Adobe and Steve: The Essence
posted Apr 29, 2010

Adobe: Hey Steve, your iPhones and iPads and stuff are great! What a fantastic opportunity to help drive our tools and solutions and platform into the mobile space!

Steve: Yeah, I bet you'd like that. How much would you like to pay us?

Adobe: Zero dollars. But just think, all the flash games on the whole WEB could be on the iPhone.

Steve: Uh sure. We have this app store, where we receive dollar money for every single app sold. How much dollar money would all those web flash games make for us?

Adobe: Zero dollars.

Steve: Eat a bag of dicks.

Adobe: Developers want to develop for the iPhone. Flash developers. There are thousands and thousands of them.

Steve: Yeah, we have thousands of developers too.

One American City. Standard time. Two decades.
posted Oct 07, 2009

In 1885, most of Detroit refused to obey a municipal ordinance to promote the "unification of time," as the campaign to get the United States to accept the Greenwich meridian as the universal standard was called. "Considerable confusion" prevailed, according to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as Detroit "showed her usual conservatism in refusing to adopt Standard Time." It took more than two decades to get the city to fully "abandon solar time" and set its clocks back twenty-eight minutes and fifty-one seconds to harmonize with Chicago and the rest of the Midwest (the city would switch to eastern standard time in 1915, both to have more sunlight hours and to synchronize the city's factories with New York banks"
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia

In an alternate universe, US lawmakers and citizens debate public education.
posted Sep 15, 2009

The essay below is a heavily modified copy - you can read the original here.

The substituted EFCE costs come from the 2006 and 2009 Minnesota state budgets (both links are .pdf files).


You can’t escape the topic of education reform today, no matter what you do. Hours of the president on TV, and the onslaught of media ads are designed to tell the American people how terrible the current education system is, and the utopia we will experience once we have public education. Everyone will be covered from kindergarten to grade 12, and the cost will be less than what we are currently spending.

If that is the case, sign me up! Who in their right mind wouldn’t want the best education in the world for less money? Of course, I’m being facetious here, and for good reason.

Hazy 4th
posted Jul 05, 2009

The night before, we passed through occasional hazes of gunpowder smoke. Tonight, the whole area was blanketed with a similar haze, but it was fog, not smoke. It was the kind of night where if you were camping and you hung something on the clothesline to dry, you'd be disappointed.

It can't be that hard for Alberto Gonzales to find a job
posted Jan 09, 2009

gonzales_jobs.png

O'reilly describes his meeting with Barack Obama
posted Sep 06, 2008

Barack Obama went on the O'Reilly show of shows last week. Mr. O'Reilly wrote a column about the interview.

I transcribed the column below.

My copy-paste key is broken, so I had to do it from memory. Apologies for any mistakes or omissions.


Like him or not, you have to give Barack Obama credit for waging a smart, focused campaign. Destroying the Clinton machine was a major achievement and so was putting together a successful convention in Denver. Obama is now firmly a part of U.S. history, no matter what happens in the presidential election. He's placed himself squarely in a historical place. An important place, just for him.

The problem some Americans continue to have with the Senator is that he is long on charisma but short on detail.

Hardcore man porn
posted Feb 15, 2008

A little man-on-man action right here:

(Thanks Selah!)

man_porn.png

A tiny little gripe about javascript libraries
posted Feb 05, 2008

I wrote a rant about something that annoyed me greatly when working with JS libraries.

read the rant if you want. Or read below, which is the same thing, but in a nicer and hopefully clearer way.

Because about half of what I ranted about was wrong, and the other half wasn't worth getting angry about. It's just slightly annoying.

A great deal of what I do with js libraries is move page elements around, change their size, and toggle them on and off.

Every JS library has slightly different ways to do this, and these ways aren't internally consistent.

(By "internally consistent", I mean that functions which get a value should return data in the same format accepted by functions that set that same value.)

This isn't too surprising, considering that the properties in question are really css.

Karl Rove re-frames himself
posted Feb 02, 2008

Karl Rove, the elder statesman.

The experienced consultant. The Wall Street Journal columnist.

Rove's "The new rules of politics" is a fluff piece, ostensibly about insights into the campaign process. It's about as insightful as a fashion consultant's views on which color is the new black.

After reading it, go back and look at it again through the eyes of Mr. Rove:

  • No Democratic candidate is named. Every Republican candidate is named.

  • The final bullet point - "Ideas still matter", merges into the conclusion. It reads as follows:

"Both Democrats and Republicans are in spirited and, at times, heated contests. The difference is Democrats are running a nasty race that has as its subtext race and gender.
Dreamhost made a 7.5 million billing error.
posted Jan 16, 2008

Yeah they did.

They handled it in classic Dreamhost fashion, too. Heavy on the comedy.

A lot of customers were unhappy with the nonchalant attitude.

This is a pretty sterling example of Paul Graham's "dignity is deadly" quote:

When you evolve out of start-up mode and start worrying about being professional and dignified, you only lose capabilities. You don't add anything... you only take away. Dignity is deadly."

I have been a Dreamhost client for several years, and I've been pretty happy with their overall service. This isn't the first time they've admitted doing something stupid.

Before Dreamhost, I was a client of Westhost.