I don’t have anything to add to the latest Weiner relevations (that he continued to be an internet horn dog even after he was very publicly busted for same), but I think the online treatment of this event is … interesting. Especially the pictures.
Small sample:
Draw your own conclusions (all screenshots ~ 9pm CDT 7/23/2013)
I dunno. Do we have the beginnings of the next “The Good Wife”?
And by “the family,” I mean the computer tech community.
And by “a death,” I mean a loss of sorts.
We’ve had a few recently.
The computer world is relatively young. Whether you mark its beginning in the 1940s with ENIAC and Bletchly Park – WWII efforts, or the advent of Unix/C in the early 1970s (and resulting mainframes/heavy iron), or even the advent of the personal computer/internet in 1980s & 1990s – the computer industry is young.
While the industry is growing like kudzu, it still takes some time to where it’s so old that one notices the passing of entrenched players, be they tech, software, people or protocols (remember GOPHER??). We’re getting to that critical mass, which is why the passings noted above are, well, notable.
Alias – Season OneThe pilot of this show – a two-hour premier – is, in many ways, the best pilot I’ve seen since The West Wing. Smart, sexy, kick-ass and so on.
I’d heard a lot about this series (debuted in 2001), but never got around to seeing same until recently.
Worth watching.
Update: Plot late s1 and s2 silly. So much so that I’m going to have to think hard and long before watching any other episodes. Sad.
I’ve only had a smartphone (iPhone 4s) for about 18 months, but it’s definitely changed how I do a bunch of stuff on my “phone.”
I even use it – on occasion – for phone calls!
I’m not at all a mobile power user, and that’s sometimes a good thing – you see that others have created work-arounds/excuses for lack of conventional desktop activity. And power users often have all sorts of reasons as to why is or that isn’t mobile native.
Stuff that should be there (mobile) but isn’t. (To me.)
My current gripe: Search within a search
Example 1 – IMDB.com rocks; I use it all the time. I think I like the mobile app (for the most part) better than the desktop experience in many ways.
But here is how I often use IMDB: Watching some show. Who is that? Hit the TV episode/movie on IMBD (mobile or desktop), and then wait until I know that character’s name: On desktop, hit Cntr-F or whatever and get highlights on character called, for example, “Linus.” (I just saw Argo, listed 219 actors: with search, no biggie. Scroll/flick to see all of those WITHOUT highlighting/anchors/whatever…icky.)
No equivalent for mobile. Have to scroll through and find, potentially, which Linus is the actor you remember (to get filmography so you can see why you did/didn’t know this actor).
Example 2 – We recently used a smartphone voice search to find a Mexican restaurant in a certain city. Didn’t want to say name of restaurant, because will voice recognize the foreign name – and do I have the foreign name correct?? Like with IMDB, got a list (with links to call and so on…awesome), but in a browser, I’d get results and then do a secondary search of those results (’cause most search today is for the first page of results…another story).
Just a thought – and the secondary search (the Control/Apple-F or whatever) could easily be a search (voice, preferably) within the search via mobile.
But – right now – I don’t see it.
And – if it’s there and I just don’t see it – well, that’s a problem, too. And not just for me.
The actor James Gandolfini, perhaps best know as Tony Soprano on the TV series The Sopranos, died unexpectedly today at the age of 51.
Here’s how CNN.com reported same:
Here’s NbcNews.com’s take:
Which is more “journalistic’ (not to mention respectful) of the two?
Sometime last year, I became aware of an iPhone (I’m on 4s) weather app called “Dark Sky.”
I downloaded, and was blown away. It’s not your traditional weather app (Temp/Humidity etc), but it was more of a forecast app: It would say “Light rain in 20 minutes” – and it would be correct!
A month or two later – I dunno – I ran across a mention that the Dark Sky folks had a web site for weather forecasting, Forecast.io.
It’s amazing.
Totally accurate? Nope.
Impressive in its depth? Yep.
Slick design? Yep deux.
One of the things that caught my (nerdy) eyes was that they had an API of weather data – and free for the casual user (1000 free hits per day; each 10k after that $1!).
So I signed up, and got to work integrating it into my geistlinger.com site.
The fun part – and the rough part – was integration entailed the following to make it “work” for me:
For me, that’s fun. And right now it works.
Whoo-hoo.
Next: Geo-location, so I can display weather where you are, not where I am. Hmm…good thing?
I needs to do more work with APIs – I love Google Maps, Forecast.io is great. I’ve got to delve into more mashups – work, but fun (dorky) work.
OK, Yahoo! has powered the weather iOS app since I got my iPhone (4s).
Yahoo! has a new app for weather – I believe it was released 4/18/2013 – and it is awesome.
Blows the old, built-in app out of the water.
The old app – on the left – has info and so on.
The new app – on the right – is sexier, and integrates (Yahoo-owned) Flickr pics. Brilliant.
On the plus side, the new app adds way more weather info – in a sexier way – and loses, for the most part, none of the original weather app.
On the negative side, it doesn’t give a forecast upon load – have to “drill in” for that. No downside, to me.
Oddly, the new weather app reminds me of an Android screen in look & feel to it – like Samsung phones. A departure for iOS stuff.
Is it just me?
As horrific – and just plain bat-shit insane – as was yesterday’s bombing at the finish line of the annual Boston Marathon, there was one good takeaway from the event: Patton Oswalt’s Facebook response to the act.
In part, Oswalt said:
I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”
…
But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out.
…
We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.
(Read the full post.)
Well written.
Actually, I did wait.
One of my favorite songs in recent memory is Mumford & Son’s I Will Wait – and, at the Grammys this year, they gave what I consider to be a kick-ass performance of the song. Note: I don’t watch the Grammys, but I kept reading about what a good performance it was…so I sought it out.
Yeah, the Grammys were about six or so weeks ago, and I finally found a clip that I’m comfortable embedding.
Trust me, it’s worth the wait. Just four guys (and a few horns) pile-driving through this live performance. The lead singer is also using a foot pedal to play a bass drum.
As I said, it’s a favorite song. This performance outshines the song.
No disrespect meant by the title, it’s just that the upcoming concave of Cardinals to pick the next Catholic Pope has had something like Super Bowl levels of press.
Agreed, it’s a somewhat big deal – every Papal election is.
This one – which begins tomorrow – is quite different, however.
For the first time is, oh, 600 years, a sitting Pope has resigned (not died), and that is the reason a new Pope is needed.
The Catholic Church in particular – and many faiths overall – has come under fire in recent years for both the sexual abuse atrocities and for its increasingly conservative stance in a world that has begun (begun) to embrace beliefs that fall outside normal Vatican doctrine: gay marriage (well, gays in general); women in the workplace, including religious orders (i.e. female priests and such); no clear message that science is not evil, that faith and empirical-based systems can co-exist.
Let’s see who gets the red shoes, and what he does while he’s wearing same.
Yahoo’s new (most recent?) CEO, Marissa Mayer, made waves recently when she announced a termination of Yahoo’s work-from-home policy.
The internet promptly went insane, with most of the commentators I read were, for the most part, against Mayer’s decision, saying a telecommuting ban flies in the face of the new workplace ethos, especially for a tech company. (You can argue whether Yahoo is a tech or media company, and – frankly – that’s one of its problems. It doesn’t know what it is.) Some took it a little too personally, noting that Mayer – a new mother – had a nursery built next to her office so she could be near the newborn. Would the moms and dads who relished the work-from-home so they could be near their children be afforded the same type of child arrangements? While a valid point, Mayer is CEO, and with that comes perks and responsibility. Get over it.
Those in favor of Mayer’s move wrote mainly about how Yahoo has become a series of competing silos – the Finance guys vs. the Search dudes vs. the Sports division and so on. This isn’t really healthy, and if making folks rub shoulders with each other every day helps ease the tensions between the silos, well, that’s a good thing.
I think my favorite response to Mayer’s move was by Slate.com’s Farhad Manjoo, who titled his piece, “Marissa Mayer Has Made a Terrible Mistake.”
Guess what side of the debate Manjoo’s on?
Now, I respect (and like!) Manjoo as both a techie and a solid journalist. But his screed – there’s no other polite word for it – comes off as a rant trying to defend his own turf: Manjoo’s a telecommuter. You can almost see the spittle hitting his screen as he pounds out his article, filled with such gems as:
Mayer is going to regret this decision. It’s myopic, unfriendly, and so boneheaded that I worry it’s the product of spending too much time at the office. (She did, after all, build a nursery next to her office to house her new baby).
So, tell me how you really feel about this. (And note the nursery reference?) And this:
This decision suggests that Mayer doesn’t understand one of the most basic ideas about managing workers—that different people work in different ways, and that some kinds of pursuits are inhibited, rather than improved, by time in the office.
I think Mayer is fully aware of different strokes for different folks, but let’s get back to the basic issue: Whatever the underlying cause(s), Yahoo isn’t working well. Telecommuters/siloing could be a part of the problem; let’s throw that against the wall and see what sticks.
Manjoo also asserts that Mayer doesn’t understand how creativity – such as what he does, write – works. Again, I disagree – I don’t for a minute believe that Mayer doesn’t understand that some (not all) creative types are slowed by being office bound. He had earlier tried to bolster his work-from-home argument by pointing to a study about how Chinese call-center workers (warning – PDF) were more productive when they could telecommute. Well, there’s an art to every job, but work in a call center is about as uncreative as any job out there, so how is this helping Manjoo’s argument?
And this goes back to “What is Yahoo?” This question was posed in 2010 to Carol Bartz – then Yahoo’s CEO – by TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington, and Bartz told Arrington to “fuck off.”
More to Manjoo’s “creative” argument: How many of the telecommuters are creative types? Are bean counters, UI/UX experts and database engineers remoting in? Why not bring them in physically instead of virtually?
What really made Manjoo’s article an awesome exercise in silliness was how he simultaneously exercised great journalistic integrity – he contacted Yahoo for a response on the end-of-remote memo – but then ignored what he was told and just continued on with his rant against Mayer’s decision.
Yahoo’s response was perfect, and if people can understand it, Mayer’s move makes sense, even if you don’t agree with it.
Yahoo’s response?
“We don’t discuss internal matters. This isn’t a broad industry view on working from home—this is about what is right for Yahoo!, right now.”
“Right for Yahoo!, right now.”
Not “we’re never allowing telecommuting ever again.”
Not “we think telecommuters are slackers.”
Not “we think the rest of the industry is wrong on this issue.”
They are just trying something – anything – to slow the decline of the still-popular web brand before there’s nothing left to do but look it up on the Internet Archive.
Will this new policy – even if temporary – result in losses of some Yahoos! that the company would like to retain? Absolutely.
Will this also trim some of the kruft, the actual slackers (there are some everywhere, even if everyone’s in-house)? Absolutely.
There are pros and cons to all business decisions, and I don’t believe Mayer made this decision lightly. Redesigning the home page? A big deal inside Yahoo!, but not to end users. An end of telecommuting? She knew this edict would light up the intertubes.
I’ve worked remotely (just a day here and there), and I’ve worked with full- and part-time remote workers. As Manjoo correctly points out, for some workers this works, but it’s not for everyone.
I’m personally on Mayer’s side for this issue, for Yahoo! at this time. I don’t see how this can hurt.