Apparently tomorrow will be the “National Day of Unplugging”, when people who are ready to “take the unplug challenge” will obey the call to “put down your cell phone, sign out of email, stop your Facebook and Twitter updates”. But this isn’t just some kind of stunt or willpower exercise; there’s a point to it. […]
Tag Archives: rants
“Unplug From the Net to Connect With People”? Why Not Drive an SUV to Fight Global Warming?
Thursday, March 3rd, 2011 – 9:13 pm
Motion Distraction — Worse Than the <Blink> Tag
Tuesday, October 19th, 2010 – 8:46 pm
Once upon a time, Netscape invented the <blink> tag. And people saw the <blink> tag, and put it on their web pages, and thought it was good. And the rest of us saw the <blink> tags on those pages, and screamed, “No, you morons, it is bad! It distracteth the user mightily, for lo, our […]
What Does “Don’t Be Evil” Mean Now?
Tuesday, August 24th, 2010 – 1:08 pm
It’s awfully convenient for Google that their famed corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”, doesn’t actually specify or define what counts as “evil”. And without any definition, they’re pretty much free to do anything they want, and just declare it not-evil. Now, some of the things they’ve done have just been misguided. For example, I really, […]
How Failtastic Can One Phone Be? Just Ask Palm About the Prē!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010 – 5:23 pm
Here are a few things that I consider to be basic requirements for functionality in a smartphone, along with notes on how my Palm Prē fails to deliver: When I press the power switch, the phone should turn on. (Assuming the battery is charged, of course. And I’m willing to accept that a modern smartphone […]
Why I’m Ditching Slackware
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 – 1:37 pm
I went to find a package to install Git. The page at http://www.slackware.com/packages/ still says that the Slackware Package Browser has been moved to http://packages.slackware.it/ — it’s said this for years, and I keep wondering when they’re going to move the package browser back onto the main Slackware site. But this time, when I followed that […]
A “Blog” Is a Whole Bunch of Posts
Tuesday, December 29th, 2009 – 2:13 pm
This is rapidly becoming one of my pet peeves, right up there with misuse of the word “literally”: This thing I’m writing right now? This single entry in my blog? This isn’t “a blog”. It’s “an entry” or “a post”. Sort of like that piece of paper in a book is a page, not a […]
Does Wanting Privacy Make You Evil?
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 – 4:37 pm
According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” This is the same stupid excuse we always hear from people who want to invade everyone’s privacy, and I’m sick of it. Incidentally, we need a good term […]
OpenOffice Writer UX Warts
Monday, October 19th, 2009 – 10:30 am
The more I play with OpenOffice.org’s Writer, the more confused I am by some of the odd UI/UX warts in it. Here are the ones that are on my mind this morning: When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do […]
A webOS 1.2 Upgrade Experience That Couldn’t Be Much Worse
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 – 11:42 am
The following is a copy of what I just posted on the Palm Prē forums: I woke up this morning to find that the webOS 1.2 upgrade had been pushed to my Prē automatically. I was happy, until the reboot finished and I saw: Signed Out You are no longer signed in to your Palm […]
Palm Is Lying, Not Just Spying
Friday, August 14th, 2009 – 12:48 pm
So, Palm was recently caught spying on its users. Major kudos, by the way, to Joey Hess, who initially broke this story. For those who haven’t kept up, various other news outlets and blogs have also been reporting on it. Palm’s response to this problem is a single paragraph of corporate PR-speak: Palm takes privacy […]