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The BBC is spot on about why you’re probably reading this entry through Facebook, even on Christmas.
I bet when you come home from a holiday the first thing you do is turn on not the kettle or even the light, but the computer, to catch up with your spam, to see whether the worldwide web has missed you, and just because that chime makes you feel normal again. Don’t worry, you're amongst friends now.
Thanks to Neil Turner for the scoop.
The New York Times’ David Pogue proves, once and for all, that Redmond does not copy Cupertino’s ideas:
But is this a ripoff of Apple’s Spotlight feature? It is not. How can I prove it? Watch again. Apple’s search menu is in the upper-right corner of the screen; Microsoft’s search box is in the lower-left corner of the screen. Not the same thing at all!
Some disagree, saying angrily that the features aren’t quite different enough. They must have their monitors hanging upside-down.
Thanks to Robert Acettura for the scoop.
Last week, I accompanied my blog entry with a lovely crayon drawing. Longtime readers of this blog – again, I’m referring to myself in the third person – will recall that this style of art is nothing new for me. What’s new is that I’m no longer slapping together crude vector drawings using Word and touching them up with the spraypaint tool in Paint. I still wanted a crude drawing to illustrate how simple a roundabout is, but since I’m no longer on a Windows box, I had to find some program to draw it in.
It really surprised me that Macintoshes don’t come with a decent drawing program. They’ve got oodles of photo-processing applications – Preview, iPhoto, and (the wonderful but hard-to-find) Core Image Fun House, to name a few – but nothing for simple drawing. That’s how I found ArtRage, a bonafied painting program for Windows and Mac OS. Even the free version is a joy to use, and it really makes me want to watch Bob Ross whack his paintbrushes again, because ArtRage basically lets me do that with the mouse.
I know of no other program where drawing a dark line with a marker involves going over the same spot three times, and drawing a purple line over a green one makes for an icky shade of gray – but that’s what happens in real life. So you can do things in ArtRage that aren’t possible in Paint or Corel Draw. Ambient Design’s unwavering attention to detail makes it possible to create real digitized paintings without ever having to scan one in. It also saves a ton of paper: mistakes are undone by Ctrl+Z, not by crumpling and tossing yet another marred, almost-there sheet of art.
For years now, the only type of art I’ve really been comfortable producing is the pencil sketch. I abandoned colored pencils (and thus color) when I realized that they were making my drawings less realistic, not more. But with ArtRage, I think I can finally give color a little love.
CSists will get this: “REST for toddlers”:
305 Use Proxy- “Did Mommy say it was OK?”
My addition to the list:
414 Request-URI Too Long
As part of their overblown mischievousness this year, the Band erected a rather stylish traffic control device in the Intersection of Death last week, creating a much-needed roundabout – one with a Santa hat and trousers – where I had my accident back in October. (To the Bostonians out there, it’s not a rotary: I can’t dial home on it.)
While I can’t claim credit for the ingenious structure, I must say that it’s about time! You don’t see a whole lot of these things in America, simply because traffic lights are a whole lot more efficient for cars. But for bikes, they’re perfect. Most of the time I can just cruise right by that Traffic Circle of Life and not worry about getting jackknifed by another overwhelmed biker. Seriously, it works: now you only have to look both ways before crossing, rather than three ways.
Nevertheless, I have seen quite a few bikers who simply don’t get it. They see the big rightwards arrow, straight out of an episode of Sesame Street… and promptly veer to the left. These might be the same people who got the turn signals wrong in their written driving test. At Stanford.
No offense to dyslexics. I’m pretty bad telling my right from my left at times, but if you’re going through the Intersection of Death, you’ve got to be alert.