Monthly Archive for October, 2007

This is just mean

Published on October 30, 2007 in Internet and Rants. 9 Comments

Margot blogsMar­got has been really into blog­ging lately.

I can be very par­tic­u­lar some­times. By “par­tic­u­lar” I mean I can be an ass­hole. There are cer­tain things that bother me to no end. Maybe talk­ing about them will help?

Two Spaces
I really can’t han­dle when peo­ple put two spaces after a period. It frus­trates the crap out of me. YOU AREN’T USING A TYPEWRITER. Wel­come to the 21st cen­tury. We use com­put­ers. We don’t use mono­spaced type any­more. There is no need for the extra space. And it’s not a spe­cific kind of per­son who does this. It’s every­one. I don’t really under­stand. When I have to remove all those extra spaces, oh man! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE remem­ber! Never EVER put two spaces after a period. It’s WRONG.

Excel
I hate excel. I hate hav­ing to take text from excel and bring it into quark. Maybe it’s just not my thing. I’ve never really needed to use it for any­thing. I’m not really even sure what it’s pur­pose is. The only thing I’ve seen them used for is lists. Can’t you use word instead? There is so much less work in for­mat­ting when using word vs. excel.

“Free“
The other thing that has been get­ting to me lately is about cost. Peo­ple for­get that every­thing costs some­thing. Noth­ing is free. The food in the fridge was bought by some­one who car­ried it in their back­pack on their bike in the sun. So when you eat it that really really sucks. Also, web­sites aren’t free. Not only are their hosting/software fees, there is the time it takes to make stuff. I have felt frus­trated at times about EM and PF in regards to this. I’m going to stop here before it goes too far. Also, Mikey really has said it best:

Well, there is still a fee, it’s just invis­i­ble to you. A lot of resources go into cre­at­ing this space (exam­ples: host­ing fees, design work, etc on UHX) and main­tain­ing it.

But we allow cer­tain forms of adver­tis­ing, such as when our friends make things, but we don’t allow other less tar­geted forms (like spam).

There is always a cost to get­ting the word out: pay­ing for posters, send­ing CDs out for review, or just the time it takes… A lot of “fee-for-speech” adver­tis­ing mod­els (news­pa­pers, mag­a­zines, etc) is more eth­i­cal because there is a clear line between edi­to­r­ial and adver­tis­ing. On UHX that line is blurred because the edi­to­r­ial is mak­ing the prod­uct and the adver­tise­ments and it’s all blurred together.

How do you pro­mote shows at the DOS w/o adver­tis­ing them?

Is adver­tis­ing okay if it comes from a trusted source?

While some of the ways in which adver­tis­ing hap­pens can be sleazy, is the entire idea of pay­ing for pro­mo­tion evil? And if so, where does that leave “news” and other ad-based media?

How can we know what is hap­pen­ing in far away places unless some­one foots the bill? Remov­ing adver­tis­ing would be worse for the world than remov­ing religion.

(via EMX)

An organized life

Published on October 23, 2007 in Internet. 6 Comments

I haven’t been post­ing much lately. It’s the sort of thing that hap­pened grad­u­ally. I have been doing a lot on the inter­nets just not in the form of writ­ing for Merde (Prescott Fam­ily dot org, 10/25!!!!). So, in the vein of get­ting back to it, I’m going to bring together a few blurbs I’ve writ­ten from around the inter­net. Lit­tle tiny guys. Hope­fully you will see the con­nec­tions. These closely resem­ble reviews.

I REALLY like Google Reader
I REALLY like Google ReaderI used Safari’s built-in feed reader, but being at school/home/work I wanted some­thing I could use in all the places eas­ily. Voilà! Google Reader. I really, really like it. I think I like it so much because I used (feature-less) Safari RSS for so long. Sea­soned aggre­ga­tors might not like it as much, but it has a lot of fea­tures you don’t see on the sur­face. I’m really just talk­ing about the key­board short­cuts. My faves are j and k, which are next and pre­vi­ous post. And in a close sec­ond n and p, which scan within a post. (Oh! and v, which is used to view the orig­i­nal post). Any­how, some­thing I just stum­bled upon is gu. gu is great for iso­lat­ing a sin­gle feed. Which is a REALLY good thing when Digg and BBC and such are fill­ing up your screen. (Life­hacker has more about the key­board shortcuts.)

buzz­word
buzzwordBuzz­word is an Adobe prod­uct. It’s an all flash and all web-based word proces­sor, which is good and bad. I am most impressed with font selec­tion. Obvi­ously. I haven’t actu­ally used it to write any­thing seri­ous, more to just play around with, but it seems to have poten­tial. Also, I would like to see more for­mats than Word and RTF. (A note: I haven’t exten­sively tried Google Docs either, so I don’t really know how buzz­word and Google Docs compare).

Browser Choice
Firefoxed (EDITED)I have strug­gled for a long time about browser choice. I like Macs. I like the look of the appli­ca­tions. I also like fea­tures and ease of use. Here’s what I said on 10/6:

I finally have com­pletely given into Fire­fox. Don’t get me wrong. I love Safari. But I’m tired of Safari crash­ing on my bank’s site. Fire­fox is also very open source and can be used on any plat­form (for the part of me that want to use Linux all the time). (Also, I know Safari is pretty open and is based on Kon­queror.) Plus, so many sweet plu­g­ins. I tried Camino, but it’s too close to Safari in the lack of really cool plu­g­ins. Not as many peo­ple use these browsers. I will still use Safari occa­sion­ally, but Fire­fox is my lady now. (Plus FF 2 isn’t as slow as 1.5 was for me.)

…

Also, what hap­pened to Fire­foxy? It seems it hasn’t been updated since 2006 (prob­a­bly the last time I’ve really used Firefox).

Obvi­ously Fire­fox is good for Linux and Win­dows, oth­er­wise I don’t really like it. There, I said it. It’s not Gecko or any­thing like that, it’s just too slow and ugly. On 10/9, I retracted my state­ment saying:

So I’m pretty much sworn back to Camino. It’s so tiny and fast. It makes my heart race. And it’s so damn pretty.

So that’s my choice. Camino. It’s small, fast, cute. It’s really a win/win sit­u­a­tion. It’s uses Gecko, but is writ­ten in Cocoa. “Camino. Mozilla Power, Mac Style” Damn right. (With that being said, I’m not that hard­core. I use Safari and Opera occa­sion­ally, but only for test­ing web­sites. And I haven’t quite deleted FF from my appli­ca­tions folder. But 99.9% of the time I use Camino.)

(Use Camino with Google Reader with Reader Noti­fier.)