Declining a Windows 7 House Party Invitation
eBay user pkx tried (and -- shockingly! -- failed) to throw an install party. Having no further need of the Microsoft-provided house party kit, pkx put it up for sale on eBay. Luckily for us, pkx has witty friends and was kind enough to share the reasons given by his friends for declining the invitation to his, ahem, "party."
Unfortunately nobody showed up, so I'm selling this party pack. I've decided to post all of the evite responses:
Pete: I've got to work the drive-thru that night.
Reid: I'd love to come but I heard there is going to be Windows there.
Colin: Feeling too antisocial to come to a computer party 
AJ: FidoNet relay forgot to pay their modem line's phone bill, evite got delayed
Chris: Found out Windows 7 not available on 5.25" floppy.
Kevin: I'll be over as soon as I shut down my laptop. XP still has 72 updates to go.
Bryan: I was going to come to your party, but then I got high. I still have XP and I know why, yeah yeah, because I got high, because I got high, because I got high.
Andy: Didn't realize you needed to own a computer to use Windows 7.
Mike: I was going to come to your launch party but then a girl called.
Ira: Sorry, my guild has a raid.
Adam: Thunderbird on Ubuntu sent your evite into the spam folder because it said, "windows 7 party."
Amanda: I was going to come to your launch party but then a girl called.
Charles: Bing gave me the wrong directions.
Rich: MS-BOB not compatible with Windows 7. Not interested.
Mark: Needs more than 640k ram, which is more than I was told I would ever need.
Amanda rolling BIG for the win. Your favorite?
PhotoSketch Finds An Image For You
Wow. With PhotoSketch, you just draw a sketch, label each item, and then the system goes out, finds photos that match the sketched items and their labels, and automatically pastes it all together into one composite image.
Happy Star Wars Day!
"Always in motion is the future." -- Yoda
From my friend Brett:
May 4 is called Star Wars Day because of a pun or play on words based on the similarity between "May the 4th be with you" and "May the force be with you", a phrase often spoken in the Star Wars movies. In common usage the joke might be presented:
1: Happy Star Wars Day!
2: What?
3: May the fourth be with you!
Seeing as how this is a holiday and all, below are a few of my favorite bits of recent, Star Wars related humor...
Blogging and Email Join Forces
Neat new feature from WordPress allowing comment reply via email.
[I]nstead of clicking back to your dashboard, you can reply to the comment straight from e-mail. When you click reply, a special WordPress e-mail address will appear in the Sender line, matching your reply to the proper comment thread. Send it off, and your reply is up on your blog in seconds.
Best Of Internet April Fools 2009
Keep warm using intestines and The Force.
As has become tradition, Internet-based companies and web celebrities (webbrities?) answered Halloween's treat with April Fools tricks. Some favorites from 2009...
7×7 Knows Nothing Of SF Cafes
Last week 7x7 magazine published their list of their favorite coffee shops to "sit down, plug in and plug away. Here are seven of [their] favorite spots for free browsing and good coffee."
Their list:
- Coffee Bar
- Caffe Trieste
- Café Que Tal
- Tazza D'Amore
- Java Beach Café
- Sugar Café
- Café Muran
Now, I'm not normally one to nitpick, but this list is terrible. San Francisco is one of the best cities in the country for café hopping, but if you only read 7x7, you'd never know it.
Tracking Obama
An action shot of the left hand that controls the Executive branch.*
Some friends and I have been interested in following and documenting Obama's actions now that he's President. We're curious to know whether he's living up to his campaign promises, and we thought it'd be useful to keep them in one easy-to-find place.
We started noting what we'd read in the news and sending it back and forth in an email thread, but really -- what is this, 1999? So I started a blog, and invited the friends as moderators. Unfortunately, we found that once our days picked up for a few hours, we quickly fell behind and started missing events. Not a very useful tool if it's ad hoc and incomplete.
Obama's first signature as president -- Jan. 20, 2009.
Brains beat brawn every time on the Internet, so off to Google my friend Chris went. For posterity, some useful resources are listed below.**
- Politifact is useful for tracking campaign promises and is being kept up to date.
- FactCheck.org is great for all recent claims made by politicians or floating around the rumor mill.
- FiveThirtyEight.com is Nate Silver's political stats and analysis site -- the best in the business.
- Whitehouse.gov tracks the various executive orders, which is kinda cool, too. So far...
EXECUTIVE ORDERS
January 22, 2009
- Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities
- Review of Detention Policy Options
- Ensuring Lawful Interrogations
January 21, 2009
- Presidential Records
- Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel
PRESIDENTIAL MEMORANDA
January 22, 2009
- Review of the Detention of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri
January 21, 2009
- Freedom of Information Act
- Pay Freeze
- Transparency and Open Government
Still, Chris couldn't find a blog or other site that's just tracking what Obama does, what actions he approves or denies each day. Another oddity -- Kottke (citing others) also notes that once the new White House site goes up, the prior president's site disappears -- *poof* -- and is moved over to that president's library site.
All problems seem strange, given the ubiquity of this type of information. If anyone finds resources or tools that are particularly useful, please post in the comments.
* The President's watch is a Jorg Gray JGC6500 Chronograph Watch. Or you could go here and pay double...
** Many thanks to those willing and able to dedicate themselves to this work. Also key is Obama's dedication to transparency and the open, free exchange of information. So refreshing.
[First image via The Big Picture. Second image via Reuters, ffffound.]
The Better Way To Add Naughty Words To Your iPhone
The iPhone, a draconian censor.
A while ago, iPhone users figured out a couple of little hacks to add words that would get you fined by the FCC to the iPhone's auto-correct dictionary.
Unhappy that she had to put in so much work to get their iPhone to speak like a Senator, Erica Sadun at ars technica did a little poking around and has discovered a much better training method for the little phucker.
Lifehacker summarizes thusly:
The iPhone's custom auto-correct dictionary (located at /private/var/mobile/Library/Keyboard/dynamic-text.dat) doesn't update itself when you're using, say, Notes. Using Mobile Safari's Google search box, however, seems to instantly refresh the file.
Erica explains...
Well, clearly, not every iPhone application can "learn" words. Notes seems to be brain-dead in that regard. At the same time, using Safari's Google text entry field worked every time, expanding the database and adding new items to my keyboard dictionary.
This isn't the way you'd expect the iPhone to work. You'd imagine that the keyboard learning algorithm would apply to all text no matter where you enter it, but apparently not. Hopefully this little trick will help you out when you want to add words that you don't want autocorrected.
I'm so relieved. Britney Spears can be more direct when texting ideas for future song titles, and Kevin Garnett can finally use the iPhone as he's always wanted. No more ABC censor -- the iPhone has upgraded to HBO!
For more discussion and even a video explanation, visit iPhone Hacks.
[Photo swiped from the ars technica article.]
Bleeping Blagojevich
Subtitles for recordings played during Day 2 of the Blagojevich impeachment trial.
William Safire catches grammatical fire discussing the terms used by the media in censoring Illinois' favorite embattled governor.
Today we are going to deal with the media coverage of profanities, expletives, vulgarisms, obscenities, execrations, epithets and imprecations, nouns often lumped together by the Bluenose Generation as coarseness, crudeness, bawdiness, scatology or swearing. But roundheeled readers should stop smacking their lips and rubbing their hands because the deliberately shocking subject can be treated with decorum, in plain words, without the titillating examples of “dirty words.” (Titillating, from the Latintitillare, “to tickle,” is clean.)
If you want to fulminate about such prissiness about prurience in print, feel free to rattle your jowls, blow your stack and otherwise express your outrage with the typographical device to which cartoonists have resorted for generations: !#*&%@%!!!
The need for today’s review is the coverage given to the participial modifier employed with great frequency and immortalized on recordings of telephone conversations made by the F.B.I. as its shocked — shocked! — agents eavesdropped on Rod Blagojevich, the Illinois governor. His favorite intensifier was reproduced in many newspapers and Internet sites with dashes as “----ing” or with asterisks as “****ing” and was substituted in broadcasts, telecasts and Netcasts as a word descriptive of the sound called bleep. The Wall Street Journal went almost all the way, using both the first letter and three dashes in the participle before “golden,” the word it modified.
Be sure to read on till the end -- some his best jabs are also his shortest.
[Image via BuzzFeed.]
No Son Of Mine Plays Oregon Trail Like That
My old arch enemy -- Decker is in for a world of hurt.
When I was a wee lad, my middle school library had a cutting-edge computer lab. It was in a loft-esque space overlooking the rest of the library; we ascended stairs, at either end of the smaller, oval-shaped loft space, when it was our turn to rise from the Dewey-decimal coded past to meet the tools of our binary future.
I'm guessing we had some variant of Apple ][s -- I know they could display a few colors, but that's it. We didn't have quite enough for every student, and our use time was very, very limited. I always got the impression that our librarian wasn't very comfortable with the newfangled gadgets, and no one was sure how to even set them up, let alone how to use them as a learning tool.
This was well before Al Gore invented the Internet (soon-to-be-our-sentient-master, all praise It), so we each had our own 5.25" floppy disc copy of whatever software we were using. In most cases, our teachers did the right thing and had us play educational games -- either Where in the World is Carmen San Diego? or my personal favorite, Oregon Trail.
I hated WWCSD? because, after everyone had checked-in and after the librarian got us up-and-running on all of our machines, we were never left with enough time to catch our art/gem/map thief. It was a pointless exercise -- the culprit was free to run off to Switzerland to anonymously deposit their loot, and we were sent off to run yet another eleven-minute mile in PE.
Oregon Trail, on the other hand, was excellent. Minimalist. Raw. Gritty. It was the old west in four-color, pixelated glory. I didn't know what dysentery was, but I soon learned to hate the damn thing as it killed my party over and over again.
Leave it to McSweeney's to take a classic and improve upon it. I present to you a Short Imagined Monologue by Michael Nelson Price entitled No Son Of Mine Plays Oregon Trail Like That. An excerpt...
Listen, son, we need to have a talk. This isn't going to be easy for either of us. You are not my son. I'm sorry, I know this will come as a blow to you. But the fact is, no son of mine plays Oregon Trail like you do.
. . .
For some time, I managed to convince myself that you preferred the banker simply because his vast resources allowed you to purchase the maximum number of oxen. I was sure that you were attempting to set a speed record of some sort. Of course, I knew that the game limited you to 40 miles a day regardless of the number of oxen, but I thought you would figure that out for yourself. But you weren't about to figure anything out. Not about Oregon Trail, and not about life.
For more Oregon Trail goodness, see the following...
- Interview with the game's creator.
- Detailed information in this article naming it one of GameSpot's Greatest Games of All Time.
- Play it here.