Obligatory upgrade post
April 29th, 2008
Hi neighbor
April 29th, 2008
We spent the weekend on Block Island, and in the local packy I saw that they are again making Narragansett beer, which in my misspent youth was the kind of stuff you drank strictly from sobriety - $2 change for a kinger six, and the resulting piss had more flavor than the beer.
I spoke to the proprietor, and she told me it’s been revived as a retro craft-type beer. Interestingly enough, it’s currently brewed in NY, not RI; but she also mentioned that they’ve sent a few shipments of RI water to NY to brew “limited edition” Gansett.
I bought a bottle and drank it in my hotel room that evening. It’s decent; nothing special, but a good lager, and certainly not the horror it was back then.
Technorati Tags:
beer, narragansett, craft+beer
wuh pee too five
April 5th, 2008
Deeply tindertwingled
April 4th, 2008
Grand Text Auto » Programs Ted Nelson Likes: “When I pressed him to mention any programs - including small-scale ones like games - that influenced him, he said he wasn’t a game guy and just mentioned some other ‘full platforms’ that aren’t computers: Tinderbox, Emacs, and Flash.”
2 out of 3 ain’t bad. Which 2 I mean is left as a really simple exercise for the reader. I wonder if Mark Bernstein’s seen this?
(Via.)
UPDATE: He’s seen it.
Technorati Tags:
mac, emacs, tinderbox, hypertext, ted nelson
At what way?
March 13th, 2008
“I found myself pondering easy choice, supermarket paralysis and internet addiction in the context of the exciting promise and strange underwhelmingness of much hyperfiction. Then, yesterday, interactive game creator and SixToStart ARG writer James Wallis said something that flipped the light on. ‘Writing for interactive is different to print writing,’ he said. “
Apparently so.
(Via if:book.)
Google Maps “Bike There” petition
February 29th, 2008
When I was figuring out my route to work via bike, I used Google Maps. I ended up having to do a lot of blue-line dragging, though, because, even with Avoid Highways turned on, i still wasn’t easy to plot a bike-friendly route. There’s a online petition asking Google to add a “Bike There” button to Google Maps, and if you’re at all for sustainable transportation, I hope you’d take a minute to go sign it. It’s at:
http://googlemapsbikethere.org/
Thanks.
Technorati Tags:
cycling, bicycling, bike+commuting, sustainable+transport, google, google+maps
2-bit world
February 27th, 2008
Speaking of NetNewsWire
February 26th, 2008
Since I’ve been less than complimentary about NetNewsWire in the past, I thought it only fair to say that I’ve returned to using it as my primary newsreader. I decided to take yet another look because of all the stories on Newsgator’s making it free; since I’ve had a paid license since somewhere back around version 1.0, this wasn’t my primary reason for trying it again.
As to my biggest gripe with the software, the absolutely horrible syncing with NewsGator online, I solved that problem by opening a new Newsgator online account and simply importing my Google reader subs into that new account. So far it has worked well. I’m not entirely happy that the only way to get it to work right was to start completely afresh, but it is what it is. Overall, though, I’m glad to be using NetNewsWire again.
Technorati Tags:
apple, mac, rss, netnewswire, nnw, feedreaders, newsgator
Obfuscation
February 25th, 2008
Screen capture of Wired News feed item in NNW:
I’m not quite sure what you’re getting at.
The original A-lister
February 14th, 2008
Kent’s Bike Blog: One Watt Planet Bike Blaze (and some other lights) Reviewed:
“Back in the early days of personal computers, Byte magazine was the magazine for computer nerds. A guy named Jerry Pournelle (yeah the same Jerry Pournelle who writes science fiction novels) wrote this column that was supposed to represent the ‘normal’ user’s view of computers. But his column became popular, people sent him stuff and when he’d have a problem, he could make phone calls that ‘normal’ people couldn’t. I remember one instance where he had a problem with some Microsoft product and Jerry’s solution was something like ’so I called up my buddy Bill Gates and he flew a couple of techs down from Redmond to look at my system…’ OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that extreme, but it was close.”
Pretty damn close. I can remember reading those Pournelle columns with a good deal of outrage. He was sort of the original A-list blogger, now that I think of it. Pournelle, though, did usually attempt to figure out problems with the Frankenputers he used to accrete, rather than the modern blogger waiting all of 5 seconds before throwing the problem onto the mercy of the LazyIntarWeb.
(Via novia.)