Category: Things

Sure, tools for ad-blocking and checking the weather and seeing if there’s a new version of the app are all well and good. They do not compare to the Stop! Hammertime! button. It replaces the boring ‘stop’ button with a HAMMERTIME button, which does something MUCH MUCH BETTER than actually stopping. Requires sound.

Dear MTV.Com:

I just watched the MADE episode where Samantha is made into a Girly-girl (off-schedule; I have TiVO). The show said, check mtv.com for more. So, I:
* Visited MTV.COM
* Switched from Firefox to Internet Explorer
* Installed a new Flash upgrade
* Rebooted
* Visited the MTV Overdrive
* Crashed my browser
* Restarted my browser
* Visited MTV Overdrive
* Discovered that Overdrive Life After Made only shows info for the latest MADE episode.

That’s an awful lot of work for a disappointment.

Note: the same lack of episode information applies to Pimp My Ride: what was fan reaction to that C-10 Truck they put all those monitors into? I just spent most of this afternoon watching Pimp My Ride on Tivo and I want to know how Heather has fared with a truck that no longer holds her garden implements because it’s so full of electronics, and what fan reaction was!

Look, I know my life is empty. But your website doesn’t help me in my quest to forget that fact. I’m going back to beer.

Yours,
Verbal at Secretly Ironic Dot Com

People don’t believe me when I tell them, but it’s true: Nissan really does make a car called the Armada. The car is as absurd as it sounds. It is approximately the size of some apartments in this city, and of some cities in Europe.

Why pick a name like Armada? Why, to convey that this is no mere land-yacht, no sir! It’s a whole FLEET! I assume it handles like an armada going down in a storm off the coast of Spain. Or like the oil tanker required to fuel it– the 5.6 liter, 8-cylinder engine means you’ll be doing as little as 13 MPG in city driving. The 4×4 LE edition weighs 5,612 pounds, and the titans are priced to move at $35,000 to $40,000.

Is there a better way to proclaim to the world that you are an asshole? I mean, aside from driving a Hummer?

Someone told me recently that Tiger Woods is the first-ever sports billionaire. Why not Jordan? I guessed that Jordan signed his licensing deals earlier on, so they may not have been as favorable. Or perhaps a year of golf tournament prizes add up to more than a year’s worth of basketball salary. And basketball doesn’t appeal to bankers, so Jordan never got licensed for much beyond sports gear, cereal, and toys, while Woods reps for Nike, Cadillac, and Accenture.

While in 2004 Woods ranked as the top-paid athlete, pulling in $10M directly from golfing plus $70M in endorsements, Jordan certainly isn’t doing badly. He was ranked fourth, at $35M/year, — all in endorsement revenues, since he’s been retired for some time now. $35M/yr is not bad for a retired guy.

Like technology journalism, a lot of motorcycle press focuses on cool crap, and pretty much ignores anything useful. Also it often requires you to pay for it. Good free sites include: Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly, Motorcycle USA (see especially this article about why being in a hurry can be fatal), the Canada Motorcycle Guide Online, and Australia Motorcycle News (MCNews.com.au), which has a great review of the 2004 Thruxton I have been eyeing covetously.

As Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games have become big communities and big business, they have attracted their share of friendly share-and-share-alike nerds and bottom-feeding sharks.

One of the nice nerds set up a website called Thottbot, which, in addition to providing a giant database of hints, tips, tricks, maps, item statistics, quest details, etc. also has message boards and some RSS aggregation stuff and other neat details.

Of course, someone set up Thotbot, with one T, which is a scam run by an ad network targeted at MMORPG players, and somehow affiliated with a site that deals in virtual merchandise for real money.

Signs you’ve become a genuine trend and a useful web presence: someone starts trying to squat on easy misspellings of your domain name, polluting the information stream, and shitting all over your good name.

Fortunately, that’ll never happen to me.

I’ve written before about bad application names.

WHO NAMES THEIR APP CADAVER? Are you just a jerk?

The Poppler PDF library for Linux is hardly any better. (See the Futurama episode “The Problem with Popplers” for the reference. Although on the other hand, it’s kind of funny to call it Poppler.

But unless you work for the CSI: Miami software development team, your app should not be called Cadaver.

The New Yorker has published an excellent 3-part series on climate change called “The Climate of Man.” The first two parts are online now; the third should be showing up shortly. It’s chilling and freaky and it points to a Jared Diamond-like conclusion that humanity, and in particular the United States, have decided to totally ignore all warnings and drive the world into disaster and death.

Quite honestly, I’m looking forward to it. Most of these things are looking to happen, or start to happen, some time in my lifetime: we’ll see bigger hurricanes, encroaching desert, weird sea current changes, malaria spreading northwards… It’ll be exciting and I’ll get to be smug about it and say “I told you so.”

Whoo yeah!

My friend Keith had this sore shoulder and got tired of lugging around his laptop and wondered, just how small can this stuff get and still be worthwhile? And so Padpaw got started. This isn’t just a “tiny laptop” project– it’s “what kinds of web services can be added to a tiny laptop to make it much cheaper and much more powerful?”

Museum of Lies.