[ Posted by kevin
Mon, 08 Jan 2007 21:15:36 GMT ]
Doesn't a monkey sound exotic? Surely it would cost several thousand dollars, not to mention being inhumane to own one anyways.
But you can get these fantastic creatures called 'cats' for free. In fact, every major city has several houses set up to house the ones they can't give away fast enough. Crazy!
I'd pay a lot for such an exotic pet. They're so ... feline. So inhuman. It's really fascinating, how much it teaches us how animal humans are by what we share vs. don't share.
Technorati Tags: cat, social interaction
Posted in Society | 3 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Sun, 07 Jan 2007 23:39:00 GMT ]
When I was in high school and an undergrad in college, I would find a passage in a book that really spoke to me in a special way. Something that I swore was written just for me. I'd read it to someone, and they'd say 'heh', and not be that interested. I dare you:
"This is obscene. How dare we be standing around,t alking about nothing, not running in one huge mass of people, running at something, something huge, knocking it over? Why do we all bother coming out, gathering her in numbers like this, without starting fires, tearing things down? How dare we not lock the doors and replace the white bulbs with red and commence with the massive orgy, the joyous mingling of a thousand arms, legs, breasts" - page 134
I love the poetic-ness, the feeling that there must be something bigger, some grander purpose to socialization. That feeling you get when the conversation is just a bit too dull, and you're like "why am I here?" When you're looking at the girls and wishing you had the nerve to say something, the wit to think of something clever that would make them love you, that would make the whole room recognize your genius. OK, well maybe a bit less ego-centric than that, but one giant shared-love experience, that we're all ok. We all crave that attention, that acceptance, isn't that what an orgy represents anyways? One giant community fulfillment?
In case you couldn't tell, I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a community, and why we bother finding or joining one. I'm not sure that I ever really have - certainly friends, and groups of friends, but never neighbors in a very real way, or any other physical or ideological grouping. I yearn for that grander purpose to start fires and tear things down - I had a taste of it in the WTO protests in Seattle 1999.
Yes, it's been awhile. Welcome back, Kevin.
Technorati Tags: religion, purpose, sex, social interaction
Posted in Society, Ambitions | no comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:40:49 GMT ]
Ebay has always pissed me off, even though I use them quite a lot lately. They basically have no competition, and are the catch-all advertising for selling anything on the internet. It’s a stupid system that needs to change, but how do you redirect all those searchers that have “ebay” imprinted on their forehead as the only place to shop online besides amazon?
They also just charge too damn much. 6% on large listings, plus $6 for each item you post (whether or not it sells).
From http://pages.ebay.com/sell/announcement200607/overview/index.html
And, when you compare our operations costs for an average Store Inventory listing and an average core listing – factoring in the duration of each – our cost to host a Store Inventory listing is more than 50% higher than for a core listing. In fact, current Store Inventory insertion fees don’t cover eBay’s costs for hosting them.
Bullox! It’s run by a bloody computer, buy a few more servers and show us the revolution of computers. You should be able to host kazillions of auctions with no noticeable speed decrease. Google shows us how easy it is to scale… This is such a “I don’t understand how computers work and I’m a marketing person” response…
Technorati Tags: ebay
Posted in Society, Ambitions | 2 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:03:15 GMT ]
The street isn’t even dirty! These bastards come through once every two weeks on prime-numbered days and expect us to remember.
They could at least just honk and let me know to move my car instead of giving me a ticket each time.
Who the hell builds houses without driveways anyways? Didn’t they see this coming? :)
Seriously though, I worry that “services” like these that end up being a big fundraiser for the city at the expense of it’s citizens are a broken idea.
Technorati Tags: street sweeping, society
Posted in Society | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 22 Jun 2006 13:43:00 GMT ]
Think of this way… what if “American Idol” had been produced solely by the capabilities of the contestants themselves, without the expertise and talent of the show’s producers, directors, writers, etc. As talented and entertaining as the contestants are, the resulting production quality, the level of emotional engagement, viewership/ratings and monetization potential of the full package would likely be far inferior to what we all see on the air today. Well, social networks should be seen in a similar way… people want to express themselves and the platforms that allow them to do so with the most creativity and production value, are the ones that people will flock to.”
from over here at http://gigaom.com/2006/05/29/social-networks-are-the-new-media/
I’d love to see an “interesting” makeover (God, I just know they must already have a TV show about this somewhere, I just don’t have a TV so I’m out of the loop).
I think you can teach people a lot about being interesting.
1) Conversation – How to pay attention to whether people are still listening. How to make things a bit more grandiose without going over the top. Friendly flirting.
2) Your routine & breaking out of it!
3) The importance of inspiration, and inspiration’s dependency on creativity.
4) Spunk exercises – how to get excited about life. You’ve got the energy somewhere inside of you!
Sign up for our exclusive class and discover the ‘you’, you’ve always wanted to know. Brainwashing and after-therapy not included. And yes, I’m serious I think people could use more excitingness, but no there’s no class – sorry! :)
Technorati Tags: design, society
Posted in Society | 2 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 19 Apr 2006 18:03:35 GMT ]
I hate dealing with multiple screen resolutions. Can’t our socialistic welfare government just give everyone a 30” monitor and designers everywhere can rejoice?
I really miss tables. They were evil to use in design, but they worked so well! if you gave each cell a width, but not the overall table, the cells would collapse smaller if the screen was too small.
I’d use this in my current project, except that each cell needs a #pixels width, which then means that the spaces between cells vary, as it’s the cells themselves that are the same width. Which, for a navigation bar, look strange.
I’m continually amazed and inspired by the changes web2.0 has brought us, in terms of scriptaculus, delicious, ruby on rails, open design, and so many other things. We’re able to get so close to the programming power of a local program, but with the decentralize and social aspect of the web at our fingertips.
But just because we’ve been able to layer javascript and html so well, I still think we need a better underlying layout and programming platform. How long can javascript/CSS/HTML last? We outgrow everything, it’s just a question of how long…
Technorati Tags: css, delicious, design, javascript, rails, ruby on rails, web design
Posted in Society, Coding, Ambitions | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 18 Apr 2006 00:42:38 GMT ]
OK, so Tara bring home a miniDV recorder that has firewire so she needs me to get it off her.
I plug it in. Nothing happens – damn!
I spend 20 minutes googling – nothing! Finally come across a forum saying maybe you need to use something like iMovie. I remember imovie being one of those huge space-wasting programs included with my computer, so I tab over and run it.
Yay! I turn on the camera. It says ‘import’, i click it… and it records the blank 10 seconds on the end of the tape. Aren’t these things supposed to be idiot proof? And I’m not even an idiot. I fudge with the DV camera’s controls to rewind the tape. Import again, finally a clip!
So now, how do I save this sucker? Sure, it will be File > Save, right? Nope, that’s as a wierd iMovie project, I want to export it as a quicktime/whatever movie. File->Export? Nope, no such thing. File > Share? Maybe. Email? Not really, i want control..
Finally, I find it under File > Share > Quicktime.
A simple user process diagram would have shown that this is so far from what people expect they’re going to be cursing the day they got started with this program. How do you spend so much time making an otherwise good product, but have such crazy UI issues? Someone hasn’t been doing enough usability testing…
As fun as it is to rant on Apple, usually their design is pretty good. The truth is, everyone does this. MS windows is even easier to yell about. Why is the damn start menu called the start menu? Why is there a start menu tree that isn’t related to the file structure? 99% of windows users have no idea what to do when something gets removed from their start menu.
Program grouping of items on the start menu – you’re working, suddenly something flashes and all of your windows are gone! So you open a new version of the program, and it’s not there either! Say you actually realize to click the sub-menu to get to your window – you’re in classic “this-takes-me-twice-as-long” mode. Sub-menus suck! And don’t even get me started about how many damned ‘advanced’ panels and sub-panels there are. Phew.
Often I think I can put myself in the user’s shoes and know what they’ll want. Clearly someone has thought this before and been terribly, terribly wrong. Does that mean I’ll start doing the actual user testing I claim is so important? I hope so, it’s so just so much work, and such a conceptually distant activity from actual programming. I mean, you have to, like, talk to people and stuff!
Technorati Tags: apple, design, windows
Posted in Society, Coding | 6 comments | 3748 trackbacks
[ Posted by kevin
Tue, 10 Jan 2006 15:03:05 GMT ]
Kinsey’s fascinating research deserved to be rediscovered by this movie, and I probably wouldn’t have looked into it for some time. Not much of a plot, but a very interesting story/ historical fiction documentary.
After watching it, I found myself thinking how unfair it is that we spay and neuter our cats, and they never are able to experience the joys of copulation. Wouldn’t it be great if one day a year all cat owners gave their cats hormones and we went to a big gym to watch them enjoy themselves? I bet it’d be possible, and it would be a fascinating way to meet other people if you were single (I see our cats are having sex, want to go out to dinner after?).
Technorati Tags: cat, kinsey, sex
Posted in Society | 1 comment
[ Posted by kevin
Thu, 08 Dec 2005 17:20:22 GMT ]
Is a fascinating thing. What does it even mean? Where can we say anything we want? To a police officer? Nope. To a judge? Nope. To a gangster? Nope.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting
the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech”
First, it’s kinda funny that “establishment of religion” made it in there, considering how many references to God abound in our official papers.
Second, is holding someone in contempt of court abridging the freedom of speech? Or is it more of a “you can say what you want, but we might kick you out if you do?”
I’m fascinated by this, because the more I run an online poetry site, the more I realize it’s like a little country, with laws and debates and protests. Obviously the US gov’t did a wise and brilliant thing when they established the freedom of speech. Should I copy them? How does law even interpret it?
I think I’ll have to award this amendment the “Least Understood Amendment” award. And the redundancy award, oh wait, that goes to me. Comments welcome!
Technorati Tags: freedom of speech
Posted in Society | 4 comments
[ Posted by kevin
Wed, 07 Dec 2005 16:35:11 GMT ]
Okay, so this is really weird. People at allpoetry are getting some strange messages –
Starhiker: 4 hours ago : casino buscan, historied Jack sag down beside the spruce, gestured at him wildly, wide-spread by her unlawfulness. casino condemned the gorses to death, but when they went to carry out the cherefullness the executioners learned that he flourish’d long-striding ; swords, casino, bitterish, even lightning, could chesterton no bulliciosa on his skin.
Ms Audrey: Nov 25, 4:36 : casino Said he, I know you will not tell a nasr-ed-din shelfful for the surplice : but for equivocation! could not compromise what Excusez could find in that non-society scribbling-paper, to endure her. tufts’s passe for a great share of our slade in life ; A play or a cosette is often widely-distributed of much of its casino if you sxi the casino beforehand.
words-are-the-way: Nov 22, 6:30 : casino She idolises uttered her rose-tinted against euclase with a shriek ever since the monster was begotten ; and till it evanish coolish the circonvoisins of the casino, she will traverse the rocking-stool on its track, dealing her glass-fragments upon its scraggin, and dashing against it her condemning zascandil.
All of these ims were to a user named ‘casino’. I’ve checked over the code, and it’s possible but very unlikely that there’s a bug that allows people to send messages as other people. More likely it’s some spyware they got on their horribly insecure windows machines, that automatically fills in and posts text areas. The internet is so wierd! It’s like wearing a robotic suit, and claiming that you didn’t graffiti the sidewalk, the suit made you do it…
These look a lot like bad markov chains, something I studied as a part of AI a longwhile back. The misspellings are strange, I don’t know why or how they would be introduced, and why not any web links? The code strips them out, so they were probably there initially…
PROOF!
I googled for “casino “for the surplice” (a phrase from the 2nd message)”, and came across someone’s guestbook (well the google archive of it anyways, since deleted):
casino Said he, I know you will not tell a nasr-ed-din shelfful for the surplice : but for equivocation! could not compromise what Excusez could find in that non-society scribbling-paper, to endure her. tufts’s passe for a great share of our slade in life ; A play or a cosette is often widely-distributed of much of its casino if you sxi the casino beforehand.
And here’s another one, still up for your viewing pleasure, and with links to some stupid casino website: http://preachers-kid.com/tp4a/pledges.php
This takes spam to a new level
Technorati Tags: casino, puppy
Posted in Society, Coding | 4 comments
