Click Here: November 2007
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- If You Can Read This, You're Hired #
- What awesome ads. I love the broken circle effect.
- NZ Herald: Your pay packet - where does it rank? #
- "Top software engineers now earned more than $150,000 a year, up almost $60,000 on last year." Hot damn. Where do I apply?
- YouTube: CARS 5th Anniversary In Pictures #
- Ah, CARS, one of my favourite sites.
- The Apple Design Philosophy: Exhibit A #
- How fascinating that they made such a clever little series of prompts for something as banal as setting up a keyboard. In case you're wondering why OS X is the best OS in the world, it's because of myriad small details like this one.
- Video: Windows 386 Promo #
- "Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys."
- UX Design on Firefox 3 #
- Really interesting detailed design analysis on the new Firefox 3 themes for OS X and Windows. "The second reason we are interested in making the back button larger is to create a unique visual identity."
- Ten New Things in WebKit 3 #
- That's a very nice-lookin' web browser you got there, mister.
- Zero-Star Reviews: Big Rigs #
- "Just how bad is Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? It's as bad as your mind will allow you to comprehend."
- Steven F: Android, With More Optimism #
- We were all a bit mean to Google's Android open mobile platform, so here's some balance. After all, we should have been being mean to open source freetards.
- Short Story: Death By Scrabble #
- "She plays JINXED, with the J on a double-letter score. 30 points. She's beating me already. Maybe I should kill her."
- YouTube: Sony Walkman Ad #
- Walkman looks kinda crap, but nice ad, Sony! Love the guitar bit.
- Design Critique of the Kindle #
- Yeah so, very good, by the standards of high school projects.
- The Third Magisterium #
- "Just as scientists claim dominion over their magisteria, and theologians claim dominion over theirs, a huge and empty space is left for the stupid questions. Who claims dominion over them? Starting now, I do. I declare myself the world's primary expert in questions so stupid that they lack any sort of meaning other than reasonably correct grammar."
- Desert Bus for Hope #
- An awesome twist on PA's Child's Play charity concept.
- xkcd: Diet Coke + Mentos #
- Perfectly executed satire.
- Ars: T-Mobile forced to sell unlocked iPhones in Germany #
- And they're selling them for only $US1,500. Get yours today!
- Stuff: Big Day Out Second Announcement #
- Including Unkle (live), Spoon, Supergroove, The Nightwatchman (Tom Morello acoustic), Liam Finn, Kate Nash, Pluto, Die! Die! Die!, Collapsing Cities. I haven't heard of most of the bands in this announcement, but I'm keen to see Supergroove, Tom Morello and Collapsing Cities. Interestingly, Scribe's back again, despite being rather unappreciated last time.
- Stuff On My Cat: An experiment, if you will #
- I haven't been linking to cat pictures nearly enough.
- Pilgrim on the Kindle #
- So this was great. It made me feel terrible for not having read 1984 yet, and now I have to read Richard Stallman (!) as well.
- Like a Book, But Ugly #
- Amazon's Kindle, a digital reader. I've never quite understood the fervour to digitise everything, but there you go, although I have to say the future looks decidedly 80s. Some interesting commentary by Seth Godin and John Gruber.
- Paris Hilton vs. Britney Spears #
- As called by Defective Yeti.
- Reagan, Racism and Republicans II #
- This one is damning: "He was tapping out the code. It was understood that when politicians started chirping about 'states' rights' to white people in places like Neshoba County they were saying that when it comes down to you and the blacks, we’re with you."
- CARS: Best Pickup Line Ever #
- Always a good chuckle, but I especially enjoyed the sledgehammer-like subtlety of the line at the end.
- Unexplainable #
- Some things just can't be.
- Why Do People Listen To This Guy? #
- Scoble's had some kind of critical problem with his Mac, and quite reasonably his response is: "Screw you Apple and your ads saying you’re better than Microsoft. Screw you. Screw you. Screw you."
- YouTube: Not The Daily Show, With Some Writer #
- From the writers of The Daily Show - about the WGA strike - for those of you needing your fix.
- Comic: Not Unexpected #
- From the genius behind Learn Self Defense (as noted here!). I quite like the use of colour and texture. Make sure you roll over the banner. Yay!
- America's Joyous Future #
- Cheap shots - the best sort of irony.
- CSS Animation #
- In case you're wondering why Safari is the close-second best browser in the world, it's because of myriad CSS advances like this one.
- Reagan, Racism and Republicans #
- Interesting insight about the role segregationalist racism has played in American politics as recently as 1980. I know this is not a profound statement, but I have to say it: fucked up, man. Fucked up.
- Firefox Memory Fragmentation #
- "Why after a while do we end up using more memory than we should be if we aren't leaking and our caches are clear?" Possibly too technical for your liking, but I was certainly interested. I have been wondering where it goes myself for a number of years now.
- Guardian: The Zero-Star Food Review #
- "It had a weird plastic flavour which reminded me of the taste you get when you blow up a new lilo. This is not a good thing in a plate of food."
- Suicide Bombing Makes Sick Sense in Halo 3 #
- You know, I wasn't sure what to make of this. I was progressively more horrified until the third-to-last paragraph. Then I started wondering if maybe he was onto something. Actually getting into that mindspace would certainly be an experience.
- Most Users Won't Even Notice #
- In case you're wondering why Firefox is the best browser in the world, it's because of myriad small details like this one.
- YouTube: OH MAN! OH GOD! OH MAN! OH GOD! Etc. #
- Worst line reading ever.
- The Subjectivity of Wine #
- "The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn't stop the experts from describing the 'red' wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its 'jamminess', while another enjoyed its 'crushed red fruit'. Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine." I'm not sure I could tell them apart myself, but then I'm more of a binge drinker.
- Spray-On #
- If we take these reviews of the T-Mobile Shadow and Nokia N81 as representative, it appears iPhone competitors really are years behind. You can't just spray on a good UI, you know.
- Video: Alec Baldwin's '30 Rock' One-Man Tour-De-Force #
- Well, that's something different. I might have to check out this "30 Rock" of which you speak.
- Napster Needs a New Business Model #
- "Six months ago the subscription music service had 830,000 subs, three months ago it had 770,000, and now it has 750,000." I'm not a big fan of subscription services myself - I'm a collector - but I've always thought a lot of people would be. I wonder if its failure can be attributed to its poor execution relative to the iPod phenomenon.
- Al Gore Slams Bush Regime #
- "They have promoted the idea that freedom and security are mutually exclusive, that you can have one only to the extent that you've sacrificed the other. That is an un-American idea." It's the first time in a while I've seen someone use the word "un-American" without it sounding dirty. (Although it certainly looks dirty, from a grammatical point of view.) Maybe it is a great country after all?
- The Onion: Study Finds Working At Work Improves Productivity #
- "Perhaps even more shocking, the study reveals that not working significantly decreases worker productivity, sometimes even resulting in no work getting done at all. Similar findings were reported in the areas of avoiding work, putting off work, complaining about work instead of actually working, pretending to work, and fucking around."
- Rachel Weisz as Snow White #
- Hallelujah.
- YouTube: Introducing Android #
- Google are leading some kind of multi-vendor open vaporware platform for mobiles. Steven F and Fake Steve provide appropriate ridicule. How awful was that YouTube video? I lost a heap of respect for Google watching that garbage.
- An Easy Solution to the Overpopulation Problem #
- The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: "On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn't. I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I'm not having it."
- DY: Thaw (a short story) #
- Yay, literature! Well, kind of. Still, this is pretty good for the internet.
- The 15 Dumbest Apple Predictions Of All Time #
- "The iMac doesn't include a floppy disk drive ... [the iMac is] doomed." Good grief. See also comment #2 for CmdrTaco's classic.
- Now Do You Agree That Alcohol Is Bad? #
- Oh, the humanity. (See also great mo' and the team.)
- NZ Herald: Out with the geek, in with the chic #
- Possibly my first ever link to the Herald? I don't much like their body font. Anyway, an article about the IT worker shortage. This surprised me: "Parents hugely influence children as to which career to follow and parents think ICT is low paid, blue-collar, high-risk work." Oh, do they now? I was informed some working-class parents might think IT means fixing DVD players or power lines or something, but I mean, where do they think TradeMe came from? All the middle-class parents I know think IT is a highly lucrative industry.
- DY: Flight of the Conchords Trick-or-Treaters #
- "Favorite costume (tie): the two teens dressed as Jemaine and Bret. Bret had disheveled hair and a guitar strapped to his back; Jemaine had muttonchops and was crooning about how he was going to buy us a kebab. When The Queen and I complemented them on their costumes, they looked astonished. 'Do you know who we are?' one asked. Sure, the Flight of the Conchords guys, we replied. 'You're the first people all night!' they cried. 'We have a fan!'" See the comments for more FotC love.
- Happiness is a Feeling #
- Really insightful piece. "In UI design, you can apply current and credible research, run tests of every sort, and still end up with something that the average person doesn't enjoy using." Read on for a fascinating I-did-not-know-that about keyboard shortcuts, taken from a 1989 study by Tog.
- What the Fuck? Why We Curse. #
- Really interesting, and really well written. Took me something like an hour to read the whole thing, but well worth it. How often do you see someone use the word phantasmagoria? Not fucking often enough.
- Stop It, Already #
- "The fastest Windows Vista notebook we've tested this year is a Mac."
- The Super-Rich Do Divorce #
- The dog-snatching was the highlight for me. On a more philosophical note, will all these massively rich people result in some kind of social upheaval at some point? Because it's pretty stuffed up.
