OneSeventeen

Wow... I would so much rather just have (perhaps a subset of) the actual data always on my display. I don't have an iPhone, but there's some room on my little screen that could show -90 when I'm in a cave and, like, -9 most of the time (or whatever it may be).

Seriously, people, are we supposed to be so dumb that we can't do that kind of judgment call on our own? I thought that that kind of thing was what the human mind was supposed to be good at and that computers are supposed to be bad at, yet here we are having a phone do it for us?

The USC loss highlights something to me: It was hard for me to tell what information was being displayed. I totally missed the news on that game (fail) so I saw USC in bold and assumed they'd won and didn't know what the big red box meant.

Maybe I'm just a space cadet and that's not actually confusing, but I found it unintuitive. I'd bold the winner after a game has been played and maybe make a note in smaller type below that the prediction was the other guy. And keep the red box.

Anyway, interesting idea.

And, by contrast, this is why computers are so slow at some decisions: no biases or heuristics, no input prioritization, etc.

I read a tip, I don't remember where anymore sadly, about taking a key word from the question, adding some password-like string to it and calling that your answer.

So: "What is your pet's name?" n0tm4hp4s5w3rd-pets-name and: "What street did you grow up on?" n0tm4hp4s5w3rd-street

You still have to remember an arbitrary string, it is SLIGHTLY more accessible than mashing randomly, and certainly more secure than putting the real answer.

I'm currently learning Flex, which I guess means I'm learning ActionScript? I have to say I'm not enjoying it as much as I enjoy Ruby.

That's hilarious. I think the best part is where it points out that since particles have positive and negative charges and 1 + -1 = 0, then the universe must have been made "from nothing". Astounding.

Doesn't it say something specifically about not wanting marketing pitches?

I agree that this is the big decision point. I'm a Ruby guy and I've looked at Python several times and it never really stuck (I could work on a project that use Python, it just wouldn't be as fun as a project using Ruby to me). I could complain about various technical details, but if I'm entirely honest it would just be minute, meaningless, bitchy detail nitpicks.

No kidding. Great reality hack.

I'd be interested in discussing it. If you (or anyone else) are, too, feel free to email me at the address in my bio. Thanks!

Is there--understand, here, that I don't have a blog and haven't blogged, so I have no idea--is there blog software that will do this for you already? Like, handle a different URL, css styles, etc. but point to the same database? That sounds like it would be really handy.

Though the article was interesting, it's nothing that isn't said a lot: quality communication is necessary and also hard; quality communication between more people is commensurately harder.

On another note: the link to hitmeuplater.com was neat. I hadn't see it before and think it's a cool idea.

Seconded. The whole verb/noun discussion played into my Linguistics background nicely. Now I... get it.

Yeah. Way to fail completely at your job, Keyes. This is a guy who can't imagine anyone using his product in a way different from the way he uses it. Fail.

Concur. I think the most impressive thing on here was Fez. Other stuff either looked like it wouldn't be terribly useful to actually use, wasn't real or both.

Yeah. Functional programming. I "understood" it for a good while before, rather suddenly, something clicked and I realized what the big deal was all about.

"Most of the time when people use qualifiers like that it's to express some type of instinct - which seems to be what the author is against."

Hah! Wonderful sentence. Love the irony. Also concur. Sorry if this is a bit off topic, but I couldn't let such quality wordsmithing go unheralded.

I had a pretty horrible experience with an airline recently (I won't regale y'all) and it has had me thinking about ways to fix air travel in the US. I had a few ideas on how an outside company might help, but I don't think they're actually tenable. Will it take the collapse of several major airlines for someone on the "inside" to fix stuff? The article posted here a while ago about Alaskan was pretty heartening.

The link broke for me, but I just went up-URL to see the post. So awesome. I just... this is amazing.

Similarly, have y'all seen mobaganda.com? It is doing the simple == better thing, as well. I notice you guys seem (I haven't actually used either site yet) to have a few more features. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.

I think the assertion was not that they should get better treatment, but that they should get equal treatment. I may have misinterpreted, of course.

As the article points out... Or else they'll be more likely to be lured away and, while they're with you, give bad customer service, etc. I certainly know that's true.

I worked in a retail chain a few years ago. At the first store I worked at, the manager went out of his way to take care of us hourly folks. We felt appreciated and were willing to put in extra effort when it was needed. After I moved and went to a different store, I discovered that this wasn't corporate policy. In fact, they seemed to go out of their way to treat employees (even managers and asst. managers) like replaceable cogs. It really lowered my own drive to perform well and eventually was a major contributing factor in my leaving (when I did and under what terms, anyway).

Do I really need to be as popular as YouTube (even in a different market) to be a success? Maybe this is what you meant by "different standards of 'getting somewhere.'" In many arenae, there is some company that has a massive, massive chunk of the user base tied up. You don't have to displace them, if you want to make a similar (but different!) app. You just have to get enough going to make some money, yes?

We have a bus system that I love, so "Yes".

The company that runs them tries a sort of service like you've described, but I have anecdotal evidence that the trick is no one wants to drive. Part of it is that they will provide a vehicle and so they want a sole person to be responsible for it, which isn't applicable to y'all. The other thing is that a lot of people are like me: traffic makes me an angry person and I'd much rather play around on my laptop or read than drive.

I don't want to sound like a nay-sayer. I definitely think that there's a market for this. However, I'd expect some strong regional trending (which is to say poor adoption in some cities and awesome adoption in others).

I, personally, prefer Ruby because it thinks the same way I do (if that makes sense). So that's what I'd pick. But Python would do you just as well, if you like the way it reads, etc. better. They key, I think, is to not be too worried about speed up front. Get your thing working in Python, say, and then do testing (another comment mentioned this) and rewrite what's slowest in C. I guess I'm warning against premature optimization.

Second this. Instead of looking for a project in a language you're familiar with. Maybe look for a project solving a problem you're familiar with in a language you're not. Then you'll have learned a new language as well. After that, you can look for a new interesting problem in your new language where, presumably, more open source stuff is going on.

Also, I don't know how uncommon that perfect storm is. Isn't one of Starbucks' primary products convenience? They're all over the place so that it's always really easy to change your plans to include a "Stop in at Starbucks" step. So, not that they've targeted DD for overflow pick-up, but they've positioned themselves so that whenever someone is thinking they might want some coffee and wherever they're standing doesn't have it, they don't have to go far. DD just needs to keep from being a place like that.

Yeah. No kidding. Honestly? Fuck that. ;)

As someone who's considered this tactic (I'm some years away from having children, but planning seems like a good idea), I'm interested in how that's working out. Have you ruined cursing for your kid as some people imply this tactic would?