February 2010
13 posts
January 2010
38 posts
It appears to be a goal of the administration to free up loans to small businesses. For the sake of this comment, let me re-define Small Business as those companies with fewer than 20 employees. There are exceptions, but more often than not, the stupidest thing a business of this size can do is borrow money.
-Mark Cuban
What Happens When You Unplug from Your Internet... →
Doing this.
“But my personal reckoning has just shown me that a bunch of libertarian-leaning...”
– Anil Dash wants YOU for AMERICA (and Expert Labs)!
Anil’s going to do more for American civic engagement than most of us will ever dream of. All I can say is where do I enlist.
“For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for...”
– Fraser Speirs: Future Shock. Read it. It’s awesome. (via marco)
Tinkerer’s Sunset →
Once upon a time, Apple made the machines that made me who I am. I became who I am by tinkering. Now it seems they’re doing everything in their power to stop my kids from finding that sense of wonder. Apple has declared war on the tinkerers of the world. With every software update, the previous generation of “jailbreaks” stop working, and people have to find new ways to break into their own...
The desktop is broken
Makes so much sense in light of the iPad.
superamit:
Compared to my iPhone, my MacBook Pro has an order of magnitude more processing power, more memory, more storage space, and more screen space.
In every possible respect (except portability), my laptop’s hardware is not just superior to my iPhone, it’s far far far far superior.
And yet, for the programs and websites that I use on both my...
“No amount of insulation will get us there; only innovating our way to what is...”
– Bill Gates
Science vs. "scientific" creation at the... →
Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They’ve got all these “lenses” and things. They can see shit that’s invisible. And they stayed on at school past 14. Science has given itself millions of years, eons, to play with, but the righteous have got to get the whole lot in, home and dry,...
Todd Purdham is long on Obama →
“I don’t know if everyone in the White House understands the dangers of this moment, or the gravity of the task at hand. But I’m betting that at least one person does, and that his name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
WatchI’m in Turkey and I’m not quite sure what this ad is telling me to do.
Watchrobhuebel:
Oh really?
squashed:
When I was very young my mother drafted a letter her editor, whose name had slipped her mind. As a place holder, she wrote, “Dear Bozo”. She forgot to change this. And, when awkwardly explaining her Dear Bozo letter, she blamed me. “My kids were messing around on the computer.”
I don’t hold a grudge—because I learned a valuable lesson. Be very careful with place holders. When I’m...
Has Roger Ailes Been Fired from Fox News? →
The tragedy of the political consultant, which Ailes once was, working for Nixon and Reagan, is that consultants can never fully monetize their success. Ailes has solved that problem: He’s turned conservative politics into a paying show.
Predictions for 2010 From Freedom to Tinker →
(1) DRM technology will still fail to prevent widespread infringement. In a related development, pigs will still fail to fly.
Video of a flying pig will be taken down from youtube by a DMCA violation notice.
(4) Major newspaper content will continue to be available online for free (with ads) despite cheerleading for paywalls by Rupert Murdoch and others.
The Bing-ified WSJ will wind up...
WatchChart Wars: The Political Power of Data Visualization
From a talk at IgniteDC comes the most straightforward analysis of the importance of comprehendible data in politics and policy. Just another reason that Political Science majors should be taught Processing.
“Richard Blumenthal (D): 59 Rob Simmons (R): 28
Richard Blumenthal (D): 60 Linda...”
– Updated CT polling data from January 4 & 5. Not what the R’s want to see.
(via Swing State Project)
What happens when the lead singer of Blink 182... →
(via waxy links)
Who is the crazy “Social Media Expert” vampire that got to Tom DeLonge and turned him into such a bizarre tech-startup pitchman? I love that his selling point for video blogging is that you can “do it in the dark and have lasers going” and “call it a space cam.” I love it.
The Top 5 Google Alternatives and Why You Should... →
(via azspot)
78% Or Why If I were a CT Republican running for...
From the November 10, 2009 Quinnipiac Poll.
Richard Blumenthal is the one person in CT politics that’s more popular than retiring governor Jodi Rell (who held the highest approval rating for any governor in the nation several years ago). Sure he’s a Greenwich Democrat (like some people who’ve run for senate here) but, in the words of the smartest political analyst...
“teaching Mom to use her Mac is like teaching my cat to use the toilet; cool in...”
– Bixby
The Kleptones - Come Again
Not only was...
End of an era?
I’m thinking it might be time to retire the old daveriordan.com blog (which I haven’t actually written anything for in over a year). I’d always dreamed of running a site like Andy Baio’s Waxy.org with long thoughtful posts every so often and a curation of links in the sidebar. Tumblr took care of the awesome linkblog element, but I never really integrated the two.
...
