This fantastic ditty has a some pretty awesome lyrics, specifically at the 1:33 mark.
Girl I turn that thing into a rainforest
Rain on my head, call that brainstorming
My new favorite song
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Category Archives: Observations
I require explanation
I recently drove to Atlanta in a rented car. I should clarify. It’s a car if we’re excepting the societal expectation of what a car is to include machines made by Dodge. At any rate, I drove to Atlanta in this tangible realization of the word mediocrity and decided to turn on the radio to see what Sirius XM is all about. Why do I live in a world where the Dodge Caliber and that song exist?
We need to talk, live tweeters
Here’s the deal. You’re not telling me anything.
“This is going to be the best speech,” said one of you. “I didn’t expect that,” said another of you with equal certainty. All I’m left with is this single question, “What?”
The whole reason we live tweet is because others can’t be there. In that scenario, the key thing to do is provide context. And, no, your hash tag isn’t context. “Best speech #oscars,” isn’t context. The only way that could work is if I get the time stamps of your tweets and a recording of the Oscars and watch the damn thing. You could have said, “Aaron Sorkin gave the best speech so far at the #oscars for his best screenplay win,” and saved everyone a lot of trouble.
But, you didn’t. You’re just throwing inane drivel into space for no reason.
And for all of you who will quickly say, “But we’re talking to each other!” No! You’re not! Because if you were, you’d do this: @traviswalters Ha! He sucked. LOL MY THOUGHTS ARE ORIGINAL #oscars.
But, you aren’t doing that either.
If one fails, so must the other
Reuters has this really well-intentioned article about how the Huffington Post is going to beat The New York Times. Sidestepping for a moment the obvious irony of the Reuters website looking exactly like The New York Times website, we’ll notice one important omission from the argument. (Which is, by the way, that HuffPo is more visual and social, while The New York Times is all filled with words.)
The article starts off that HuffPo wins because within hours of a story posting there are more than 2,088 comments. Quality over quantity everyone always says. It’s too bad everyone uses quantity to measure success. Of those 2,088, I guarantee at least 100 of the people couldn’t spell comment. Around eight of those people are there to spam a conspiracy about gold or Donald Rumsfield they paste on every story and the rest are in an intractable war of Left versus Right that has absolutely nothing to do with the story they’re commenting on.
This quote, however, is my favorite part:
Most importantly, the HuffPo page is genuinely, compellingly, interactive — it’s almost impossible to visit it without finding something you want to click on. Like! Comment! Tweet! Go here! Try this! Visit that! There’s site navigation, yes, but that’s just one layer of a very rich and complex page architecture. At the NYT page, by contrast, to get out of the Media Decoder blog you either have to click on a generic navigation button like “Sports,” or else you’ll just leave the page and the site completely.
The Huffington Post acts the same way as the New York Times does. To get out of a story, you have to click the generic categories at the top. I’m not really sure what point is trying to be made here. He is right that HuffPo has more interaction. There are, after all, three Twitter feeds on that page, an entire giant box for Bing, two mentions of the Big News page, four ads, and a section for the most discussed and most viewed stories and they aren’t next to each other. Put it another way, HuffPo loads slower than The New York Times and appears as though it was pieced together over time with no planning.
User experience aside, there’s one good reason why HuffPo doesn’t “win” against The Times.
Now for that omission. (I’ll present my argument visually like the good man at Reuters.)
And, if someone could explain this paragraph to me in a way that makes sense, I’ll be eternally grateful.
The fact is that readers come to the NYT — or any website — because they want to read itsstories. They don’t much care about branded sections, or deciphering the difference between a news story and a blog entry. (The Olbermann story is a blog post, for reasons which even I don’t fully understand.) But the NYT site architecture seems built around the peculiar way that the news is produced inside 620 8th Avenue, rather than around showing the NYT’s readers the exact stories they’re most likely to want to read.
This isn’t about Katy Perry
I get that we Photoshop magazine covers. The way people look naturally repulses me. The day they invent Photoshop glasses so I don’t have to look at dirt on the sidewalk is the day I become a permanently happy person.
What I don’t get is the change in the bottom right corner.
The impending network race
Yesterday, Verizon announced iPhone 4 was coming to the nation’s largest network. I don’t know what the means.
And, I’m not a public speaking professional, but I’m pretty sure if you’re inviting the media to an event with the hopes that it makes the news you shouldn’t talk like you do to your shareholders or board of directors. Lets start by removing the phrase, “iPhone 4 joins our portfolio of products.”
I don’t say, “Butter Pecan joins my portfolio of frozen food stuffs.”
But, I digress. The purpose of this post is to plead to all other humans to shun ads like this one:
If we don’t, we’ll have to deal with this in the future.
“Hi. I’m a MyiTouch Hal10,000 and I run on the planet’s fastest 20Pulsar network. Who are you?
Oh, I’m a stereotype opposite you with self-esteem issues because I don’t accurately represent the social circles you move through even though I maintain roughly the same market share and appreciation in my social circle that you do in yours.
Wow. You’re silly. Join Earthzon Mobile today and get a free brain implant. Just think where your kids are and you’ll see them!”
The Internet as scapegoat
This article in the New York Times is about how the Internet, and technology in general, is making children less able to focus and succeed. Many of the quotes used in the story are of children saying, “If it weren’t for the Internet distracting me I’d get my homework done.”
Bullshit.
Technology, video games and the Internet are convenient scapegoats for a larger societal problem. We don’t value education at all.
A column by Thomas Friedman highlights this problem effectively when you compare the United States to the rest of the world. Many of the top graduates of US universities are not from the US.
What time is it?
No. This isn’t a funny headline that’s supposed to make you say something back to me. I want you to ask yourself what time it is. After you’ve done this, compare that time to other places on earth.
Thanks to the rotation of the planet and its distance from the sun, we go through seasons and have long and short days. Humans invented time and time zones so we knew when to punch in at work when punch cards were invented for the industrial age.
Lets cut to today. We have daylight savings time in the United States because our Congress fails at various things. Lets not dwell on that now and just deal with it. OK? Great. Now, today, Oct. 14, we are in Eastern Daylight Time if you’re like me and live on the East Coast. Writing EST/EDT, because you forgot what time it is, isn’t correct. More than that, seriously? Google.
Here’s a video I made showing how easy it is.
I’d like to apologize
AT&T has sometimes served me since 2004 when I purchased my very first Motorola RAZR, and I was the coolest kid in town. I had it before it became the phone to have, and before the RAZR2, ROKR and CHPTR11 (It’s coming, give it time). I bought the iPhone when it came out because I am a pretentious liberal elitist snob prone to cultish behavior like nice things. It pushed the technical limits of AT&T’s network and there were times when I laid the hate on AT&T pretty hard.
I realize now I should be thankful for AT&T’s disparate coverage, even from neighboring cities, because it is the only thing that can adequately prepare you for the woefully inept service from Comcast and Georgia Power. I’ve tweeted about Comcast’s poor infrastructure before (I said they used caked sand instead of cable), and I declared that if humanity were as reliable as Comcast, mole people would rule the earth.
AT&T, I’m sorry I said you sucked. You do, but not as bad as these others. Your general failures have beaten my soul to the point where my blood pressure can’t get as high anymore, so when the power goes out on a clear blue day for no apparent reason, I just get dressed in the dark and go to work. Thanks so much.
Irony
I enjoy sweet delicious irony as much as the next person, but this is too much. Monster213 thinks some people might use fake names.
