I really loved all his spots on the Daily Show, and his anecdote about someone being starstruck by him was also memorable, but then someone over at boing boing started to take an interest in him and the loose gravel gave way. They made a video of him talking about his book. I can only imagine the appeal is exclusive to those who are into mediocre humor which appeals only to them. An insular group who will insist I "just don't get it". A variant on your drama geeks who incessantly quote Monty Python's Holy Grail, his fans.
Mole men. I get it. Hi-larious.
Now he's back on the Daily Show, promoting his book, and he sucks.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Friday, October 17, 2008
PC Makers Suck
Straight off a post about Apple's horrid industrial design comes this.
For all the terrible work apple does, they also do some great things. The Mac Pro for example. Great looking workstation-class computer. When Dell or HP make one of these the case is gobs of ugly plastic glued onto a standard PC case.
While they may be off dreaming about humping the robots in the Bjork video most of the time, when Apple does make good hardware they make it look good as well, and very few, to this day, manage that.
It's getting better, and thank god, because I don't think i'm going to be able to stomach buying another Mac.
For all the terrible work apple does, they also do some great things. The Mac Pro for example. Great looking workstation-class computer. When Dell or HP make one of these the case is gobs of ugly plastic glued onto a standard PC case.
While they may be off dreaming about humping the robots in the Bjork video most of the time, when Apple does make good hardware they make it look good as well, and very few, to this day, manage that.
It's getting better, and thank god, because I don't think i'm going to be able to stomach buying another Mac.
Apple Sucks III
Every mouse Apple Computer has designed since the imac sucks.
First we had the puck. Which way is up? My hand cannot tell because this object has no tactile indicator of "up". Cute and unusable.
They fixed that when people got tired of buying jelly bean computers and we got the one button mouse. Up was easy. Clicking and dragging? Impossible. You have to awkwardly grip two side-nubs (the only part of the mouse that is not the button) to get the contrary force to allow you to tell the computer you are down-clicked-and-holding. It's like buzzard attempting to turn some knobs: Hard to do.
Then we got the mighty mouse, which had magic right clicking technology for the first time in a first party mac product. Welcome to decades ago. Still suffers from the buzzard claw issue. At this point I want to see what the hands of Apple's testing department look like.
I think what this showed them, along with the ipod, is that no one cares about interfaces. They care about shiny, or gumdroppy, and smooth.
To say that their design trumps it's intended function would be to mis-define the word design. The design of any thing should take into account how it's used. That's part of it. If you are making an unusable art object based on a computer mouse you can get away with this. If, on the other hand, you are designing an interface object whose sole purpose is to make controlling a computer more intuitive, then you have failed.
Apple is now in the business of making shiny art objects that can also, with some finagling, compute stuff.
This post came about because Apple's new notebook monitors are shiny. You used to have the option of getting a matte monitor. Matte is superior for viewing; it has less glare. Shiny is 'prettier' especially when the monitor is off, and I suppose for all your people with DWR furniture it's the computer to get. For those of us who make a living staring at these things, it's a big waving middle finger.
Apple doesn't want to make your computers, and the fact that Johnathan Ive is the guy they say is gonna replace Steve Jobs confirms that. Ive wants to make pretty things. I wish I could believe the guy gives any thought to how we might interface with his pretty designs, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards.
I'll be watching paint dry until another company can step it up.
First we had the puck. Which way is up? My hand cannot tell because this object has no tactile indicator of "up". Cute and unusable.
They fixed that when people got tired of buying jelly bean computers and we got the one button mouse. Up was easy. Clicking and dragging? Impossible. You have to awkwardly grip two side-nubs (the only part of the mouse that is not the button) to get the contrary force to allow you to tell the computer you are down-clicked-and-holding. It's like buzzard attempting to turn some knobs: Hard to do.
Then we got the mighty mouse, which had magic right clicking technology for the first time in a first party mac product. Welcome to decades ago. Still suffers from the buzzard claw issue. At this point I want to see what the hands of Apple's testing department look like.
I think what this showed them, along with the ipod, is that no one cares about interfaces. They care about shiny, or gumdroppy, and smooth.
To say that their design trumps it's intended function would be to mis-define the word design. The design of any thing should take into account how it's used. That's part of it. If you are making an unusable art object based on a computer mouse you can get away with this. If, on the other hand, you are designing an interface object whose sole purpose is to make controlling a computer more intuitive, then you have failed.
Apple is now in the business of making shiny art objects that can also, with some finagling, compute stuff.
This post came about because Apple's new notebook monitors are shiny. You used to have the option of getting a matte monitor. Matte is superior for viewing; it has less glare. Shiny is 'prettier' especially when the monitor is off, and I suppose for all your people with DWR furniture it's the computer to get. For those of us who make a living staring at these things, it's a big waving middle finger.
Apple doesn't want to make your computers, and the fact that Johnathan Ive is the guy they say is gonna replace Steve Jobs confirms that. Ive wants to make pretty things. I wish I could believe the guy gives any thought to how we might interface with his pretty designs, but it doesn't seem to be in the cards.
I'll be watching paint dry until another company can step it up.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Sarah Palin Sucks II
http://embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/10/11/palin-drops-puck-at-flyers-game-receives-mixed-reaction/
I can only imagine what I'd have felt like at age 7 if my mom took me to the center of a sports arena and half the crowd booed her. I feel genuinely sad for her kids to have to deal with that sort of stuff.
The kids could have stayed home. It's school season. The reporting outside of the punditry class is minimal. They could keep their esteem for their mom. I may not be a huge fan of the lady and honestly this behavior is exactly why, but even I believe her kids should still look up to her and feel she's a good person who people like.
I can only imagine what I'd have felt like at age 7 if my mom took me to the center of a sports arena and half the crowd booed her. I feel genuinely sad for her kids to have to deal with that sort of stuff.
The kids could have stayed home. It's school season. The reporting outside of the punditry class is minimal. They could keep their esteem for their mom. I may not be a huge fan of the lady and honestly this behavior is exactly why, but even I believe her kids should still look up to her and feel she's a good person who people like.
have I mentioned Heroes Sucks
First the obvious: Hiro didn't kill Ando. It was Time Warping Magic!! Which, well, which underscores the whole issue with his ability and how they use it. Zero accountability for Hiro. Also, it's been three years, time for him to stop talking like a 10 year old.
This whole episode was, hmmm....
It was.... I'm working on the analogy.
It was a great hand of poker, played terribly. The end reveal of Parkman's dad as the mastermind was underwhelming; more "oh, okay." than "Oh Shit!" Another example in a long like of "doye" moments that abound. The show is getting better but still has some serious issues showing it's hand.
Then there's Sylar. WTF? Was there a contest to write his character this week and five people all won? He could be a great character if his rehabilitation were more real. See also fake Linderman tell speedy girl it's cool to kill if you have a reason. How about maybe making the show about a slow moral decline? Valid reasons leading to horrible actions. The glib way people brush off death, get upset with each other and/or make friends in this show makes nothing permanent.
If Peter, or Claire or any of the "good guys" had, instead of a 1 episode change of opinion, a slow 12 ep decline then when they innevitably became good again it'd be real drama. Stealing bread for your family, so to speak. (who loves the Office?) As it stands the few people still watching the show are going to yell "DOYE" at the TV instead.
This whole episode was, hmmm....
It was.... I'm working on the analogy.
It was a great hand of poker, played terribly. The end reveal of Parkman's dad as the mastermind was underwhelming; more "oh, okay." than "Oh Shit!" Another example in a long like of "doye" moments that abound. The show is getting better but still has some serious issues showing it's hand.
Then there's Sylar. WTF? Was there a contest to write his character this week and five people all won? He could be a great character if his rehabilitation were more real. See also fake Linderman tell speedy girl it's cool to kill if you have a reason. How about maybe making the show about a slow moral decline? Valid reasons leading to horrible actions. The glib way people brush off death, get upset with each other and/or make friends in this show makes nothing permanent.
If Peter, or Claire or any of the "good guys" had, instead of a 1 episode change of opinion, a slow 12 ep decline then when they innevitably became good again it'd be real drama. Stealing bread for your family, so to speak. (who loves the Office?) As it stands the few people still watching the show are going to yell "DOYE" at the TV instead.
Metal Gear 4 Sucks
Not exactly timely but holy hell.
For your $60 you get something like 20 PS3 "tech demos" and 20 nanomachine powerpoint presentations, with the actual game on this shit sandwich being mustard there's so little of it.
Someone call the Japanese police. Hideo Kojima has thrown out his baby and is selling us dirty bathwater.
For your $60 you get something like 20 PS3 "tech demos" and 20 nanomachine powerpoint presentations, with the actual game on this shit sandwich being mustard there's so little of it.
Someone call the Japanese police. Hideo Kojima has thrown out his baby and is selling us dirty bathwater.
Monday, October 13, 2008
Apple's Color Sucks
I know I rag on Apple a lot, but they deserve it.
Color is an application bundled with Final Cut Studio. Apple bought "Final Touch" and renamed it "Color" and much like the un-renamed "Shake" they bought only the name and current code so no one, ever, will update it or improve it.
Seriously. Apple Pro Apps are becoming this miserable wasteland of whogivesafuck. Shake's gone from being the #1 desktop compositing app the world over to bargain bin "I wish we had Nuke" software. While I'll be the first to admit compositing isn't exactly the forefront of technology and since Shake supports floating point bit depth it's pretty much at the top of the game, but come on. Autodesk manages to staple on some unnecessary crap every year to justify the $1200 Maya upgrades.
So Color. A DI suite on your desktop. You've got your digital versions of trackballs for your different hue swings and you can make masks and bad keys to isolate areas, so I'd put it on par with a DaVinci in terms of a feature set, but what the fuck is this? I can't set color ranges, the number input fields are a pain to use and the Shake like schematic is only deep enough to really piss me off and make me want to individually export every damn shot to Shake to color correct.
The whole point of this software is that it works so dang well with Final Cut Pro, which it does in the sense that sending the project over is easy. So far however, It's not radically better than Final Cut's native color correction tools.
Maybe now I know why it's free.
Mostly Color sucks cos it's close to being really dang nice. A few more features, an actual product cycle instead of wating for yet another NAB for Apple to not show up at and not announce anything for cos they're too busy getting people to code tip calculators for their phone.
Color is an application bundled with Final Cut Studio. Apple bought "Final Touch" and renamed it "Color" and much like the un-renamed "Shake" they bought only the name and current code so no one, ever, will update it or improve it.
Seriously. Apple Pro Apps are becoming this miserable wasteland of whogivesafuck. Shake's gone from being the #1 desktop compositing app the world over to bargain bin "I wish we had Nuke" software. While I'll be the first to admit compositing isn't exactly the forefront of technology and since Shake supports floating point bit depth it's pretty much at the top of the game, but come on. Autodesk manages to staple on some unnecessary crap every year to justify the $1200 Maya upgrades.
So Color. A DI suite on your desktop. You've got your digital versions of trackballs for your different hue swings and you can make masks and bad keys to isolate areas, so I'd put it on par with a DaVinci in terms of a feature set, but what the fuck is this? I can't set color ranges, the number input fields are a pain to use and the Shake like schematic is only deep enough to really piss me off and make me want to individually export every damn shot to Shake to color correct.
The whole point of this software is that it works so dang well with Final Cut Pro, which it does in the sense that sending the project over is easy. So far however, It's not radically better than Final Cut's native color correction tools.
Maybe now I know why it's free.
Mostly Color sucks cos it's close to being really dang nice. A few more features, an actual product cycle instead of wating for yet another NAB for Apple to not show up at and not announce anything for cos they're too busy getting people to code tip calculators for their phone.
American Godzilla Sucks
If you're gonna name the main character after a friend of yours, it's probably best to not make his difficult to read and/or pronounce name a recurring joke throughout the movie. Especially when the stupid looking monster he designed is running amok outside.
Oh, sorry, burrowed underneath New York.
Oh, sorry, burrowed underneath New York.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Sarah Palin Sucks
I was never very enthusiastic about doing homework. When I was in the 10th grade my World Civ 2 teacher yelled at me in front of the class to put at least one fact in the papers I was handing in.
Sarah Palin never had my World Civ 2 teacher.
Sarah Palin never had my World Civ 2 teacher.
Deregulation Sucks
So with all this business about investment banks and the stock market, I'll happily chuck in my uninformed two cents.
People are greedy, and when being greedy is easy to get away with, they get extra greedy. I have illegally downloaded music that I've never even loaded into itunes, let alone listened to. I've downloaded hundreds of applications that started up maybe once. When you can get away with all this, the specialness of things decreases as does one's fear of getting caught.
If firms are making money hand over fist using shady practices, but no one tells them to knock it off, they're gonna use shadier practices.
I don't know why this is such news. In this age of government officials having such disregard for the law, it only makes sense others would feel it longer applies to them either. Who knew you could tell a subpoena to go fuck itself?
Laws are really more of handy suggestions.
I'm still waiting for the day when "Karl Rove did it" is someone's defense.
People are greedy, and when being greedy is easy to get away with, they get extra greedy. I have illegally downloaded music that I've never even loaded into itunes, let alone listened to. I've downloaded hundreds of applications that started up maybe once. When you can get away with all this, the specialness of things decreases as does one's fear of getting caught.
If firms are making money hand over fist using shady practices, but no one tells them to knock it off, they're gonna use shadier practices.
I don't know why this is such news. In this age of government officials having such disregard for the law, it only makes sense others would feel it longer applies to them either. Who knew you could tell a subpoena to go fuck itself?
Laws are really more of handy suggestions.
I'm still waiting for the day when "Karl Rove did it" is someone's defense.
Las Vegas Sucks
Las Vegas is a party town for frat kids who's entire understanding of 'party' is getting housed and going "whoooo" a lot. It's training wheels for your party bike. Scripted fun. Lets go to this club and sit around, let's go to that one and sit around. Amuse me Vegas, I've got money.
Las Vegas is a city built on losers.
Las Vegas is a city built on losers.
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