter, it’s going to have to try much harder to automate the process of moving your friends over. Although Pownce has a feature that lets you import your friends from Twitter, it shoots itself in the foot by making the process brain-dead tedious. Upon contacting Twitter, Pownce presents an interface that looks like this:
You’d think that you’d be able to just click “Add Friend” one after the other to quickly invite people, right?
You’d think.
Instead, your friend’s entry in the list is replaced by this:
After a few seconds of waiting, Pownce dumps you onto your invitee’s Pownce profile page. To invite the next person, you have to click your Back button and click on the next friend to invite. What we have here is a wonderful example of AJAX gone bad. The UI could easily have allowed you to just click a checkbox next to each name and press Invite just once. What’s exacerbating is that while you’re waiting for Pownce to “proces your request”, it allows you to continue clicking on “Add Friend” buttons. However, the moment it finishes processing your first request, it dumps you onto that person’s profile cancelling your subsequent requests.
Here’s another one. Pownce tells me: “hey, you have a friend request, you popular guy you”:
Excited, I click on it, and here’s what I get:
Pownce LOL’ing in the background: “made you click on it, LOSER!”
Thanks, Pownce.
Killing me softly with his words
Humans suffer from bright’n’shiny complex, where we’re titillated by the new. Think of it like this: have you actually done anything with that last domain you bought? No. You had the idea for it on Tuesday morning and you got all fired up, so you bought the domain the moment you got in to work. At lunch you furiously doodled your design in your notebook, fully intending to get home and get started on the HTML/CSS, and then you got home… and watched Lost.
Get… out… of… my… mind!