hello, typepad

Poor Lady L

Poor Lady L
Originally uploaded by david.

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http://apperceptive.com

omg giant soup dumpling

omg giant soup dumpling
Originally uploaded by yi.

If the reports are indeed correct, which will become painfully clear later today when the Mitchell report becomes public, baseball has its white Barry Bonds.

Hi-Ya.

Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting....

Some folks think Postmodernism means little more than the Empowerment of the Vulgar. Some folks think the same about Perl.

But I take Postmodernism to mean that a Text, whether spoken or written, is an act of communication requiring intelligence on both ends, and sometimes in the middle too. I don't want to talk to a stupid computer language. I want my computer language to understand the strings I type.

Lifehacker:

When we say 'stalk,' we're exaggerating, not recommending.

I love that Gina still has a sense of humor on Lifehacker. A lesser editrix would have broken down and become serious and plodding, sticking us with keyboard shortcut upon keyboard shortcut.

I would rather eat my own shoes than Two Boots pizza.

evhead on the Kindle:

Look, blogs aren't free anyway. You paid for your computer, and you're paying for your Internet access (or someone is). You paid for your iPhone, and you pay for your iPhone's Internet connection. You get blogs with the package.

If Amazon charged a monthly connection fee for the Kindle and made blogs free, instead, no one would complain (about the blog part). Because that's the pricing model they're used to.

This One Doesn't Go to Eleven

Guitar Hero is a solid gold hit; a sell-out across all major gaming platforms with a booming ebay/craigslist trade emerging for guitars sans game. I enjoyed a perfect song recently, and I was rewarded with 5 embossed gold stars. But this got me thinking... I hate gold stars! Unfortunately I kept thinking.

I love Sonic Youth and The Stone Roses, but much of the game "play" feels like a chore. Shouldn't I be able to make my own playlist, instead of slogging through a music selection geared for alternateens? It's an mp3 and a guitar tab, it should be trivial to roll your own. With the Wii selling nearly two million units a month, and many of those sales ending up in the hands of older gamers (all the way up to retirement homes), there needs to some diversity in the musical selection and avatars.

The game also punishes you for improvisation - it's DDR in a guitar neck. This is the third iteration in the Guitar Hero series, and Mario and Katamari have shown us how satisfying games can be when you remove walls - shouldn't a game whose heart is live performance do the same? Instead we're mindlessly mashing buttons. We may as well be cup stacking. There's also a second level of performance in video games when playing games in a social setting. For spectators, there's absolutely no visual interest in following the action, unless you need a headache.

Guitar Hero is exhilarating and addictive because listening to music is fantastic. Considering this, it's remarkable that the music industry has still managed to paint themselves into a corner they probably won't get out of. There's a tremendous opportunity for music technology that breaks in instead of breaking down the more you experience it.