Posts tagged “Apple”

• “When I see a guy alone at a café without a device open, I assume that he’s either got the iPhone antenna problem or that he’s a serial killer… I’m almost never alone with my thoughts anymore.” (from Blogging from the Shower, by Dave Pell)
• I really love these vintage social media advertisements. Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce would be proud. (See also: The Periodic Table of Mad Men)
• The last six pictures from July’s massive oil spill in China are terrifying and heartbreaking.
• It’s pretty tough to argue that Apple doesn’t do everything better and smarter than everyone else, especially when you look at how amazing they made a simple battery charger. (I want one.)
• Research proves that happiness is probably not as expensive as you thought.
• “A 95-page court ruling on a college volleyball budget sounds like a Monty Python sketch — because Title IX itself has become a Monty Python sketch… Title IX strictures that were needed a generation ago simply aren’t needed any longer. But because no government program is ever shut down, they slog on, causing asinine intrusions.”
• It’s just not a real party until one of the guests decides to start smashing watermelon fruit bowls on the heads of the dancers.
• I absolutely must get a speech bubble whiteboard lamp for my office.

Bonus: Five Feeds I Recommend

1. Snarkmarket (subscribe)
2. shooshee (subscribe)
3. A Conversation on Cool (subscribe)
4. the impossible cool (subscribe)
5. All Day, Everyday (subscribe)

• I love that Snoop Dogg recorded an ode to Sookie Stackhouse.
• If you want to really know what the difference is between Apple and every other technology company, read what Daring Fireball said about FaceTime. Just remember that most of us — including me, and I’ve been a computer programmer for almost twenty years — are “normal” people.
• Snooki Saved My Marriage: “[E]very combination of two good things does not equal a peanut butter and chocolate moment.”
• The Vatican has officially endorsed The Blues Brothers and said it should be recommended viewing for Catholics everywhere.
• A Field Guide to WiFi Users at Starbucks (archived)
• How I Lost My 1K Status on United is a great story.
• Who doesn’t love other people’s cats?
• “…[E]mployees who volunteered felt more connected to their companies and were more likely to work harder on tasks, …spoke positively about their employer in public and were less likely to daydream, cyber loaf or take extra time off work.”
• It is no surprise at all that Jeff Demps is number one on Heisman Pundit’s Ten Fastest College Football Players for 2010.
• The Big 12 somehow managed to stay alive.
• EDSBS compares sports leagues to religions, and makes sense.
• Did USC get railroaded?

• Literary Tattoos
• The Periodic Table Of Super-Powers
• Dale Peterson is not screwing around. (He’s got my vote.)
• If you like The Big Picture, you’ll love The Big Caption.
• Apple, Inc. v. Apple Corps: Why The Beatles Are Not in the iTunes Store
• Never Punt with Tebow: A Mathematical Analysis of 4th Down
• The fastest man in college football is University of Florida running back Jeff Demps, who helped the Gators win the SEC outdoor track championships by running the 100m dash in 10.06 seconds. (That’s just a half-second “slower” than world record holder Usain Bolt.)

• Building an airplane looks like fun.
• When the biggest problem in personal technology is that the leading company is getting a little too exceptional, it’s a good problem to have.
• Mouth-to-snout resuscitation saves lives!
• The “happy” version of The Shining is still one of my all-time Internet favorites.
• The Best Bob Dylan Album Calculator
• One of the cool things about Tebow being drafted by the Broncos is that he’ll still be rockin’ the orange and blue.
• R.I.P. one of my heroes: Dick Giordano

• Drop everything and go watch Teenage Zombies right now.
• The Green Day rock opera album American Idiot is now a Broadway show.
• After a grueling 58 hours of continuous play, John McAllister of Seattle, Washington officially became the best Asteroids player on the planet.
• I also spend a fair amount of my life trying to determine what went wrong, so I can appreciate a stroke of luck.
• Well this is pretty crazy: There are a bunch of functioning oil wells hidden around Los Angeles. The first one they feature is about two miles from my house; it’s covered by giant paintings of flowers right next to a high school football field. (I always thought it was some funky art project!)
• A few drinks and a little idle curiosity have led to the discovery of a hidden chapel under a family home.
• This is what I keep wondering about Dancing with the Stars: “Oh you mean world champions like Jerry Rice and Emmitt Smith and Ocho Cinco, who make millions because of their brilliant hand-eye coordination and ability to move in a rhythm with exact timing and precision? How will that translate to dancing?”
• It has a double penis, is as long as a tall human, and lives in a heavily populated area of the Philippines. Yet somehow the giant lizard Varanus bitatawa has gone undetected by science until now.
• I’ve been skeptical of solar power for a long time. There are simply too many cloudy days. (Not here in LA, but certainly in Florida.) But I’ve always been a fan of wind. [ed: I have since changed my stance! Solar power is awesome!]
• The reason why Apple is going to win — again — with the iPad, is because the overwhelming majority of people don’t care about Flash, software, files, directories, RAM, or whether their machine has a CD-ROM drive. They just want stuff that works.

There’s an excellent Kia Sorento commercial right now featuring a sock monkey and a monster (and some other kid toys). They go bowling and the sock monkey gets a tattoo. The best part, though, is the song. It’s How You Like Me Now, by The Heavy. You can find it on the album The House That Dirt Built on iTunes.

Sidebar: I just noticed that the latest version of iTunes now lets you easily post a song or app to Twitter or Facebook. (Savvy guys, those Apple engineers.) But here’s something extraordinarily odd: The URL that iTunes provides for the link is absurdly long. The one for the song mentioned above is http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/the-house-that-dirt-built/id328490302, which is seventy characters. Twitter only allows 140 characters! Why in the world isn’t Apple running their own URL-shortening service?

• It’s still early, but I think I’ve found a winner for Best Site of 2010:
  Nelson HaHa.
• Without a Single Throw, Tebow Rules the Combine
• Unrelated Captions are what you get when the pictures have nothing to do with their captions.
• Put your flight jacket on one of these really cool airplane hangers.
• “Inspection showed multiple lacerations and puncture wounds all over the body which could not have been caused by any other attacker than a bottle-nosed dolphin.”
• Matthew David Lopez, 18, was taken to jail on charges of wearing a mask or hood on a public road after the age of 16 years old and resisting arrest without violence.
• The Boneyard
• Apple has a new great section on their site that teaches people how to switch from PC to Mac.
• “Jenny McCarthy is back in Time magazine this week to warn more parents about vaccines and blaming medicine for giving her son autism, even though there’s no scientific evidence of any kind to support those statements, and mountains of data proving she is 100 percent wrong. … [D]octors must shake their head and think, ‘I can’t believe I’m arguing with a chick who is only here because she sold pictures of her vagina to a magazine.'”

• General Stuff
  • My dad has posted more gorgeous shots of New England to his Flickr feed.
  • Nothing is over until we decide it is!
  • Suck it, Michael. The Beatles are one notch above the King of Pop for most-viewed Wikipedia article.
  • How the hell does a car’s differential work? I never understood it… and then I watched this General Motors 1930s tutorial which explains it wonderfully. (link via Kottke)
  • “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” – MLK, Jr.
  • Dooce is still writing the best stuff on the Internet. Seriously. If you haven’t yet read everything she’s ever written, take a few months off work and go do that right now. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll wonder why she doesn’t have her own television show.
  • What did you think you were going to find at hiddenpassageway.com?
  • What’s the business benefit of free bread at restaurants? (AskMeFi is just awesome, although some of the questions people ask can be quite depressing.)
  • My wife is sure to be thrilled to see LA Weekly’s list of 99 Essential L.A. Restaurants.
  • Yes, you could build your house with LEGO blocks. But why?
  • Pizza Hut Fails Basic Grammar, another excellent post from the witty One Step Forward
• Techie Stuff
  • Check out these cool grunge peeling sticker social media icons.
  • Ten ways to stop spam in WordPress covers the basics and includes a few new tricks I didn’t know.
  • Make your Mac prettier with a glossy dock.

• General Stuff
  • If you’re taking any medicine for any reason at all, you should read this article.
  • Abusive relationships like this one just suck.
  • Perspective
  • Wired has a great article all about craigslist, if you like that site.
  • Whole Foods has crazy expensive groceries, but terrific thoughts on healthcare reform.
  • I had no idea that the word avocado comes from the Nahuatl word ãhuacatl (“testicle”), a reference to the shape of the fruit.
  • Think that we’re not living in the future yet? Read The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data from Google. Or take a look at how you could use your iPhone as a restaurant HUD. And start saving up for that jetpack.
  • Here’s your cute kitten fix for the day.
  • You can convey quite a bit with just three frames. (The ones from Jaws, The Goonies, and Jurassic Park are my favorites.)
• Gator Stuff
  • Bill Belichick presents a stone face to the world, but succeeds in part because he is open to change. For the past two years, the Patriots have run an offense that is all but identical to Urban Meyer‘s Florida spread.
  • Stopping Tim Tebow isn’t easy, but it is possible.
  • Kirk Herbstreit on Tebow
  • Boom! – must-watch YouTube vid of big Gator hits
  • “Tim Tebow’s proficiency as a passer and rusher have placed him among the all-time greats after only two seasons as a starter,” according to statistical analysis done by Sports Illustrated’s Stewart Mandel.
• Techie Stuff
  • Oh, hey! I didn’t realize you could create animated images with Photoshop!
  • Apple did a very smart thing when it priced Snow Leopard below the cost of a typical family visit to the movies.
  • Do you use any of the out-of-touch computer terms on this list at your office?