Month: August 2002 (Page 2 of 6)

Reason I wish I still had a Mac: Watson.

Bringing together all kinds of “look it up on the web” information – movies, TV, weather, phone numbers, word definitions, flights, etc. – in a non-browser interface is a great idea. (It’s so great that Apple copied it for Sherlock 3.) It’s faster than going to lots of different web sites for the same information, and you use a consistent, fast interface for everything. If anyone knows anything like this on Windows, let me know.

I miss my Mac.

First it was the double release of “Lord of the Rings,” with the two-disk set (which I bought) to be followed by a four-disk set at the end of the year. I wouldn’t mind the two-disk one, except it has no audio commentary whatsoever. They’re saving that for the next one. Greedy bastards. 🙂

Now it’s “Pulp Fiction,” my friend Mike VS‘s favorite movie. I bought the bare-bones DVD some time ago, and now they’ve up and got me buying the ultra mega edition at Best Buy (it was $15.99 or some such, so I didn’t have to take out a second mortgage). It too has no audio commentary (boo!) except when played on a computer DVD player. But what it does have is what they call a “trivia track,” where they use the subtitle text area to tell a stream of trivia about the movie. Very cool. And your eyes aren’t wandering around the screen like they are with the “pop up video” stuff, which this is clearly patterned after.

So these three tomatoes are walking down the street: Papa Tomato, Momma Tomato, and Baby Tomato. But Baby Tomato is lagging behind. So Papa Tomato gets mad, goes over to Baby Tomato and squishes him, and says, “Catch up.”

Looks like I touched off a design debate over at Radio Free Blogistan. Now if I could just get all those sites (especially journal sites) with tiny red text on blue backgrounds, pink text on white, etc. to change to something readable…

I hate doing laundry, but I enjoy doing the dishes. Go figure.

Have you ever stopped reading or cut down on your reading of a weblog because they changed the design? Radio Free Blogistan, one of the first Salon blogs, used to have a spare, plain design. I used to read it quite often – lots of good stuff about the world of weblogs. But now that they’ve switched to one of those busy, choppy, non-scrolling backgrounds, it’s hard for me to look at.

Let’s face it, the web is all about text. People who fight that are waging a losing (and reader-losing) battle. My Web Common Sense newsletter this week is about the very same topic (and if you’d like to subscribe, I’d be honored).

Tamyra, Tamyra, Tamyra

Up until now, I always told myself that there was no reason to watch the Wednesday night voting show of “American Idol.” After all, it’s just 30 minutes of filler and ads and fake suspense. Until this week, until tonight, the vote-off was pretty anticlimactic. But I would always end up watching it anyway.

So in the cosmic joke way my life has been playing out lately, the shocker came on the night I decided that the show wasn’t worth watching.

I was so, so wrong.

I have to admit that I thought Tamyra gave the worst performance of the night last night, a bizarre rendering of Patti LaBelle’s “New Attitude.” So her ouster isn’t totally without merit, at least based only on last night (which it shouldn’t be). But Nikki’s singing has been groan-inducing from the start, and I think she did just OK last night. And don’t even get me started about Mr. Floppy Legs Guarini trying to do something I was told was a Michael Jackson impression. I thought he was having a seizure.

I’ve heard some hackers have been using autodialers to flood the phone lines with votes for Nikki. I believe this is one of the preeminent occupations in Hell. The girl knows she’s not going to win, and she wants to go home, people. Let Nikki go home. In the name of all that is holy.

I had a dream last night that I was on a long plane ride across Russia. On the plane was a real disaster movie cross section of people – athletes, convicts, nuns etc. At one point we had to land unexpectedly because of a problem on the plane. The airline put us up in a hotel overnight and paid for everyone to have massages. Then when the plane took off the next day, we began to have problems again and it looked like we were going to crash. I thought to myself, “I really don’t want to die, because then I’ll never get another massage.”

Mr. Mosey likes to make fun of me for blogging Salon. But this article by a guest on Phil Donahue’s new cable show has a lot of thoughtful things to say about media, the influence of video games on kids, and why cable talk shows are not the best venue for reasoned debate, even if they are hosted by Donahue. Recommended.

Blue Crush

Great brain candy. Mind-blowing surfing photography. Amiable “plucky heroine” tone. Lots of zero-body-fat nearly-naked people. Michelle Rodriguez. What’s not to like?

Got an e-mail today from a new reader in the UK who stumbled on words mean things by using the query “No, I mean INTERESTING things!!” in Google (try it!). He asked, “do these images [on my photo page] bear any relevance to anything in particular or were you just extremely bored?”

In response, I offer the above, seen on my walk around the neighborhood. Clearly there’s a lot of strange and interesting (if irrelevant) stuff out there if you just look for it. There were a bunch of paint cans around the mannequin, and I wanted to take more pictures, but the owners of the house were on the upstairs porch, and I didn’t want to be discovered.