College Rankings

Everyone who thinks about colleges knows about the US News & World Report College Rankings. Maybe they’re fair, maybe they’re not. Slate accused them of fiddling with their criteria to make the numbers change more often than they otherwise would.

Washington Monthly has a different list, rating colleges as measures of social mobility: who helps the most poor kids get good jobs? Whose students are more likely to be working in public service or for the public good? That kind of thing. The results are quite interesting.

Dan Savage Podcast: Awesome

Dan Savage is going to be doing a call-in podcast!

Have you ever wanted to ask me a question but lost your nerve or sobered up before you could send me an e-mail? Well, now you’ll be able to drunk-dial me and record a question from the comfort of that bar, washroom, bedroom, or dungeon. The number: 206-201-2720. Call and ask, I’ll listen and advise. When the podcast launches I’ll announce it in this space.

Formal Events

Over the past year or so, Bookdwarf and I have been invited to about one wedding every two months. And last night, we began to think that the spurt of weddings was coming to a close.

This morning, we got a “Save the Date” announcement.

User Interface Arguments

My boss Halley and I just had a major disagreement. I sent her an IM with the link to the Huffington Post’s parody of the NYT as seen by right-wingers, and she said she wanted me to email it to her. She wanted to send it to a friend, and she couldn’t copy and paste from IM on a Macintosh. I said, what?

She said, there’s no right-click, so how do you copy and paste?

I said, Command-C. She said, what? I said, select the text you want to copy and press Command-C. I mean, you could hold Control while clicking to get the context menu, and she said no no no, I am not going to learn some keyboard shortcut.

I said, it’s the most commonly known keyboard shortcut: Cmd-A for all, Cmd-C for copy, Cmd-X for cut, and Cmd-V for paste. Everyone knows those. People can argue about the intuitiveness Cmd-Alt-Esc for Force Quit, or Cmd-` for switch-windows-within-an-application, but Cmd-C is the most obvious keyboard shortcut in the world.

She said, I want to do it with one finger on a mouse. If I have to use the keyboard I won’t do it.