One of the weird consequences a publicly-known fast food obsession housed in a tiny body is that friends keep sending me tasty things like turbaconducken and This Is Why You’re Fat.
A friend e-mailed this gem from Canada.
Yum!!!
Halle is interning at Kiva, which, given her personality, I figure is her dream internship.
Kiva is a microfinance site for the poor that allows anyone to give flat-rate microloans via PayPal. As a coincidence of the “I seem to have a lot of cash” and my New Year’s resolution to be a more responsible person, I’ve recently started to put a tiny fraction of my income into Kiva. You can view my lender page here to see that I currently participate in 17 microloans.
I mention all this because Kiva will be sponsoring a Developers Happy Hour this Thursday at their headquarters in San Francisco. Considering I give 5% of my money lent back to Kiva, I’m going for the drinks. 🙂
(Find out more about the concept from Muhammad Yunus’s Nobel lecture, the FrontLine program on social entrepreurship, conservative columnist Nicholas Kristof’s editorial in the New York Times, and the books Banker To the Poor, and Creating a World Without Poverty.)
From flackette:
“To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting”
Alas, it seems that the Kindle has backed up my colon!
Shit! I hate to bitch, but I’d have used more expletives if I knew you were fucking tracking it. I mean I have my own hashtag, you bastards! 🙂
(Nice to see “twat” made the cursebird list. Unfortunately, I only contributed to it in my dreams.)
The CableBox
I like to wait at least a day to mull over a purchase, sale or no sale. But I was waiting months on a purchase of some stuff, so tacking on a <a href="http://www.bluelounge.com/cablebox.php" title="CableBox—Blue LoungeBlueLounge CableBox (or two) to my A+R order didn’t seem such a bad idea.
Usually snap buying decisions are a bad idea, but this one turned out not so bad.
Who knew a bunch of plastic boxes with cutouts could do so much!
Continue reading about More shots of the CableBox after the jump
Media moguls—journalism moguls, anyway—need two sets of skills. They have to be able to select and package material from the world in a way that gives it order and narrative drive and swagger. They also have to forge, through creativity, cunning, and force, a set of arrangements with customers, competitors, governments, advertisers, production facilities, and distribution networks which can generate a lot of money. Even in an era of focus groups and marketing research, any news publication that attracts an audience has to have a personality, which means that it has to bear the stamp of a real person.
—Nicholas Lemann on Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolf Hearst, Barney Kilgore, and Rupert Murdoch in “Paper Tigers”, The New Yorker, April 13, 2009
[To a friend on what I liked about her latest blog posting.]
“It’s like the Lauren ad from Microsoft. Using the recession to talk about things holds a lot of serious interest,” I said.
“That’s what I think too,” my friend replied, “But I remember when I used to make references to it in posts for someone else, the editor would always delete them.”
“He hails from a school that’s outdated. The biggest blogs make it personal. Take Orangette—that’s a blog about cooking. Why is it one of the most popular blogs? Or ZenHabits—how did it in two years become one of the top self-help sites?
“When I write personal articles with wide application, they take off on FeedBurner.
“It’s about making it personal, without taking it personally.
“My problem is I always take it personally, 😉 ” I finished.
She laughed. “Well I already know what I’m going to write tonight!”
Just a reminder that this is the last day to Last day to purchase the MacHeist bundle. I’ve been buying these since they used to be co-produced with MacUpdate, and now it’s almost just a habit on the off chance that I might need one of the applications. Usually just needing one offsets the price of the bundle.
Just recently, everything got unlocked.
Because of this I’ve found I own a lot of duplicates. I thought I’d go over some of them just FYI for Mac Users.
Since I recently wrote about LED traffic lights, I thought some people might be interested to know that I got some EarthLED replacement light bulbs for my ambient lamp.
Here is what the lightbulb looks like:
Continue reading about More than you need to know about LED lightbulbs after the jump
Apparently one commenter found my April Fools article “ham-handed.”
ham-hand⋅ed
clumsy, inept, or heavy-handed: a ham-handed approach to dealing with people that hurts a lot of feelings.
I’m sorry that some people didn’t realize that an article was meant to show off someone else’s April Fool’s prank. I guess the snippets of code showing the joke, putting it in the “humor” category, and adding the words “april phails phools” to the URL just wasn’t enough for some people 🙁
Next time, in order to prevent hurt feelings, I’ll be sure splay across the top the words: “Look, Phails is an April Fools Joke, Please don’t take it seriously (pretty please?)” in 42-point Charcoal typeface.
…
On second thought, why bother? 37Signals has me beat in the tact and sensitivity department. Notice how they introduce Ruby on Rails as…
(And when I replied that this was madness, he kicked me into some CAT-5 ethernet cabling with the words, “THIS IS SPARTA!!!”)
(I heard that Web development is so hard that Rasmus had John Yoo write up a torture memo lest any Guantamano detainees put up a website between waterboarding sessions.)
Thank God, that I learned Ruby on Rails so I no longer have to deal with the pain of writing a SQL select.
Alexa revised their ranking system again. Data is now limited to the last six months.
I thought I’d look up my website.
As you can see, even in the last six months, we seem to be growing in the face of a declining social networking trend. That’s no surprise. we were the fastest growing social network in the United States last year in all categories (by percentage).
That’s good. But let’s look at the big boys.
Hmm, not even close (remember the graph is logarithmic). Well, at least with 19 places in the last three months, we’re still growing fast right?
There’s always a bigger fish. Congrats, Twitter. 🙂
