Archive for June, 2005

Thursday, June 30th, 2005

Gaming irritants

by Warren

We’ve all run into them, the little things that make playing otherwise good to great video games a hellish experience. I’m sure we can all come up with a few more examples ourselves.

Tuesday, June 28th, 2005

Apple jumps on the podcasting bandwagon

by Warren

Apple just added podcast support to iTunes, and so far it looks pretty slick. I only had a few minutes to play with the new features, but I managed to snag a few podcasts for the Skytrain commute with a minimum of fuss. It beats out my previous client, iPodder, though to be fair Apple has a whole lot more resources at its disposal than most of the small code shops cranking out podcast clients.

But this new wrinkle in iTunes isn’t as significant for guys like me, who’ve been listening to podcasts from the beginning, as it is for people who have no idea what a podcast is, don’t want to deal with crap like RSS enclosures, feeds, and whatnot, but are sick of commercial radio. My dad, for one is sure to be a regular listener of the NPR and BBC stuff on iTunes (as am I).

Monday, June 27th, 2005

Rebuilding Kabul

by Warren

The NYT has an interesting article about rebuilding the war-torn shambles that is Kabul into something a little less broken.

Friday, June 24th, 2005

More Doctor Who news…ah, life is good.

by Warren

Turns out Stephen “England’s Coolest Homo” Fry is going to write an episode of next season’s Doctor Who. This is great news, as besides being funnier than hell in Blackadder, he’s also one hell of a writer. And in case you’re wondering who the newest Gallifreyan is being played by, here’s some background info on David Tennant.

Friday, June 24th, 2005

Grover: Behind the Felt

by Warren

A solid gold look at the bitter, acrimonious later career of Grover Monster, the shining light of Sesame Street.

Friday, June 24th, 2005

Podcasts…is there anything they can’t do?

by Warren

I generally hate going to the gym. It’s boring, repetitive, and almost every gym in existence plays middle of the road, crappy pop music at a ridiculous volume. But thanks to the one-two combo of my iPod Mini and some intellectually stimulating podcasts, the ritual of vanity-driven punishment is now pretty tolerable. It’s pretty surreal to watch Vancouver urbanites run and grunt to terrible tunes while I listen to the eminent philisophes of the BBC’s In Our Time or the lexiconical libations of the Word Nerds, but there we are.

And this only concerns myself and I Am Steven, really, but somebody has beat us to the punch and produced a podcast about Dr. Who.

Friday, June 24th, 2005

Iranian elections lead to copyright violation, historical ignorance

by Warren

So I was listening to the BBC World Service over breakfast yesterday (thanks to this fine Dashboard widget) and they had a story about the upcoming elections in Iran. They played a bit of the campaign commercial for the hard-line candidate. All well and good, expect he was using the theme music from “Alexander” in his ad. So, let me get this straight; music from a terrible, Western movie filled to brimming with homosexual innuendo and about a guy who invaded and conquered the Persian people is apparently entirely appropriate to a guy who wants to hold up the values of the 1979 Islamic revolution. Clearly, someone on his campaign needs to be fired. 🙂

Thursday, June 23rd, 2005

Software hatred

by Warren

If there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s a finely crafted rant. A site I just stumbled across called Acme Hates Software look relatively new, but already there’s some Grade “A” bitching about various bits of poorly coded, clunky or otherwise frustrating programs. They seem to focus on OS X and Linux,which is odd since Windows is a never-ending sinkhole of crappiness. Not that the Mac and Linux boxen don’t deserve the occassional boot in the bottom too; maybe covering Windows is just too daunting a task.

Tuesday, June 21st, 2005

Outsourcing for the little guy

by Warren

Shades of Thomas Friedman! More NYT goodness, with an article about how one and two person companies are outsourcing the grunt work to overseas factories, programmers and other services.

I’m not sure if this is a great example of globalization working, or of people taking advantage of crappy labour conditions that used to only work in favor of major corporations. Either way, it’s an interesting read.

Tuesday, June 21st, 2005

Credit card fraud rampant, says NYT

by Warren

Apparently the current generation of “leet haxx0rs” aren’t content to download movies and trade video games. The newest rage amongst the young and digitally criminal is pilfering credit cards online. Some of the fleecing schemes these enterprising young fellows have set up would be impressive if they weren’t so damned scary, particularly for a confirmed Amazon.ca and iTunes Music Store addict like me.

Also, this new breed of digital villain makes my heady junior high days of trading pilfered Apple 2 games on 5 1/4 inch floppies looks pretty tame by comparison. 🙂

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