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What the fuck is with comedians being total idiots?

2012-01-26T02:01:00.000-05:00

Twice in my life I've imparted valuable advice to comedians (OK, one comedian and one venue) about marketing -- or more specifically, HOW to market using social media -- and twice now those people have acted like idiots.

Pro tip: Don't fucking tweet "SHOW UP AT GIBBLYS MONKEY HOUSE!" with no context. You have to give people a reason to show up, and more importantly, don't make them work to find out where some place is.

1. You're only going to attract an audience of people who would normally go to a comedy club anyway. This isn't the way to expand your audience. It's a way to get stuck.
2. Most people won't bother clicking more than twice when trying to find something. We're trained by Google to expect instant results. When you hide the location of the fucking awesome shit show you just ALL CAPS tweeted about, you just lost about 50% of the people who might have thought about considering to come to your show. Good job!
3. How hard is it to give an address? This isn't rocket science.

There's a reason you guys are working shitty day jobs. You have no idea what it means to actually build an audience. It's hard work, and hardly funny at all.

Fucking idiots

2012-01-10T03:30:00.000-05:00

So the geniuses at Pepcom... where do I start? Just look at their website. Currently it shows a picture of a bull's asshole, a cowboy thrown off said bull. That's like the perfect metaphor for this company. 12 years they say they've been putting on "Digital Experience" during CES. I think they've had a good run. At this point, they should quit and move on. As near as I can tell they have no other purpose in life but this cash cow. I mean, here's their year in summary.

Yes, this is a real business. Now, granted, this is an old business model. This is a crazy dumb business to be in, too. One thing I've learned being at CES for a couple of years now is that there are way too many publishers of crap out there. Pepcom likes to trumpet "over 1000 press will see you!" but let's bear in mind that many of these "press" are either antiques in print form from a bygone era or horribly designed hobbyist sites that do zero research and regurgitate press releases.

Worst of all, they serve a bunch of food and booze at these things. I have seen so many "traditional journalists" hogging the food and booze, it makes me sad. But oh hell on a fucking stick, get out of the way for that guy from CBS! Sure, he has no clue was SSH is, or even 3D printing, but THIS IS CBS YOU EDUCATED JACKASS!

Anyway, Pepcom really pissed me off by being super strict about RSVP'ing, then suddenly allowing some people in, but then NOT allowing Leo Laporte. And (worse, IMHO), deleting their Twitter account and deleting Facebook comments because Leo's fans starting complaining. Is this what vendors are paying for? A company who has no clue how to do PR? A company that gives such a shit about the media that they won't allow Leo in?

These people are idiots. And my tolerance of financially successful idiots has drawn to a null amount. There's a strong impetus in me to crush these morons. How hard would it be? Here's what they do:
1. Rent a space
2. Sell tables
3. Invite the media

Real fucking hard. Step 4 must be profit, because these fools actually have a staff. If I have my way, they won't have that staff for long.

Dan Frommer on Louis C.K.

2011-12-14T10:59:00.000-05:00

Dan points out the lack of DRM on Louis C.K.'s self-distributed (and promoted) latest video special. But then he proceeds to throw in that hyperbolic "disrupt the power balance" thing regarding the existing media industry.

Here's the thing, however... I couldn't do this. None of the comedians I personally know (some of whom are touring pros) could do this and make anything close to what Louis did. He is a known entity in part because of that media industry. Were it not for TV specials and TV and film appearances already, he'd just be another one of the thousands of faceless, feature performers out there trying to make a buck making people laugh in an industry that is largely controlled by old timey morons (seriously, ask around about comedy club owners -- most sound like they just wish they ran a porno modeling agency, but aren't smart enough to know to move to LA).

At any rate, I think it's a fine thing Louis did, but it's not going to disrupt shit other than the existing friends he has in the media industry. Comedy Central won't want to sign a deal with him if they know he'll just do another special in a month they don't own the rights to, and it sounds like Louis has outgrown them anyway. What I'd like to see, and what would TRULY be disruptive, would be MORE comedians of Louis's stature band together to form a method for promoting and distributing comedy -- and not just their own, but other comedians as well. Yeah, a label of sorts.

Imagine if people like Kathy Griffin signed on? OK, not just redheads, but you get what I mean. That would be truly disruptive, and that would be great. But it ain't gonna happen. Most agents have their talent by the balls, and the agents play ball with the media industry, therefore: Nothing changes.

Although I'm hoping to change this myself, but I can't talk about my secret project yet!

Fireflies in a jar held by a baboon

2011-12-06T18:12:00.000-05:00

I think baboons are actually quite smart, but let's say this is a really dumb baboon. One with no sense, one who only knows how "things have always been" and can't seem to think his way out of extinction.

Now say that baboon is holding a jar of beautiful fireflies, each one capable of giving light... and so the baboon naturally doesn't know what he's got so he smashes the jar on the rocks and the fireflies fly away, knowing the baboon is a crazy idiot.

After hearing about the layoffs at KNS I can't help but think that's how a lot of businesses feel these days. The people at the top are delusional megalomaniacs who propel themselves forward on courses of "case studies from Harvard" and hope for the best, knowing their golden egg is secure and the worker fireflies can just be collected again like so many motes of dust on the mantle.

Another happy Xmas from Paypal

2011-12-05T23:50:00.001-05:00

Ah yes, the Evil Empire rises again. Kafka would be proud.

Update: Now this crap?

HP on deathwatch

2011-11-29T09:32:00.000-05:00

You know, when you start copying the work of others your best days are behind you. HP unveiled their newest "Envy" line of laptops (which, frankly, are stupidly named the exact same as the kickass printers HP makes, but that is seriously the least of their worries) last month. Anyone who has been near a MacBook Pro in the past few years got a huge chuckle at HP's expense because the keyboard, aluminum chassis and overall look of the Envy is nearly identical to Apple's Pro laptops. Hilarious, right? Oh wait, there's more. See, to PROVE HP wasn't just photocopying Apple, they made this unintentionally hilarious video attempting to explain all the subtle design awesomeness that the rest of us were missing. Like that totally killer volume knob grafted onto the side of the laptop like a vagina stuck on Frankenstein's neck. Surely people wanted this? Surely it won't get accidentally cranked up to 11 when putting it in a laptop bag, right? RIGHT?

What's saddest is the utter lack of passion in this video. Look at how many times the younger designer gazes at the floor. You'll never see Jony Ive do this. He also says "probably the best audio in the industry"... Look dude, if you HAVE the best audio product, you HAVE to say it -- no equivocations. I get the feeling they "had" to integrate Beats at some point and I wonder how late in the design stage it was.

Then there's the older, wiser design guy. He actually says you have to balance luxury with performance. O RLY? Tell that to Rolls Royce. Or Mercedes, BMW, Maserati, Bugati, etc. etc. Luxury and power are synonymous when you do things right. The fact that they are spewing nonsense actually makes sense when you see this through the terrifying lens of "someone who could be fired if they say this is dumb."

I mean, consider that these guys probably have families, work for a (formerly) prestigious brand, and likely have million-dollar tiny ass houses in Silicon Valley somewhere. They send their kids to great schools, live in a great place, and pay with their souls.

I do NOT envy them, HP or this masterwork of fraud masquerading as innovation. Check the video below and prepare to laugh. Then cry.

Success awaits you in the career of journalism

2011-11-28T13:00:00.002-05:00

Here you go, friendless ones.

I link because this will be me. Particularly if I wind up in NYC as an old man, wedged between my parents' generation and my brothers' generation.

Making time

2011-11-23T23:02:00.000-05:00

Tonight I disconnected and spent some time with the kids. Despite being in the news biz, I think this sort of thing is important. I'm thankful I get to do these things.

Speaking of time, we saw Hugo. It really struck a chord. Weston had seen the Méliès moon face at Planet Hollywood in Orlando. I tried to explain, but... he's 8. Seeing this dazzling tale that included more Méliès info (although obviously fictionalized to fit in the story) plus learning about film history and automatons... It was so cool.

New Firefox version...

2011-11-08T16:41:00.002-05:00

Do you care? Probably not. You have a life. That's why you're not reading this. Mozilla is going to fuck things up horribly by version 12, mark my words. People will go to Safari, IE and Chrome in droves, and we'll be done with Firefox forever. Sad, because it used to be great.

And this whole "new version every 2 months" bullshit is a dumb, dumb move that no engineer worth a damn should agree to implement. It sounds like some horseshit marketing move.

Sad little human moments

2011-11-06T22:03:00.000-05:00

Tonight I was going through my son's returned schoolwork and I came across a very sad story he wrote for a program he's in (he's in the gifted program, but oddly enough they give them work that is stuff they need improvement on -- so it's stuff he doesn't like much, like reading and writing).

In this short assignment he detailed how his grandfather, whom we called Poppy, died. The narrative was that Poppy fell down a flight of stairs, got a replacement shoulder, which made things worse, went to the hospital for a long time, then had a big wound then went back, then died. Basically, he's getting that health care failed Poppy -- which it did. Eric Barger's death was in part attributable to the work of a Dr. Mays (I believe that's the spelling of this quack). A "doctor" who never seemed to care that his patient was a potently addicted alcoholic. In fact, he cared so little for his patient he prescribed the very powerful pain medications which very likely had a direct hand in Eric's death. I know my son is wary of medicine to begin with (and granted, I'm a big wuss when it comes to these things as well, so there's some natural predisposition to these fears) because he had a rather painful childhood and one very scary procedure that had likely been burned into his subconscious (because he was awake the whole time).

Anyway, I read this narrative and got choked up. Here was my son coming to terms with mortality, and the most I'd ever heard from him was in this paper. Months later. My son had learned to suffer in silence -- dry skin, some kind of gastro issue (doctors still haven't figured out what), etc. He's been in pain for a lot of his short life, and I think it has given him some ability to be more patient than I ever was, although I see the familiar impatience with learning new things and wanting to be great at stuff quickly. Maybe that's human nature.

But to think that he felt this strongly... and to peek into his mind about how it went down, and how sad it was for him. That's really tough to deal with. Every time I look at this paper tears well up in my eyes. I sent it to his mom immediately when she asked, and I'm sure she cried. It's really hard to make me cry, but I get "teary" with relative ease. I made sure to hug the kids extra hard tonight. I'm going to miss them when they're too old to hug me so readily.

How Apple will neuter Google

2011-10-26T14:06:00.002-04:00

Siri will redirect people to a more natural interaction with web searches, thus ending the reign of "type in some magic words and you'll get what you're looking for, hopefully."

Sounds a lot like the old command line interfaces, doesn't it? Sure, if you know how to use the text entry field and all the tricks like Boolean search queries, etc. you can find whatever you want.

But wouldn't it be cooler to say "where can I find saffron?" when on vacation and just have your phone show you where to go?

What Apple got really wrong

2011-10-22T22:55:00.000-04:00

iCloud has a "feature" called Photostream, which sounds nifty in theory. Pictures taken on my iPhone are magically uploaded to the iCloud, which can them appear on my Mac (using iPhoto or Aperture) or other iDevices using my Apple ID. Problem is, I just came back from vacation and imported hundreds of photos into Aperture BEFORE realizing you could turn off this automatic uploading shit.

There is NO delete button for items in your Photostream. It's all or nothing. That's so stupid -- each of my iOS devices proceeded to FILL UP entirely with photos. No apps could update, nothing could happen until I turned the damn thing off. Now I have to wait 30 days to turn it on again because I still need to import my fucking vacation pics.

Another thing Apple fucked up in iOS 5: "OTA" updates for apps. Yeah, I get it. A PC-free world where I don't have to tether. Guess what? No thanks, I have a damned computer. Why, pray tell, did I spend 30 minutes clicking one app update after another in iTunes (because "update all" has almost never worked for me, yielding a network lost error 99% of the time) just to have iTunes IGNORE those updated apps, and NOT install them?

Oh right. Apparently the iPhone was so full from those damned photos it failed to WARN ME that it couldn't update anything else until it had the memory.

Photostream needs to get a lot better really fast.

iPhone 5 vs Android

2011-10-21T10:14:00.000-04:00

I'm going to wait and get an iPhone 5. To think that it was likely the last iPhone Steve had a real hand in producing, there's that. But also there's the practical realization that tech like NFC and 4G will likely "be there" for Apple to embrace. And imagine what else there might be... Just consider that now Apple need only make TWO iPhones which bear the 4S monicker. One in white, one in black. Everything else on the inside needs only a signal to make things hum.

The difference between Apple and Google, whose competitor mobile OS Android is "free" and "open" and given cutesy, life-reducing sweets-based* codenames is this: one does things at its own pace according to what's best for the consumer and only releasing a product that is 90-99% "there" and the other does things rapidly, a steady stream of half-measures without a cohesive core and whose ultimate goal is to learn more about your personal habits in order to make web searches better.

And that's it. Of course Apple wants to know about you as well (certainly the iAds division, CRM folks, etc.), but that's not their core purpose. Apple's core being is to make great products that are powerful and easy to use. That's always been their mantra. So when people asked me about where Apple is going without Jobs, I tell them "the same place it's always been going."

That sentiment is somewhat reflected in this interview for the TNJN and this for the Knoxville News Sentinel.

Steve Jobs

2011-10-06T14:29:00.001-04:00

Changed my life. Last night I got the news through an ex-girlfriend (and wonderful person) as I was busy preparing dinner for my current girlfriend. Just as Michelle pulled in the driveway I was opening my MacBook Air to command the troops (as they say -- I'm a pretty laid-back leader).

I think Steve would have appreciated the fact that I waited until today to mourn him. If John Gruber is right, Steve increasingly understood that life is about people, and those closest to you are what's really important. The big work is out there, and it should be done, but never at their expense.

And thus, I am changed again. Thanks, Steve.

Gentlemen, to evil!

2011-10-03T22:00:00.002-04:00

This is a pretty nasty bit about the Koch family, currently a major force behind the right wing lunatic fringe. Like comic book supervillians, these guys.

Raz

2011-09-29T19:36:00.002-04:00

Best vacation ever.

Connective tissue

2011-09-20T00:06:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine (works for me, but I think/hope we're sympatico) urged me to move West. Of course, I can't do that until my kids can go as well or I'm wealthy enough to actually be bi-coastal. Part of it is that my ex-wife's boyfriend has a kid and *her* mom isn't going anywhere. I tried to explain some of this connective tissue to a friend I had hoped I made on OKCupid this week. Sadly, upon explaining that I didn't have my kids most of the time due to work constraints, she said we could no longer chat.

So my thought out of all this is that all humans are connected. When we sever those connections we hurt a lot. When we build them, aren't we enriched? This is something I need to work on.

Probably the best thing Scoble has ever written

2011-09-11T20:06:00.000-04:00

Thus far.

I dunno

2011-09-11T16:53:00.002-04:00

Ah, that aching void immediately after a breakup. Worse is the issue when you realize that YOU are the one with the problem and, in the end, your relationship was aspirational in a way you never envisioned. But she did.

Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture's sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.
My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,
A closet never pierc'd with crystal eyes,
But the defendant doth that plea deny,
And says in him thy fair appearance lies.
To 'cide this title is impannelled
A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart;
And by their verdict is determined
The clear eye's moiety, and the dear heart's part:
As thus: mine eye's due is thine outward part,
And my heart's right, thine inward love of heart.

Probably going to back off the social media for a while and get some things sorted out.

Armchair CEO: Yahoo

2011-09-07T10:51:00.000-04:00

Since I'll never, ever be CEO of Yahoo, here's what I'd do if I got the call this week:
- Bolster the products people love, like Flickr and Delicious and make them relevant again. Yes, it can be done. Flickr needs only a few hooks and it'd be better (it's already pretty good) and make it more of an Evernote thing by getting rid of the ridiculous "you'll lose your history" when you stop paying. Be more generous. As for Delicious, the only thing it needs is a much better way of sorting your tags and URLs. I'd essentially rip off circles from Google+ to give ordinary people better control over a cloud-based bookmark system. Oh, and world-class cross-platform apps for both of those services.
- See WTF we can do with Y!M. If it could be made into a Campfire/Skype/Hangout competitor, I'd fast-track that plan ASAP.
- Get back to indexing. Yep. Google and Microsoft can duke it out on the algorithm stage, meanwhile I'd have Yahoo become the "Yellow Pages" of the Internet as it once was. There's a monetization scheme in there as well...

So those are 3 things to start with.

One has to wonder...

2011-09-06T14:47:00.002-04:00

How long will this continue?

How TechCrunch is like Weblogs, Inc.

2011-09-06T04:55:00.000-04:00

Paul Carr writes in the latest defense of Mike Arrington:
"TechCrunch is not a publication with a single voice. TechCrunch is a collection of writers, brought together by Mike Arrington to write about the technology industry as they see it."

It's funny to read this because it is largely how Weblogs, Inc. ran for many years (before being largely digested and turned to effluent by AOL, for better or worse). I try to keep this spirit alive with a few changes.

On TUAW, every writer for us should have a voice. Granted, if you read a post by Kelly Hodgkins you may not get as much "spice" as when you read a post by Erica Sadun. Kelly tends to hit the news stories, and Erica does more opinion and developer stuff. I specifically avoid the royal "we" on posts because I think individual writers should speak in their own voice -- as long as it is clear and effective.

In fact, when I started at Weblogs, before the acquisition, I remember Jason Calacanis going on record to say, "the bloggers are the stars." That's exactly how it should be! Why else would you go work somewhere and be a part of the blob, just another molecule suspended in jelly handing off nucleotide chains in an effort to metabolize the news each day? That's insanely boring and ultimately can become a commodity (as we're seeing, sadly).

However, I do exert some editorial control in that lately I've clamped down on the number of rumors we post, specifically about new Apple hardware. I've also asked writers under NDA to respect the NDA on our pages (unlike numerous competitors of ours). While not publishing rumors isn't doing our net page views any good, and not publishing juicy details of NDA materials can be seen as a competitive disadvantage, the overall idea is to establish a baseline of credibility with our audience. Over time I think this is best. I mean, how many times are you going to read "Product X arrives THIS WEEK!" before you realize people are just playing the numbers and wasting your time? I'm not playing that losing game. We have to have standards.

But I also think TechCrunch was established with standards and M.G.'s latest post was a bit unnecessary. It comes off a bit petulant, as though no other human could ever fill in for Mike... Well, that could be true. But at the same time, if everything Paul Carr has said is true, there should be few worries. Mike set the tone, set the standard of excellence and laid the foundation for what TC has become today. If the writers are autonomous, what's the problem? Other than the few posts Arrington wrote each week, some of which were absolutely fascinating. I particularly loved the one where he outed a sort of cabal meeting of VC's.

As Robert Scoble pointed out on Google+, almost no one from the early days of Engadget still remains there, but Engadget is still an important tech blog. There are very few of any of us from the early days of Weblogs, and Jason and Brian left long ago -- yet we persist. Blogsmith is still in use, Joystiq, Engadget, TUAW and Autoblog are still going gangbusters. RIP to Cinematical, DownloadSquad and a dozen or more others, however...

My point is this: by finding great talent you've set the stage for success. That's what Arrington did. That was a founding principle of the success at Weblogs, Inc. as well. As Brad Hill used to say when he was Director of Weblogs within AOL, "find great writers and set them free." To Mike Arrington I would say, "mission accomplished." Just look at the impassioned, intelligent writing coming out of TC in your defense. Well done.

Coffee jerks

2011-09-02T12:18:00.002-04:00

How cynical?

2011-09-01T23:53:00.000-04:00

When Pat Summit revealed she had the early stages of dementia, Knoxville residents decided to wear orange a week or so before football season -- when we usually wear orange on Fridays. It was designed to be a sign of respect and solidarity behind one of our town's citizens. A woman who has not only done great things as a coach, but as a contributory member of our society and our town.

Unfortunately, some folks don't think that's enough. And true, wearing orange won't cure Summit. Just like wearing a pink ribbon won't cure breast cancer or yellow ribbons won't bring the troops home, etc. etc. It's a symbolic gesture. Before you ask yourself, "how cynical can you be?" we already have an answer from Metropulse's newest writer and long-time hater of UT and the Vols.

I mean, why do anything to show solidarity, ever? I plan to scream "PHONY" at the next race for the cure and similar events. Clearly these slackers should be going to med school and getting on that cure business, not running and wearing pink. Clearly.

I don't even know wtf this is...

2011-09-01T12:21:00.002-04:00

Is it a story? Story time? Just random screed? An amusing bedtime story for unwary Silicon Valley dinner compatriots? A chance to drop names? A pre-April 1 tip? I dunno. I'd never publish it, however. This much I do know.

Eli Hodapp has an obsession with TUAW's Erica Sadun

2011-08-31T15:47:00.000-04:00

I don't know why Eli's obsession with Erica exists. Maybe he's jealous? Maybe he wanted to write for TUAW? But I think it began here: http://twitter.com/#!/hodapp/statuses/2183507799

Well, on Twitter, anyway. We actually have asinine comments left by Eli going back to 2007! Quite the sustained level of hatred in that kid's heart, I tell ya. Sure, you could make a boogeyman of Dick Cheney or Dick Clark or Osama Bin Laden, but why not pick on a mom, a developer and a writer? Because you can!

We actually had to ban him at least once on TUAW. Back when Scott McNulty was editor. Here's a comment he made in 2007:
"Believe me, I'd love to meet Erica in real life." What does THAT mean? Would you physically harm her? That sure sounds like a threat to me.

Continuing harassment here: http://twitter.com/#!/hodapp/status/108980571581067264

Seems weird to obsess for so long over someone just trying to help our readers, but whatever. I know kids like this. They run their mouths and never shut up and refuse to listen to anything other than their lips flapping. Sad, really. Thank goodness journalistic integrity at video game blogs are so low Eli can appear to be Edward R.-fucking Murrow by comparison.

One secret to Apple's success...

2011-08-25T10:17:00.000-04:00

Simple supply and demand. If you have demand for a product, make sure there is a supply available at some point. Yeah, they sometimes have demand outstrip supply (not a bad thing if you catch up quickly), but when Apple says "this is now available" they make damn sure it IS available. Unlike so many other businesses.

Example: I saw our story on TUAW about a Nikon Coolpix (of some idiotic random assortment of letters and numbers for designation which I can't remember nor can any other human) which has a projector in it, and you're able to plug it in to an iPad or iPhone and project video. No clue if it supports mirroring on the iPad 2, and no question the light strength is likely minimal at best. It's a gimmick, I realize, but I wanted one. WANTED one. So what does Nikon do? Say, "here it is, go buy it!" Except you can't. I'm currently in NYC and no one has this thing in stock. They haven't received their stock.

You see, what Tim Cook and other smart people at Apple know is that when you make a big deal about a cool product, at the end of the day you must make this product available to consumers for purchase. It boggles my mind how Nikon and so many others do not grasp this very simple reality of business. That is why they fail.

Letters! We get letters! From disturbed barely-endowed people!

2011-08-24T17:19:00.003-04:00

UPDATE: IP tracking says this is Durango, Colorado. So, look out, Durango! There's an idiot on the loose.

Here's a good one:
"IP: 72.174.201.51
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Safari/534.50

Name: Required - oh, fuck you.
URL:
Subject: What Arrogant Pricks...

Hi There, douchefuckwipes, (that is how i was instructed to refer to you dweebs)

LOVE the arrogant fucking attitude of this so-called 'Apple news' site. Today's latest example, and we quote, 'Better late than never, I guess...' from your Logitech article.

This tone of superiority, judgment and self-absorption is tiring and shows a marked lack of consideration for your readers. Your readers do not want your interpretation of events. We want the 'who, what, why, when and how' of an event or product. [Save the sophomoric subjective rants for the boys when you are sitting around some dive bar lusting after the gals at the other table. (You do not stand a chance.)]

Ask yourselves this question, and I will go slowly so you can track what I am saying, 'What contribution have any of you or this 'site' made to the world?

Now let me answer for you 'absolutely nothing'. Competing with the other Apple rumor sites does not constitute a contribution. You are very, very small and irrelevant people. You will not be missed.

R.I.P. Fuckfucks

Related URL: http://"

And the best part? This child clearly has nothing better to do, sending us a bunch of these in a row. The one above is the latest. I wish we could ban feedback by IP, but we can't. Here's one from a few minutes earlier. I'm guessing he looked in a mirror:
"IP: 72.174.201.51
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_8) AppleWebKit/534.50 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Safari/534.50

Name: Vanessa
URL:
Subject: Nice FuckFuck Acknowledgement Form

'You did it!

If necessary, we will get in touch with you as soon as possible. We cannot respond to every one of the requests we receive, but it doesn't mean we're not thinking about you.'

oh, fuckyou, youfuckingmoronicdipshitdonkeydicklickingdouchebags

Related URL:"

You're doing it wrong

2011-08-22T12:33:00.002-04:00

MacTrast writes a post about something Scoble hears at Apple about Mark Zuckerberg "being a fucking asshole"... and Cult of Mac spins it as STEVE JOBS said this.

It's not hard to discern the difference between someone who merely wants to grab some traffic, shake 'em down and move on, fuck all sense of integrity versus a person who wants to see their publication establish authority, is it? One reports something, the other embellishes for effect.

Great when performing magic, terrible when practicing journalism. As if anyone gives a damn these days.

A letter from Zlio

2011-08-20T11:16:00.000-04:00

I heard they were shutting down and blaming Google, basically. Really they were blaming a shitty SEO company who scammed them and THEY got stuck paying anyway! That sort of thing irks me because SEO is, all too often, sold as snake oil. It's too bad. I've redacted the part where you can get to my Toyblogging.com admin panel ;)
---

Six years after its launch, we regret to announce that we are going out of business.

The service will officially end on September 11!

Zlio had a fantastic start, receiving capital from one Europe's largest venture capital funds, Mangrove Capital. In addition, we held advanced M&A talks with Google, which unfortunately fell through at the last minute.

Our strong initial growth was interrupted on September 27, 2007, when the majority of Zlio shops, which were generally very well ranked, saw their Google ranking drop dramatically, eliminating 65% of our traffic.

Despite our best efforts, and the opening of 380,000 stores to date, it has not been possible to regain our previous Google rankings, except in exceptional cases.

When we founded Zlio, we thought that you, members of Zlio, would successfully promote your shops among your circles. We did not believe that Google referencing would be so crucial. Unfortunately, it has proved to be indispensable.

Among the actions taken to improve our Google ranking, we approached an SEO company who claimed they were able to fix our problem.

In view of their poor performance, we assessed that this company had not fulfilled its obligations. Therefore, we entered into dispute with it, which resulted in a court case whose sentence was rendered on July 26, 2011. This ruling is available on the website of the Paris Commercial Court (Tribunal de Commerce de Paris).

This decision sentences us both to pay the whole of a service that we still believe have not been provided and to pay damages for publishing our opinion about Referencement on Twitter. The latter part of the sentence has already drawn much attention in the French media.

This sentence means we cannot go on. The service has been losing money for several years (which forced us to gradually reduce our staff), and the amounts to which we are sentenced to pay today no longer allow us to meet our obligations.

Nevertheless:

- We will settle all the commissions due to our members. If you have validated commissions, you are invited to collect them as soon as possible via your administration interface.

Click here to go to your administration interface : http://toyblogging*****

If you have pending commissions, you will be able to collect them within the next few weeks as the merchants validate them.

- The Premium subscriptions that will still be active on September 11 will be reimbursed automatically in the next few days as Zlio commissions prorata their remaining months of subscriptions.

The shops will close on September 11.

The owners of active domain names registered through our service will soon receive an email with the information required to transfer their domain name to another website.

Thank you all for your trust!

We are proud to have invented such an innovative tool, but it soon became clear that our success was too dependent on search engine optimization, which we did anticipate.

Thank you all for your support, and see you soon!

The Zlio Team

PS: Throughout this period, our support is reachable by email to answer any questions at the address: http://www.zlio.com/help/contact
News about the service will be regularly published on our Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/zlio

PS2: The teams of Zlio have launched several projects over the last months, including:
http://www.kimaventures.com
http://www.iadvize.com
http://www.onetask.com
http://www.producteev.com

The importance of perspective

2011-08-18T16:53:00.000-04:00

Granted, if you are a fancy writer in San Francisco writing about tech all the time you ARE supposed to be bleeding edge, but do not extrapolate your usage to the average user. Perhaps you are in a unique position to predict the future -- but you could also be wrong. Still, I'd agree that SMS is going to eventually see a reduction in use, but it is far from being obsolete, as MG Siegler claims in a post on TechCrunch:

I look at my own usage. In the past six months, I’ve sent seven actual SMS message. Seven. All the rest of my short messages have been through either Beluga, GroupMe, the Google Voice app, or now Facebook Messenger. Each of these messages have been sent or received for free (they’re a just use a tiny amount of data you’re already paying for if your on 3G). This is the future.

I actually find it disappointing, because SMS, like email, worked on a specific set of protocols transmissible without trouble across ALL mobile platforms. We are rapidly running out of these solutions. I fear the future is full of walled gardens, with communications being isolated and contained and even outright owned by the people building platforms like, say, Facebook.

I do not welcome this future. I don't particularly like the cash cow carriers have made of SMS, either, but... $20 a month for all you can text beats the shit out of the $350 bill I once got for going over my voice and texting one terrible month at Macworld Expo.

A Modest Proposal

2011-08-11T23:55:00.000-04:00

Hire crooks to run the country. It's that simple. We complain that crooks already run the country, and yeah, once in a while some total scumbag comes along and takes a picture of his wiener... well, OK bad example, that's not really criminal... Uh, oh hey, remember the S&L scandal? That's what I mean.

Bernie Madoff, Paul Monea, all those launderers and tax cheats, etc. THOSE guys know how to make a buck. Say China, sign up now and get 5 friends to join and you barely pay anything! See? We could be the Global Grifter we all know we were born to be. I mean, after all, didn't we run off with this country after twisting it out of the steely grip of a King a few hundred years ago?

So it only seems fitting. Some of our greatest icons are criminals. Al Capone, DB Cooper, Aaron Burr -- these guys rock! I'm just saying let's let it all hang out. Really put our criminals where the money is, in government. At least then we can keep an eye on them, and they can keep us all honest.

It's only fair to reward these crooks with the power and loyalty they crave. And it's only right to make America better by making it worse.

Tech news buckets

2011-08-11T13:00:00.000-04:00

Any given company is:
1. Innovating
2. Flailing
3. Moving towards exit strategy

There are your buckets, tech news writers.

Turd sandwich revisited

2011-08-06T14:35:00.000-04:00

Here's a fun anecdote about the debt deal. I know a guy who was working for a private company on a project to help make Medicare more efficient. This project was funded by government spending, yes. But it was being implemented by a private company, who hired a skilled worker, to make an inefficient system better and thus save money long-term.

What was passed by Congress had this effect:
- A skilled worker lost a job
- A private company lost a contract
- A system desperately needing fixes won't get them, thus costing government MORE money in the long term

See, the system TOTALLY works.

Watch our nation shit the bed

2011-07-29T13:38:00.000-04:00

The ultra-right wing has decided they can give a Democrat president NO victory. None. It began with Clinton, this "we can only win if they lose" mentality. But it's been brewing, and is not unprecedented in our history.

Still, there's a point at which someone has to pay their bills. I'd guess some certain interests have decided they don't want to pay *taxes* but the rate of return on another crash is OK with them. Get ready to buy some CD's and cry over credit card bills, because this is not going to get fixed.

I have every expectation that we're going to default. Thanks to extremists. Which is the same folly that saw the Taliban take hold of the Afghanistan government, although theirs was a much sadder, ungraceful fall, and one in the making for a long while.

That's not to say we're as unfixable as Afghanistan. We have a system of education in this country. We have not yet taken to hating each other on a personal basis due to party affiliation, and there's barely more than 3 parties, so there's hope.

But playing dice with our economy the way Boehner is doing? That's downright unpatriotic, and even in our more dismal of years as a free society (and we've had some!) in the end someone woke up and realized this was crazy and backed off. But now? Backing off is spun a thousand ways and there's no more BLINK left in anyone.

Therefore, no compromise. I blame cable TV.

Weird vs. Tasteless

2011-07-22T10:08:00.000-04:00

So there's a story in the New York Post about a Class A Douchebag cramming his iPhone down the throat of his girlfriend. Sadly, I see some Apple sites reporting this because it is "weird news." Which I think is sad. Weird news is a MacBook Pro surviving being submerged underwater, or a naked thief trying to shoplift from the 5th Ave. Apple Store at 3am... This? This is just stupid. The iPhone angle is dumb. Millions of people own iPhones, some are truly horrible people. Who gives a shit? Does Black and Decker publicize how many bodies are dismembered using its tools? Does Ford want Autoblog writing about pedestrians hit with its cars? Do editors of sites want that shit on their pages?

As the hashtag goes, I'm #smh over this one.

Your inner douchebag

2011-07-14T20:15:00.001-04:00

Being a politician these days means being a bigger douchebag than Ari on Entourage. Really, it's amazing to me. I mean, you always did have to be this way, and some might argue you had to be even MORE of a d-bag in the "olden days." But now we have much more powerful polling tools, more avenues to communicate with our representatives than ever... and more ways to hold them accountable.

Unfortunately, the brainblobs which form constituencies rarely make an impression on the larger brainblobs of the mass populace. Like marketing, it's tough to get your signal through the noise out there.

But the most truly terrifying moment is when you realize there's a powerful cabal in power that does not have your interests at heart. They just want to prove someone else is wrong. The demagogues who dig in, ignore all reason or advice and merely want to get "their way or the highway" are the egotistical, unpatriotic shitheads who are killing this country in the name of freedom. In fact, they do not want freedom for the individual -- they want to make sure you are only able to spend freely. Everything else will be forbidden if it is un-Christian. Instead of government being accountable to the people and helping the people, they want a nation under corporations, destined to become the feudal lords of the 21st century.

We're looking at a scary future where food and water shortages are real, and the cost of everything is prohibitive. Not because of government legislation, but because the feudal lords deem it necessary to stay in business. We'll buy that for a dollar, I guess.

My inspiration for this rant comes from this story on CNN about the Republicans who refuse to compromise on the deficit. Listen to Mitch McConnell's own words: "And all of the sudden, we have co-ownership of the economy." regarding Obama's spin off of the debt ceiling issue onto Republicans if they refuse to allow it to rise.

Sooooo... Congress is in now way "owning" the economic situation? It's all on Obama? I'm sorry, but when did we elect a king? And are we to presume the economy was peachy keen 24 hours before Obama became president and now he "owns" the economy but Congress is in no way culpable? Unbelievable. There are no facts to sway demagogues, only the bloody bodies of those they leave in their wake as they march towards the shining hill of "Being Right Always."

Ouch

2011-07-12T18:36:00.000-04:00

We've always had very strong policies about over-quoting sources who do the hard work at TUAW. I'm hoping some of the Weblogs, Inc. ethic (really which was instilled in me by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey and Judith Meskill and Peter Rojas and others within Weblogs even before the AOL acquisition) will seep in to HP somehow. Because this can't go on and without losing our integrity as a news organization.

Why am I not doing this?

2011-07-08T11:53:00.000-04:00

Hat tip to Patrick Rhone for putting this on Twitter "Time for a workflow audit"

It occurred to me that I would like doing this. Just an hour, just 5 things. Maybe some services, maybe something that'll just save your ass one day (did I see you backing anything up anywhere?).

And it's funny to see this because I'm in the process of teaching my girlfriend how to more effectively use her tech.

Related: The fact that Keychain isn't more powerful on the Mac (and more like 1Password) is crazy.

Google+

2011-06-30T00:54:00.001-04:00

Bottom line, it visualizes your networks well and makes it relatively easy to delineate using those ingenious circles. Like SQL for humans via good design. Can't wait to see it evolve. I've found a few bugs, but for some modes of communications, this will be Google's biggest "social" hit so far. Not a giant barrier, mind you.

I guess Gruber doesn't read TUAW

2011-06-24T10:44:00.000-04:00

Or he'd have seen Mike Rose's excellent dissertation on the topic he chose to link to The Loop instead.

To be fair, The Loop is great, and Shawn calls the patent application what it is... but not after Mike did.

Generally Gruber is good about linking to sources, but this time... Well, maybe it's because our readers called him names, but I think it's just that he doesn't read TUAW for reasons I'll not guess at.

Oh well, we'll just keep kicking ass and taking names and see @gruber mentioned in the winds of the whippoorwills at all conventions Apple-related.

The laundry list

2011-06-23T13:32:00.000-04:00

My life has been crazy lately. Here's a brief rundown of items on my to do list:
- Fix the front storm door, blown off the frame of the house thanks to the US Postal Service after they delivered a package and left it in-between the doors. A storm came through and RIIIP, a door which should have lasted a decade lasted less than half that.

- Fix a bathroom window which causes flooding in big rains. If the gutters are sparkling clear, it doesn't happen, but they are only that clean about 1 month out of the year (cumulative). And this year Knoxville has had some HUGE rains.

- Sell our property up the street.

- Clean and re-organize the house entirely after my separation.

- Start doing my own finances, something handled by my wife up until about 6 months ago. So far I've been late on almost every bill, for the first time in a decade.

- Get on a strict budget to reduce my debt.

- Look into service on a dozen consumer electronics going wacky.

- Romance my lady big time.

- Write a dozen hardware reviews for TUAW, never mind the app reviews, hundreds of apps long...

Oh and there's lots more.

Race doesn't matter, dressing like a dickweed does

2011-05-26T01:24:00.000-04:00

So a couple of dudes in NYC are suing Apple over "racial profiling" when they went into an Apple Store wearing baggy pants and sweaters. Hey, dipshits, pull up your pants and dry that sweater because Apple Stores see a TON of theft -- the most brazen kind, in fact. We report it all the time on TUAW. Those big, glass walls are just begging to be shattered, and morons'r'us swing into Apple Stores to swoop up the high end merch.

Look guys, black, white, red or yellow, you are Morons. Deal with it, not with ambulance-chasing lawyers.

Today's douchebag!

2011-05-16T00:19:00.002-04:00

"@jeffshawman: @austinlavoie After reading that article, I realize that @tuaw sucks. 2006 brought easypay, but it wasn't iPod based, it was windows."

Well, thank god the universe was spared that glaring error! It must be awesome to sit in your cheeto-encrusted shirt and adult diaper and laugh at those who fail to be as big a loser as you are. I know and do some pretty geeky shit, but to denigrate the hard work of a dozen people because of a simple error made on a weekend just reeks of entitlement. I would love nothing more that to drop people like this into the middle of Darfur or Haiti or the hinterlands of most of the rest of the planet without Netflix or 3G or their mommy and show them that there's a big ol' world out there that really care nothing for their self-righteous indignation.

Because most of the world is just trying to survive.

NO REMOTES EVER!

2011-05-13T18:42:00.000-04:00

I've been testing the Peel (after buying one and now left to put it on ebay) and UnityRemote. I'll save the full head-to-head for TUAW but let me just say this: how is it we're halfway through the year 2011 and we can't invent an awesome universal remote? I mean, I'm aware of how great Harmony remotes are, but I understand their software is buggy and terrible and prone to crashes.

Yet the iPhone makes SO much sense for a proper universal remote. The best thing I've seen thus far is Griffin's remote, hopefully coming out later this year. Both the Peel and UnityRemote have serious issues making them a less-than-ideal solution for everyone.

Dreamhost can fuck a pony

2011-05-05T12:46:00.000-04:00

a) We're not doing this. b) Dreamhost is run by children. c) Don't treat your customers (who probably know more than your tech help monkeys anyway) like idiots. Here's a response I got from Dreamhost when they claimed something was in violation of their TOS:
"Hello Victor,

I understand what you are saying, but rather than argue the definition of
a daemon I will just say that we do not allow persistent process that
listen on ports on shared hosting accounts, as detailed in our Acceptable
Use Policy (http://www.dreamhost.com/aup.html):

"Any process that opens a network socket to accept connections from
external networks is forbidden. "

(under the Network Daemons section).

Thanks for refraining from running this in the future, and we will
continue to work to improve the reliability of the services we provide."

Whatevs.

My day

2011-04-28T13:47:00.000-04:00

Most of my day today has been dealing with the increasingly difficult task of publishing quality content on a reasonable schedule.

Some serious backend issues plague us, and I worry that if things continue the ability of my people to do their jobs will be so compromised that we simply *won't* be able to do it at all.

That, and the increasingly disengaged system of communication has be very worried about the future.

It's a shame, because we all love what we do and would hate to no longer be allowed to do it. But change seems inevitable, for good or for ill. Pray for Mojo!

Fantastic and funny magic effect from Hannibal

2011-04-19T15:23:00.002-04:00

Perspective

2011-04-10T10:59:00.000-04:00

I love the Overseers in Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End." It's a bit contrived, to have an alien species come in, "fix" humanity (or at least nudge us into progressing), and ripe for "human resistance" backstories (fan fic, where are you people?) but I was inspired by one act in the book to conceive of something else the Overseers should have done.

In the novel, to show humanity they aren't fucking around -- and to instill in us some empathy -- they show up at a bullfight in Spain and make everyone in the arena feel intense pain.

In my story, I'd like an alien race to come down here, and whomever hasn't achieved "perspective" would be instantly transported to another part of the world where they have to fill another's position for, say, a week.

An example: some redneck who hates "the blacks" is transported to Somalia and has to be a fisherman. On the flip side, some badass warlord from Somalia is sent to Nova Scotia.

This is also inspired by the "empathy gun" from the filmed version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

This is what being an adult performer is all about

2011-04-07T23:37:00.000-04:00

Just go read this post by Raven Alexis (if I have to warn you that Xcritic.com is NSFW you're doing this all wrong). She's fantastic, and I haven't even seen much of her performances. I know her as a gamer, a geek and a very well-spoken young woman who will likely go on to do amazing things in her lifetime. She's got moxie, that one.

Exactly as I figured

2011-03-28T00:49:00.000-04:00

Frustrated and sad, because things are going to wind up exactly as I feared they would.

So now I start worrying about my daughter, who appears to be on the same track as I was, only learning things by experiencing them the hard way. Even when you know it'll end badly, diving in anyway. There's a fine line between playing it safe and living the safe life... and damning the fear, diving in anyway and having a rich, full life of no compromise.

It makes me wonder if there's a genetic predisposition to feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

Maybe it is time I finally read that book my shrink recommended so many years ago.

Free idea for nuclear power plant designers

2011-03-24T13:42:00.003-04:00

I'm not an expert or even barely knowledgeable about how nuclear power plants are designed. While I protested against Watts Bar (which is near enough to me where if it had a meltdown I'd have to evacuate), most of what I'm learning about modern plants is based on reporting on the mostly-new plant in Japan undergoing several critical failures. But I do know how these plants work at the most basic level.

As I understand it, the plant in Japan is wholly reliant upon some form of power being available to keep the core from overheating. Pumps, mechanisms and the like were supposed to be powered by diesel generators in case of catastrophe. Except, in case of REALLY BIG catastrophes, this is a tough gambit. Why not rely on the one thing that will never fail -- gravity.

By designing a plant where rods will *fall away* from each other should power be cut, those rods will not be close enough to overheat. Seems like a simple enough idea. I'm sure engineers will claim it's tough to do, but I have faith in human ingenuity. I've been lucky enough to witness the impossible many times in my short life.

UPDATE: The very smart Richard Gaywood (check out his awesome food blog here) noted that nuclear engineers already use gravity to drop boron rods into the core, stopping fission. As he explains: "the problem comes from residual heat and decay heat, neither of which depends on the fuel rods being close to each other."

So... back to solar, you damn hippies!

Losing coworkers

2011-03-10T20:09:00.000-05:00

Sucks. Until today I hadn't been so close to the swirl of corporate cuts, but today I felt that sting. I'm still employed, but some members of our work family were let go and I feel terrible. I've had a hard time mustering the interest to pack for SXSW, even though I fly out in less than 10 hours.

Anyway, here's to the awesome people who gave their time, wisdom and energies to AOL. Until today. Here's to you, friends.

So it's come to this

2011-03-07T00:38:00.000-05:00

TechCrunch had to move to Facebook comments to reduce trolls on its site. People can still be fake on Facebook, but most people do not. I have a feeling that in 2 years this will change. Already we're seeing plenty of face accounts show up to be douchebags. Like weeds on a concrete slab, they find a way.

I just banned a guy who felt he was being constructive by telling us everything that was wrong with a "3 apps" series of videos we're running. It's like when you go somewhere and decide to scoff at the person doing their job because they are "doing it wrong" or not doing it the way YOU would be doing it, had you ever bothered to do whatever they are doing just once in your life. Instead, these people chose to be professional trolls. The hilarity goes up a notch when they proceed to tell me I'm out of line by telling them they are being trolls. Yes, the trolls being given a taste of their own medicine.

So, here's a sample of "Mr. Helpful"... This comment is on Joystiq, because I already deleted his comments on TUAW:
"Anyone who has ever experienced Quake on a jailbroken iPhone can tell you exactly what chance this thing has to rule gaming. It's awful. And I'm sorry, Ellen viewers and nü-wave soccer moms, but YOU NEED SOME FUCKING BUTTONS TO PLAY GOOD GAMES. A library full of crappy $2 blackjack simulations and games in which you tilt shit around isn't going to rule squat.

Either Time didn't actually think this through before breathlessly jumping on Apple's jock, or it's trolling for attention. Probably both, given the sad state of that magazine."

Yeah... Gaming on the iPhone TOTALLY sucks, doesn't it? This comment was left in 2008. Claim chowder tastes good, but again, I need to be more careful in the future with critiquing trolls. I mean, they ARE professionals. This guy's just doing what he clearly does best: being a total asshole know-it-all who won't listen to anyone but his own gaping asshole as it shits out judgement from on high.

Look out below!

12 percent? You have to be kidding me.

2011-02-28T12:15:00.000-05:00

Read this post and tell me it wasn't lovingly crafted from an Adobe fanboy. I'm not saying it was written BY Adobe, but it has the feel of someone who is desperately (or not) trying to amp up Flash as some sort of universal, open-source tool that can make the Web what it really should be AND slice and dice your veggies AND replace all computers some day. Yeah, I didn't make that last part up.

Some hilarious quotes here:
"Android certainly wasn’t even the first platform to support Flash (that honor actually goes to Windows Mobile)"
Yes, and how many people do you see with Windows Mobile devices actually USING Flash? The article, quoting ReadWriteWeb, notes that only 12 percent of mobile phones currently SUPPORT Flash. Somehow that number is supposed to be impressive. I have no idea in what universe... Oh right, the one where Flash is an "open standard" LULZ4EVER!

"Plenty of rich and wonderful apps, but a whole lot of empty boxes on a whole lot of websites."
Yes, we poor iOS users know nothing about "rich and wonderful apps" on our platform. Oh, you mean there are hundreds of thousands of apps on our store? Huh. And you mean pisspoor shit like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Bebot, Dueapp, Calvetica, Infinity Blade, You Gotta See This, WordLens... oh you get the idea. What the fuck? Granted, I have seen some very cool things using Flash -- but to say that because Adobe refuses to build an HTML5 exporter we iOS users are somehow losing out on restaurants who farm out their menu pages to some dipshit college kid with a pirated copy of Creative Suite (among other dipshits who can't code their websites properly), is just ignorant.

"Apple maintains that Flash in inherently insecure, although its desktop and laptop products have supported it for years."
Desktops have supported malware for years, how the fuck is this a relevant point? Making a case that Flash is somehow magically secure makes me want to vomit into my boxed copy of Norton Antivirus.

This time the article quotes Adobe as saying, "Video in particular is driving demand for the plugin..."
Bwaahaha, yeah, and even Google has opted out. They say webm, Apple and many others say H264. Point is, we are long past the days when Adobe is the sole provider of accessible video on the internet. Come ON guys, this is 2011!

"Real-time video and audio collaboration? Check."
Oh, you mean like screen-sharing and FaceTime? Check.

"High-performance web gaming? Check."
Oh, you mean like Unity? Check.

"3D visualization and modeling? Check."
Again, see Unity above. Although there are other options for this besides Flash and Unity, yeesh.

"Further death knells for the desktop computer? Check."
Wait, WHAT? What fresh hell is this? The author is talking about Flash Media Server... What the holy Merlin's Nuts does this have to do with the "death" of the desktop computer? Not even a drunk goat can draw a trail leading to this one... Man, way to destroy any shred of credibility with that sour note at the end.

Finally, the gem which Gruber chose to save for future claim chowder:
"I give Apple a year until they cave. Android tablets will just be too cool and too useful for both entertainment and enterprise applications if they don’t."

Ha, yeah. Because Apple "caving" is why we still have ADB ports, SCSI, floppies and cheap plastic casings on our computers. Utter fucking genius, this one.

What the Oscars mean to me

2011-02-28T00:05:00.001-05:00

In 1998 I was in film school in Nashville, TN. I had plans to graduate, move to a major movie-making city somewhere in the world and work in "entertainment" for a living.

Years later, that career was derailed, shifted 90 degrees and then put in a nice little box which I keep in my bed, and trot out every year during the Oscars. But now, I realize what this all really is.

We make fun of what the stars wear, but if you look beyond them you see a dozen frazzled assistants and tradespeople doing their job under pressure to make a great show go off without a hitch.

For me, the Oscars are a window into the world of people who make the magic happen for anyone not too jaded to enjoy mindless, enjoyable and yes, even sometimes thought-provoking "entertainment."

The Academy is an important function of storytelling, and I wish all art forms had such a powerful, glamorous yet practical advocate and organizing body.

The jokes we shared tonight were fun. It's fun to poke fun at what is, admittedly, a lot of pomp and circumstance and just this side of awkward-as-a-high-school-prom writing. Clearly the award show needs some rework. I mean, imagine integrating Twitter in a meaningful way?

In the end, however, the film business, the story business, does well. The people who push the envelope, who make storytelling more powerful, they fill an incredibly important role in our society -- and in humanity as a species. Good for them, this is always their night.

Now let's make winning a Nobel or Pulitzer Prize just as glamorous.

and now...

My selected tweets from the evening:
OMG "end of Oscars" tweets are the funniest. I hope the Library of Congress wears adult diapers to work tomorrow.

Now we can all go back to worrying about when Charlie Sheen became Gary Busey.

You funny bastards out there... YOU are the real winners!
Next year's teleprompter for the Oscars should be crowdsourced.

Fun fact: the Oscar hosts have to stay and help clean up.
Naaahhhh, what'd you think, Hollywood is made of liberal whackos?

Go ahead, hipster bastards, just say something about those adorable kids who have to go back to their shacks in India and beg for food.

Schroedinger totally picked all of the winners this year. But none of you saw the picks until now.

Best Dressing Room goes to... Anne Hathaway's dressing room!

So if I join the academy some day I must outlive Celine Dion to avoid a fate worse than death: her singing at my death montage.

That short subject kid stole my haircut.

Uh oh. Autotune in the Oscars. Expect letters from the bluehairs.

I love Blanchett, but wearing Mr. Bubble was a bold choice.

Thanks for the same Reznor jokes a million times, America.

My kids wanted to stay up and watch the Oscars but I told them I didn't recognize their right to bargain with me as a group.

Just realized Gwenyth Paltrow is wearing John Boehner.

Is this fucking awards show sponsored by match.com???

Tonight's the night we trolls award ourselves.

Weird Al needs a haircut.

That Kings Speech guy sure can write a speech.

I'm about to win an award for Adequate Dishwasher!

A body scanner on the red carpet would have been a lot of fun. "Whose panties are you wearing?"

Checking lists! Shouting into headsets! Responding to emails on your Blackberry! Yes, it's the support staff for the Oscars. Glamorous.

Bigger, badder, uncut

2011-02-11T19:49:00.000-05:00

2011 is gonna be huge. On the work front, TUAW is pushing forward with some amazing new stuff. We're ramping up our app reviews, working on an amazing new design and covering more events than ever before. I'm hoping we can do even more than that, but it's not easy with certain constraints...

On the personal front I've committed to do a real, live stage show in 2012. This affects 2011 in that I finally have to do 2 things: 1) double-down on performing for family, friends and strangers to develop my "performance muscles" and 2) stick with a rehearsal schedule and plan of action.

I hate schedules! But between the show and TUAW's desperate need for more structure, I'm learning to deal with more structure in my life. Can't be a dirty hippie forever, you know.

Ya gotta do what you love

2011-02-01T19:26:00.000-05:00

I run into Marshall at SXSW and we've never had much time to chat, but I have always admired his ethic and what he does. So this was a nice thing to say about the "AOL content farm" people are spasming about today.

The thing people are ignoring is that enthusiasts will talk about their passion for FREE. That's why bloggers love what they do. Trust me, if it was mercenary we'd all be having a lot less fun at work.

So I'm proud to be a part of AOL right now and proud of my TUAW team.

Somewhat related: I finally have a real vision for my next performance effort. While I'll continue to work up some stand-up material (it's a great way to work out bits), I'm currently planning a show for 2012 called "Oh Bananas!" that is a comedy/magic show aimed at adults. Think Amazing Jonathan meets Cheech and Chong. Should be fun. If it doesn't kill me.

Macworld 2011

2011-01-31T00:36:00.000-05:00

Wow. 60 video segments at our booth. Several more shot by my bloggers, plus lots of posts waiting to flow into the site... An unbelievable amount of hustle for people who basically got paid in food (like an independent movie crew). It was like a dream. Pity Macworld seems to be shrinking, or at least not evolving as it should, but I remain hopeful.

The people at TUAW are truly remarkable. Dave Caolo is a warm, funny, kind and caring man and I think his kids are incredibly lucky to have him. Dave also worked his ass off. Mike Rose is the same superhuman dad plus his years of show experience made this thing go as close to clockwork as was possible with our limited resources. Mike Schramm, as always, is a freakin' machine with posting, scheduling and keeping on task. That guy has a huge amount of hustle. Steve Sande is an alarmingly patient and witty guy who managed to stay on his feet the entire time and still knock out a ton of work. David Winograd also hit the floor like a beat reporter on a mission and I thought his passion for his job put many younger bloggers (who have all since left TUAW) to shame. Brett Terpstra, as always, was genius and wound up writing, coding and meeting some of the people who he's deserved to meet for a LONG time. Kelly Guimont is some sort of mutant superhero, I think. Whatever mind ray she possesses managed to keep us all together and make me sing karaoke.

Also, a couple of special guests joined us. One, Shawn Boyd aka Doc Rock is one of the most amazing people I've met in my life. I'll talk more about him at a later date because now I have a reason to visit Hawaii. Just for that one motherfucker, yes. I also met Andrew Tokuda, whose work I have admired for years without realizing. He's a cool cat.

Then there's a slew of peers I either reconnected with or met for the first time. Chris Foresman, for one, surprised me with creative awesomeness. It's always good to see Dave Hamilton, Jeff Gamet, Ken Ray, David Chartier, Shawn King, Paul Kent... my brain is going numb and I'm likely to leave people off this list (like Peter Cohen, who I really wish I'd had more time to chill with), but there's the thing -- there's just too much to digest now.

I'm typing this at the airport before my flight on 4 hours of sleep. Last night I did two hours of karaoke, the 2nd time I've ever done karaoke EVER (and the 1st barely counted).

I also had an amazing time in San Francisco reconnecting with people like Nick Starr and Violet Blue, but those are all stories for a time when I can collect my thoughts. I shared magical secrets with a working magician. I interviewed a man with a REAL story (as close as I've come to real journalism in a while). Did I mention I met Rod Roddenberry, son of Gene Roddenberry? Yes, this was the twist ending to my time in California this past week and it kinda sums up the surprise that this year's Macworld became. Truly magical.

The last mile...

2011-01-22T11:04:00.000-05:00

Wrapping up a crazy past 3 months where I think I've driven the team to exhaustion, built out a number of new things and hit CES for the first time it's hard to believe we're about to descend upon San Francisco AGAIN for Macworld. This should be the best one yet for our coverage, I hope, and I'm looking forward to blowing it out and coming back to ramping up the TUAW news cycle even more...

Time to make some lists!

Most people suck

2010-12-29T15:27:00.000-05:00

You know that bumper sticker that says "Mean people suck," right? I've found most people suck. They are mean, yes, but wrapped in that irate behavior is a crunchy coating of utter incompetence that drives me f-ing bananas.

I see it ALL THE TIME. Luckily I'm surrounded by some really awesome people. We make mistakes, but we correct quickly and we learn from them. Most people make the same mistakes over and over. I do it, but not on the scale I see in the general populace.

Does that make me better than some people? Yeah, sorta. Not in a civil rights way, but certainly in a capability way.

Footnote: I've always chuckled at the meatbags who are recruited off the line from Pellissippi to go work at Scripps, yet I've been rejected for every job I've ever applied for at the place including a janitorial gig. Nevertheless, most of the people I know at Scripps are excellent. I have not yet met anyone in HR.

Opinions are like assholes...

2010-12-21T22:45:00.001-05:00

I'm going to fuck yours.

Kayden Kross has a brain

2010-12-19T14:39:00.000-05:00

The common cliche about porn stars is that they are too dumb to get real jobs or even act. Fact is, some are pretty smart. The ones who manage to treat the business like a business... well, they could be doing all sorts of things. But if you happen to be really attractive, smart AND have a rocket-fueled libido? You may be set for porn stardom. Or not. It seems to help to live in Los Angeles. Go figure.

Anyway, I happened upon the blog of Kayden Kross, an unbelievably attractive blonde porn star who happens to be getting a degree and managing her film (yes, adult film for now) career quite well.

These are the people who impress me. They can live their life unafraid and do amazing things despite a populace who would turn on them like meth-head zombies in an instant.

As the cliche says, "you go girl!"

You have to be a certified idiot in order to gain access to famous people

2010-12-14T21:32:00.000-05:00

Harry Shearer. Adam Carolla. Dr. Drew. Those are just a few of the people professional moron Joshua Kors has had the opportunity to interview. I don't know if he spoke English or just grunted and pointed at the ground a lot, however, because his "humor" piece for the Huffington Post indicates the cerebral capacity of a week-old lemur.

In my business, blogging, the slave ship deckhand of journalism, we get excoriated by trained weasels for posting a humor piece as a real piece of analysis. At least there's "anal" in analysis. In Joshua's case... it's just tripe.

Google his name and add the word iMac to see what I'm talking about. I wonder if his investigative reporting on the military has led to the conclusion that guns fire bullets but tanks do something else he can't quite understand yet.

People are confusing

2010-12-13T19:57:00.001-05:00

I'm not sure when "miss you" turns into "fuck you" but I have yet to understand anything about how people work, apparently. It's a mystery, as the Bard might say.

*sigh*

My paranoid bullshit is somehow more accurate than yours!

2010-12-11T15:24:00.000-05:00

I was doing a little research on this story about a Tea Party leader (well, they claim there IS no leadership structure, although that would make them anarchists or at the least, Church of the Subgenius) saying voting rights should be restricted to property owners. I stumbled upon this gem of an article on Free Republic (love how they always co-opt "freedom" because how can you be against freedom? I mean, unless you are gay or something). So two things in this "article" -- 1) The article, like so many partisan shitblobs, shifts away from the central argument (what was said, what it meant) and deflects into another issue entirely. In this case "what the liberals want." Of course, the liberals hate freedom and fair elections. This has little to do with the TP assertion... and then there's 2) which is that EVERY use of the word "left" can be substituted with "right" except for where it is referring to specific organizations that have been accused of tampering with voter registrations or somehow manipulating them.

I'm not here to investigate voter shenanigans. I'm just pointing out how utterly futile it is to paint one side or another as "hating freedom." This is bullshit. Neither side hates freedom. They just believe in varying degrees of it. On the liberal side there's the freedom of the individual to do certain things. On the right... THE SAME THING. But in different areas. Liberals might be OK with decriminalizing pot use. Conservatives want fewer regulations on small business owners or gun owners. The arguments otherwise are pointless. Let's debate issues, not that one side or another doesn't want a debate.

So here's the Free Republic article with the terms "left" replaced with "right" and "liberal" with "conservative." I've left in the ACORN, etc. mentions, because otherwise some nitwit would accuse me of somehow censoring the delicate context of their argument. So substitute those organizations with other, more right-wing orgs. Good luck. This will fuck with your sense of reality.

PS -- I find a LOT of right-wing propaganda starts with "I haven't read the whole thing..." which I think speaks for itself.

LEFT VS RIGHT IS POINTLESS:
Do they really want this fight?
A couple of weeks ago, on the Tea Party Nation radio show, I was talking with David DeGerolamo of NC Freedom about the Founding Fathers and the original Constitution. During the course of our discussion, I mentioned that the founding fathers limited voting rights to property owners. I commented this was a wise idea.
Apparently, two weeks after the show, some conservative stumbled across it and today, that comment has turned into conservative headlines such as, “Tea Party Nation President says It Makes A Lot of Sense to Restrict Voting to Property Owners” and “Tea Party Leaders Attack Constitution.” Suddenly, this has morphed from a discussion between two tea partiers into articles claiming that I want to change the Constitution to restrict voting to property owners.
To put it mildly, the right went nuts.
Watching the right go into hysteria over this has been nothing short of amusing. Of course, when the right goes spastic over something like this, they either get it wrong, or nine times out of ten, they lie about what was said. One of the more amusing stories started out, “Listen to Tea Party Nation President Judson Phillips discuss ending voting rights for those who do not own property!”
Of course, it begs the question; do they really want this fight?
Let’s talk about the right and voting. Perhaps we should start with ACORN. In 2007, eight members of Acorn were arrested and all later pled guilty to voter fraud. ACORN is of course, a self admitted rightist organization. This would be noteworthy in and of itself, but of course, this isn’t the first time. In 1986, twelve ACORN members pleaded guilty to voter fraud. In February 2005, an ACORN worker was convicted of voter fraud in the St. Louis area.
In Houston this year, out of 25,000 voter registrations submitted by a conservative group called Houston Votes, less than 2,000 were actually valid.
In Illinois this year, at least 35 counties failed to send ballots to U.S Service members overseas in time for them to vote. However, in Chicago, election officials made certain that ballots were delivered to criminals incarcerated in the Cook County Jail.
This year, in Arizona, the conservative groups Mi Familia, Border Action and Faith, Hope &Vote bombarded the Yuma, AZ Recorders office with a massive number of registrations right before the deadline. Of those registrations, over 8000 were found to be forged. Over 300 were by convicted felons or illegal aliens.
Of course, this does not even begin to discuss the storied history of conservative Democrat election fraud. “Landside” Lyndon Johnson was the master in Texas of getting dead people to vote for him. In Chicago, the Dailey machine was legendary in stuffing ballot boxes. In more recent times, Democrats in Washington stole the Governor’s race from Dino Rossi in 2004 and the Minnesota Senate seat from Norm Coleman in 2008.
conservatives do not believe in fair elections. This goes back to the general problem conservatives have with any form of competition. They do not like the competition of ideas because their ideas suck and Americans by a wide margin do not like their ideas. That is why they have to steal elections.
That is why conservatives have to register people multiple times to vote. That is why they have to get dead people to vote. That is why they have to get illegal aliens to vote.
The right is currently trying to raise hell and lie about something I did not say regarding voting. Do they really want to bring their record on voting to the forefront?
Emphasis mine. He should post the transcript of the full exchange; like I said up top, this wouldn’t be the first time a conservative’s words had been bowdlerized by a righty editor for maximum outrageous outrage effect.

It isn't that hard. But it is.

2010-12-10T23:57:00.000-05:00

I half-remembered a wise saying about life and "just showing up" and some percentage. So I went to Google and uncovered an interview with Bill Gates' dad that I missed out on.

It's so true: Just show up for life. Why do so many people find this hard to do? Perhaps because of our incessant lack of perspective. I mean, it's hard to have perspective when you have bills to pay, you're stuck in traffic and you can't get that girl out of your head even though you're married with kids.

Life is complicated. People make excuses. Time passes.

In the end, all you have is what you showed up to do. Did you do it? Or did it do you?

Heavy. Also heavy: "Are we not men? We are emo!" I almost put that on Twitter. So there, Life.

PS -- I'm not emo. I am growing my hair long because I've always wanted to and now, by dammit, I have the means to do so.

Stuff left undone

2010-12-08T23:36:00.001-05:00

Video. I gotta crank out some video before the end of the year. I don't know how I'm gonna do it, but boy howdy I have a backlog like a cheese taster who has never eaten a prune.

All the world's a stage...

2010-12-04T01:33:00.000-05:00

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." — Jaques (Act II, Scene VII, lines 139-166)

Mind binding

2010-12-02T12:08:00.000-05:00

The practice of foot binding in China is terrible. But we're doing a similar thing now in America which I call "mind binding." Mind binding is putting blinders on your kids, and in your own life, to only see a very narrow spectrum in the marketplace of ideas. Worse than just political naivete, this extends to *everything* and leads to people getting offended by simple posts about Chilean minders getting iPods.

A friend of mine, Haley Pogue, lives in Los Angeles and works at a theater. She gets to attend all sorts of great film functions, including Q&A sessions with filmmakers. I happened to see this tweet:
"Don't you think it deserves the NC-17 because of how real it is? Because it's so ... real?" - stupidest question at 'Blue Valentine' Q&A

It occurred to me that this person likely practices mind binding, and lives in a world where blood never exits the body when a bullet pierces the skin, where bad guys gently roll out of cars when they flip end-for-end and America's Funniest Home videos is equal to Faces of Death. In short, they are too scared by reality so they create a smaller, safer, cuter version of their own.

It is a form of selective ignorance exacerbated by the ability to now filter every piece of information you receive through the computer sorting system the rest of us call The Internet. For mind binders, this is a Wild West Web, and they endeavor not to explore new ideas, but to lock in ONLY the items they feel are true, or real, or fit their world view.

Like ignorance, this is one of the greatest threats to human progress ever.

Paul Thurrott just called me an idiot

2010-11-30T15:46:00.001-05:00

Oh Paul, you love to point out the obvious, pretend it is insightful and call it a day. Much like the middle management at Microsoft, you consider this "a real value" to your customers (in this case, audience).

However, the dude cannot abide your hacky jaunt down Kookooville's aisles with the humdinger you pooped out today, "How Apple Can Fix the iPad in 2011 LULZ 4VR" (emphasis mine and fake).

So I'll make this quick cuz I gots things to do:
1. You're not the CEO of a company like Apple and you never will be. If you think Apple gives a shit about helping the underclass afford an iPad then you may be likely to confuse the Mercedes dealership with a 7-11 or Gas'n'Go. Dunno if you checked, but Apple makes a healthy profit. By shipping "horrible" products, naturally.

2. Blah blah Features, blah blah Extras, blah blah This Ain't Right. Guess what? Me and millions of others have bought and STILL enjoy our "foolish" purchase. We will for a few years yet. Despite not having Ultra-Wide SCSI support, a matte screen and a steely dan attached to our Big touch.

3. Let's go back to profit. If you think Apple is going to create an Everlasting Gobstopper of tech, you should tell us what you did with the real Paul's body. I mean, you DO pay attention to this game, yes?

I suppose your warning was for the cheap readers, or the ones who meticulously pore over spec sheets on the Dell site waiting for that .00001MHz enhancement that'll "totally make the polygons load faster"... Those are people who aren't really users of technology, they are abusers of it. They go for the quick fix or the other extreme: they hold out for something that always eludes them, like some dragon of tech's design, a perfect beast of flight and fire that will solve all of their problems and eat the villagers.

Well, you've made a good living at it so who am I to judge? I just run one of the biggest Apple blogs on the planet, that's all.

When people say...

2010-11-28T11:23:00.000-05:00

"Let's go have a drink sometime" they mean "you look like the ice cream truck ran over your dog after your dog ate all your ice cream -- so let's go have a drink when I'm feeling worse than you."

Or something similar.

How many reboots does it take?

2010-11-25T01:02:00.000-05:00

To get to the center of my issues? I probably lost a good part of myself today after a long struggle. There may be no going back, either...

Double Down: The Repeatening

2010-11-24T09:25:00.002-05:00

We're getting bigger, badder and uncut for this year's Macworld. It's going to be awesome, exhausting work.

Gone but not forgotten

2010-11-22T23:00:00.002-05:00

I miss my friends. Considering a radical change.

Never knowing

2010-11-20T10:15:00.001-05:00

There must be some way out of here.
Said the joker to the thief.
There's too much confusion.
I can't get no relief.

Fappin' to the oldies

2010-11-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

I love how marketing firms, even those who think they are "new" and "fresh" and "use the social medias all the kids are doin' these days" still wind up falling under the same bus of conventional thought that every organization larger than 3 succumbs to. For example, when you have a meeting or presentation about "The New Role of Blogs" and you have access to a guy who manages a blog with millions of readers but instead delete his comment and focus instead on a PR guy (who, admittedly is quite awesome) alone... well, that's kinda silly, I think. It's the same herd mentality that prevents companies from innovating. They are so wrapped up in their little bubbles they never grok what the outside world is doing. One of the things I've always liked about Apple is that they do NOT do this. To Steve Jobs, design is tantamount. And design is organic when it is done best. It is not a formula, handed down from generations of academics who only live in the world of design (although that world is merely a reflection of the outside so by definition it is NOT a bubble).

Gotta think bigger than PR, my PR friends.

Can't get that song out of my head

2010-11-13T23:59:00.003-05:00

COMMENTERS! There's gotta be a musical number in there somewhere. I want to eviscerate one here. This was left on the Netflix blog when they made an announcement about Netflix on Android. Here's the comment with my comments on the comment in bold.

Android isn't fragmented, its called choice.
You say potato, I say French Fries. Same fucking thing but one is less healthy for your heart.

And its also called progress.
Fragmentation is progress because choice means never being able to figure out what app runs on what phone. Choice!

If you have an old computer running Windows 98, you can't just expect it to be able to run Vista. Some people run Android1.6, and their devices aren't strong enough to run anything bigger. That's just progress.
Uh, except Windows 98 was 12 years ago. Android was 2 years ago. This sounds like some Steve Jobsisms. Which brings us to the next gem...

And that versions of Android look different from difference manufacturers - that's choice (something apple hates)
Whoa, let's stop right here for a second. Apple hates choice. 1) You are mostly correct. 2) You know who else hates choice? Google. Ford. NBC. The guy selling oranges at the exit ramp. Offering different flavors of your OS to different manufacturers is NOT choice. Businesses don't want you to choose *other competitor products* -- they want you to choose them, Pikachu.

they offer different things to different people - and normal people like that. Its only nerds who freak out.
Actually, no. Let's ignore the runaway success of "evil" Apple, who "hates" choice. There's a well-known force at work in consumer product lines called "overabundance of choice." A consumer, having little time or knowledge to make a decision amongst too many similar-but-different products in a given category can experience a sort of vapor lock, choosing instead a completely different product that is easy to comprehend.
Apple, for those who are older than 11 years old and might remember, once offered a dizzying line of Macs known as Performas. There were Performas in dozens of flavors and configurations -- and they sold like crap. When Jobs came back he simplified the product line and guess what? People bought the shit out of Apple products. To this day each category has a streamlined offering. Based on sales within each category and YOY market share growth, I'd say consumers dig this "evil" lack of choice. Geeks, on the other hand, will do the research and choose something out of a billion configs that matches exactly what they want. That's why they build computers from scratch.

And finally Digital Restrictions Management is evil, so its only natural the free Android fights it.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of DRM, but saying "Android fights it" is asinine. What evidence is there of this? Fragmentation, I guess.
/end of line.

By the way, the commenters pretty much throw the whole "fragmentation is good" argument out the window. Those commenters are what we call "normal consumers" and they are tired of getting screwed.

Once in a while Giz knocks it out of the park

2010-11-12T15:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was that day.

If I had my will turned into instant reality I would tattoo every word of this in 72-point type across the chest and back of every asshat moron who feels TUAW (or any other decent site) isn't doing something justice by whatever kneejerk metric they've pooped out that moment.

In short: I would drown trolls in this sauce of reason.

Kudos to Giz.

Innernette is HARD (Update: It really is)

2010-11-09T16:53:00.001-05:00

Cooks Source claims to have no clue how to use social media for good, bad or otherwise and claims to have made a "simple" error in plagiarizing the work of an author. Good for them!

Update: To be fair, Cooks Source probably is just a small operation by a team of people who, like it or not, don't understand tech that well, let alone "social media." This is what keeps consultants in business. Also, I feel for them in a way because *we* make mistakes all the time on the web and people never hesitate (never, ever, ever) to call us out on them.

For instance, tonight we published a pic of John Gruber's kid supposedly holding a white iPhone 4. Our author didn't check to see that John has a son (the long hair in the pic made him presume it was a girl but it wouldn't have been that hard to check) nor did he (or myself) check to see if the iPhone really *was* an iPhone, not a toy. It turned out to be a toy.

In the heat of battle shit happens. Anytime I feel like associating evil motives to an innocent screwup without having the benefit of being in the room as people made that decision, I am reminded of our own foibles. None are with ill intent.

Adopt-a-douche

2010-11-02T13:32:00.002-04:00

For mere pennies a day, you can support the vitriolic spew of this loving TUAW commenter, Freddy.

It's a lot funnier if you use that Fred kid's voice when reading his bullshit, however.

Hey, it CAN be worse!

2010-10-22T14:42:00.001-04:00

Just look at the vitriolic, off-topic, whack-job nutso comments on this post about Obama signing an iPad on MacDailyNews here. (The ones with hard facts are just off-topic, but IMO if you feel the need to be off-topic, you're kinda off-kilter anyway)

So here's my analogy of the day. Free speech allows you to say whatever the hell you want. If a guy comes into a restaurant and has his fly down, and you lean over to your dining companion and say, "hey look at that idiot," that's fine.

However, if you jump on top of your table and scream at the top of your lungs "THAT FUCKING IDIOT HAS HIS FLY DOWN, ZOMGWTFBBQSAUCE!" then the owner of the establishment has every right to throw your dumbfuck face out the door and hope you land in a pile of dogshit.

I'm not picking a political side here, I'm saying quit being loud douchebags every opportunity that presents itself.

But we sort of have a history of being assholes in this country...

Blogger lashes out, and my debut podcast TONIGHT

2010-10-20T19:34:00.000-04:00

I found this little item nice "Dear John Kass, Where's The Love?" Great rebuttal by a hardworking blogger who was disses in a blanket (asshat) statement by a John Kass, a 25-year veteran of the Chicago Tribune. It must be nice to think that, after 25 years, you are somehow more equal than other humans beings, or that your work instantly invalidates the hard work bloggers do.

Blogging is different, but it is still hard work. The people at Kroger's deli may not make the same cakes as Charm City, but they still bust their asses. OK, maybe not ALL the time.

Anyway, it's this sort of thing I want to start talking about. We're all people. I've had the pleasure to know (and fall out of touch with) a great many people, from construction workers to lawyers to homeless immigrants to college professors. I think the more we can talk to each other, the more we understand.

So tonight I'm starting my first podcast in what is fast becoming "nearly a decade" in bloggerspeak (that is, imprecise fuzzy talk, haha). Check it out on Wednesday nights at 11PM Eastern right here on Talkshoe.

My righteous indignation over your free product I willingly accept into my brain

2010-10-18T01:11:00.000-04:00

Commenters have reached an all-time low. We posted about Chilean miners... apparently people thought it was offensive, linkbait, racist, evil and so on.

Then we post about an app for Healthcare.gov and the partisan lunatics come out in force, leaving a trail of misery and stupidity in their wake. Calling for the firing of my bloggers and saying they, as "customers" are somehow incensed that we would DARE take a "side" on the issue... and again calling for my people to be fired.

So from now on we're going to start banning/deleting any idiots. And and all of them. Judgement day is here and I've got a fully-automatic double-barrel .50 cal just waiting to drop these birds like an alien invasion of stupid.

Glenn Beck is crazy, right?

2010-10-13T18:15:00.001-04:00

This commencement speech sounds like the ravings of a lunatic. Listen how he laughs maniacally at a wrong moment. Or how he mixes biblical phrases with pop-culture sayings. I don't know how anyone with more than a 3rd-grade education takes this guy seriously.

This is probably the best comment ever on the MediaMatters post I linked to above.

"What our grandparents taught us?

Mine raised children through the Great Depression. They didn't lose much because they had nothing to lose. They saw FDR as one of our greatest presidents and the one responsible for leading them through hard financial times.

They saw their sons answer the call to fight fascism in Europe and the beaches and waters of the Pacific. Their daughters worked long hours in munitions factories to do their part in the war against fascism.

They taught their grandchildren empathy, compassion and most of all an appreciation for what it means to be an American.

In short, my grandparents would be called fascists by Beck, even though their sons risked everything fighting against real fascism in WWII or communists even though their grandsons risked all fighting communism in South East Asia.

Glenn Beck is an ill-informed, cowardly religious fraud. He's risen to a position of power and wealth on the backs of the people whose troubles he's ridiculed throughout his shock jock radio career which he's now turned into a daily political screed, attacking everything my grand parents, parents and I have fought against our entire lives.

I've had the best modern history teachers in the world, the people who actually lived it. How dare you or Beck come here and push your alternative reality on those of us who've actually taken part in that history?"

Whiners, lazy parents and evilness

2010-10-09T12:06:00.000-04:00

We're in great shape as a people. We went to soccer today and I saw:
- Whiny parents who want to complain but not offer solutions or clean up their own mess.
- Lazy parents who have either fed their kids corn syrup for breakfast or raw sugar, and who refuse to push their kids to do better. "Billy, you're doing a great job standing there and looking up into space!"
- Evil parents who cuss out the ONE KID who ran the entire game. Also the same parents I see completely ignoring their 2 other kids. They've got like 5, but the babies sit in one of those wagons, crying, just wanting to be picked up, but instead the parents just ignore them. The 3-yr old was crying to get her doll out of a spot it was stuck in, and the mom (instead of fixing the problem) came over and said "if you don't stop crying I'm going to bust your butt." That's a great lesson: If life hands you lemons, STAB LIFE IN THE NECK AND CRUSH ITS FACE.

No wonder these Tea Party nutcases are being nominated.

Let it go

2010-10-05T09:25:00.001-04:00

Just let it go, Jack.

One of my favorite Lost moments.

Lonely

2010-10-04T23:52:00.000-04:00

I've spent the better part of the past 11 years distancing myself from anyone I ever knew. Holing myself up with my then-wife and retreating from society. I was never good at keeping in touch with people.

There's some old proverb about a rich man being rich in money but poor in friends and a poor man who is rich in friends having more in his life... but study after study has shown that you grow older and stay happier if you have a good network of friends.

I'm pretty lucky. I do have friends. Some people have far fewer. But in my hour of darkness the list of people I can call to is quite short. They all have lives now. It's not like when we were in our 20's and we didn't worry so much about paychecks and feeding our kids...

Now here I am watching Battlestar Galactica. The episode called "Tigh me up, Tigh me down" and part of it is about friendship. And mistakes. But the whole series was about this. I'm re-watching the series because it is a reminder of the choices we make in life. The ones that have an impact beyond our own little lives.

This has all happened before...

UR doin it wrong

2010-10-04T16:32:00.001-04:00

But don't pause to re-evaluate. Just keep going headlong into the darkness and hope it works out.

Golly what a day!

2010-09-28T18:47:00.000-04:00

Oodelally, indeed! AOL bought TechCrunch, the company who makes Brizzly and 5min media all in one day. I'm one degree of separation from Jason Shellen, have been to the Crunchies but have never heard of 5min media until today... None of which amounts to any sort of statement on what's to come!

I will say that I met M.G. Siegler and the guy is crazy smart. At least he seemed that way. I put on a good show as well, but clearly MG has better posture.

Mean-ness

2010-09-26T10:36:00.002-04:00

I appreciate a good roast but have always found it tricky to deal with "mean" humor. It's something my dad always did, so maybe that's my mental block.

You have to stand for something

2010-09-23T23:42:00.000-04:00

If everyone in the financial system (huge, vast, overcomplicated and freaky circulatory system of "money") acted like Ron Conway, we never would have had to bail anyone out. The system would work because it would be merit-based. Not greed-based.

Burn Barrel Talk

2010-09-21T19:39:00.000-04:00

Watch this and help me win the Rocky Top Comedy Contest!

Feeling better because...

2010-09-21T18:26:00.000-04:00

When I reflect upon things I realize
a) Things are pretty OK, really
b) I need to let go more
c) I'm not trapped 2,000+ feet below the Earth's surface with no hope of rescue for months.

Also: my secret project just keeps getting more awesome in my mind. It's the perfect blend of "stuff" that equates to an almost magical karmic blend. In other words, this project will "lift all boats" for everyone involved and shaft no one.

I'm a big believer in karma, especially in business. This is the one. The one that I can call my own and share the success with everyone who engages it. Can't talk about it too much yet, but hopefully before the end of the year I can...

Happy fucking birthday to me

2010-09-21T13:56:00.001-04:00

16+ hour workdays, now my girlfriend is pissed at me and I can't even make time to do the extra work I need to make life more enjoyable. Depression begins NOW. Yay.

Low power mode

2010-09-20T22:22:00.000-04:00

I'd been putting off a sickness for a while, but also working 12+hour days for over a week. Today my body had enough. Just when I thought I was feeling a little better my head started hurting so bad I couldn't bear to have my eyes open. So I crawled into bed for what I thought would just be an hour or so... about 6 hours later I managed to crawl back out.

Proof that you can push your body for a while, but then it'll want to go into Sleep mode to run some cron jobs or something. Feeling much better now!

Toyblogging isn't back... yet

2010-09-16T11:35:00.002-04:00

Working on something way cooler. Can't talk about it yet.

No sleep till... Brooklyn?

2010-09-15T18:03:00.002-04:00

Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Sleep.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.
Work work work work work work.

UPDATE: Forgot the END OF LINE statement. Last line should read:
Work work work DIE.

In honor of a very wonderful man who I swore not to become. Marc Orchant, I'll probably join you before I know it.

So here's the deal

2010-09-15T00:29:00.000-04:00

Both the right and the left are going to continue to spar for a while. The tipping point will likely be when someone says or does something *directly* that is so vile it disenfranchises an entire segment of their support.

Of course, they've tried. Painting Palin as an opportunist may be accurate, but it has largely failed to win anyone to "the other side." They've successfully sold Palin as a success story -- and Americans love a gal who did it her way. Who says you can't make money? That's downright UN-American!

It's also un-American to manipulate the truth. With six words Fox news could end this pointless "birther" crap. Newt has only to say it. A free marketplace of ideas is only free when the ruling class speaks the truth as they know it. We've always had lies in politics, but now there's an entire channel devoted to propagandizing a party line. And that's a little scary.

Seriously?

2010-09-14T17:12:00.000-04:00

While live on air, the journalist claimed that her demanding producers were disabling her from being able to “eat properly” and “breathe.” via Geekosystem

Old school journalists are going to have to understand that in today's online world you are not allowed to pee, poop, eat, OR breathe. Sorry, I just heard my kidneys explode. I guess it helps that Norway has a lovely unemployment benefits plan for people who just walk off the job...