Archives for January 2007

links for 2007-01-25

Posted by PJ on Jan 25, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-22

Posted by PJ on Jan 22, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-19

Posted by PJ on Jan 19, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-17

Posted by PJ on Jan 17, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-16

Posted by PJ on Jan 16, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-15

Posted by PJ on Jan 15, 2007 | Comment |

The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Grease (if It Doesn’t Get Replaced)

I called Comcast yesterday to cancel HBO and Showtime.

The original programming offered by these two channels is great–some of the best shows currently on television. I loved watching this past season of Weeds, Dexter, Huff, and Big Love. I’m also eagerly anticipating the return of The Sopranos. It’s just that the movie selection has been sub-par as of late.

Combined, these two channels cost me $30.90 per month. I already have a Netflix subscription, so I figured I would just wait until my favorite shows come out on DVD to watch them and save the $370.80 per year.

So after I explained all this to the Comcast customer service representative, she offered me free HBO and Starz for the next 12 months with no further obligation. She couldn’t do anything about Showtime, but hey, I got free HBO.

I’m sure they figure I’ll forget to cancel it at the end of the promotional period and they’ll have me back on board. They’re wrong.

In any case, feel free to try this at your own risk.

Posted by PJ on Jan 12, 2007 | Comments Off |

links for 2007-01-12

Posted by PJ on Jan 12, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-11

Posted by PJ on Jan 11, 2007 | Comment |

They Go There for the Wings

When they’re not giving tens of billions of dollars away to promote global health, the world’s two richest men are just regular guys.

The World's Richest Men

Well, not really.

Posted by PJ on Jan 11, 2007 | Comments Off |

Blind African-American Blues Musician or Pseudonym Used by Sighted White Blues Musician?

  1. Blind Lemon Jefferson
  2. Blind Willie Dunn
  3. Blind Willie Johnson
  4. Blind Willie McTell
  5. Blind Joe Death
  6. Blind Boy Fuller
  7. Blind Thomas
  8. Blind Roosevelt Graves

Black & Blind: 1, 3, 4, 6, 8. White & Sighted: 2, 5, 7

Posted by PJ on Jan 10, 2007 | Comments Off |

Research in Motion Crapping Themselves

Right now Research in Motion is down 6.5% on Apple’s announcement of their new iPhone.

I wonder how they’re feeling about this ad they took out on Time.com right now:

Bad Ad Placement

Posted by PJ on Jan 9, 2007 | 3 Comments |

Obligatory MWSF 2007 Keynote Predictions

Steve Jobs’ Macworld San Francisco keynote speech begins in just over two hours. Here are my predictions.

  1. Leopard, the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system, will ship on or before January 29th. Why? Microsoft Vista is shipping to consumers on January 30th. This way Jobs can remind the attendees that Apple shipped five versions of Mac OS X while Microsoft was continually changing the release date on Vista.
  2. Jobs will unveil new 802.11n Airport Base Stations.
  3. We will see a bump in the speed of the Mac Mini as the line is given Intel Core 2 Duo processors.
  4. Roughly 70-minutes into the presentation, Jobs will start to wrap up. He’ll thank everyone for attending, then his pocket will start ringing repeatedly. Everyone is expecting the phone–it’s a given. I’m just predicting the gimmicky Jobsian manner by which he will formally unveil the device.
  5. Jobs will announce a spreadsheet application for iWork ‘07. Poor Roz Ho from Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit will be snubbed.

Posted by PJ on Jan 9, 2007 | Comments Off |

links for 2007-01-07

Posted by PJ on Jan 7, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-06

Posted by PJ on Jan 6, 2007 | Comment |

links for 2007-01-05

Posted by PJ on Jan 5, 2007 | Comment |

I was a little surprised by how much attention the last few posts have received over this past week. Who would have thought so many people would be interested in a standard machine-readable label for online NSFW content? The posts were featured on _Digg_, _Slashdot_, _Reddit_, _Newsvine_, _Yayhooray!_, and a number of other high-traffic tech-oriented sites. There’s one question that people keep asking me. They want to know how this machine-readable label might be used in practice. Well, here are some examples that readily come to mind: 1. Community-driven sites could easily employ server-side scripting to add the appropriate attribute and value automatically to either a div or an anchor whenever a user reports a post, comment, or link to be NSFW. Many sites, including [Yayhooray!][1], already use such functionality to achieve the same basic effect. They would just need to make sure their syntax matches the new standard. 2. Site owners could provide an alternate CSS stylesheet as a site function. Visitors would then be able to easily select “Hide NSFW Content” and have that preference persist through use of cookies. 3. Browser developers could create a preference to hide or show content labelled with an NSFW attribute value. You also might be interested to know that over the last week I’ve been corresponding with a number of interesting and potentially influential people interested in helping out with the promotion of the spec as a standard. If there’s anyone else out there interested, don’t hesitate to contact me. [1]: http://www.yayhooray.com/

links for 2007-01-02

Posted by PJ on Jan 2, 2007 | Comment |

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