funny

(source)

A blog I have mentioned before that I enjoy is closing. I hate that. Uncov, the foulmouthed CS-heavy blog. is closing, as an afterthought, Ted writes:

Oh, right. One more thing. This is the last Uncov. Ever. I have been getting tired of it, and this has been manifesting itself in my writing. After seeing the spectacle at the Crunchies, I think it’s finally time to quit.

Bummer. I enjoy cranky tech blogs. They’re a nice antidote to the pure rah-rah blogs out there. Bye, Uncov.

HI,

Good Evening. I found your profile which you have posted in the Google. I got very good job offer for you. I am sending you the details. If you are interested to take this opportunity, kindly send your updated resume with contact details and two references so that I can submit you and put you on board. We deal directly with the client and this position is moving real fast.

Position:Full time
Salary:
Location : San Jose, CA.
Start date immediate

Yesterday I managed to write a post that was not: a single photo with a caption; a list of links; a random snippet of lyrics; a few words begging you off until I could really blog. Today, I have some links, but there are very many, and I hope to provide some context for each.

First up, with my slightly increasing free time, I have more time for random seeking out of interesting links. Some of the best I’ve found have been via a subdomain off reddit.com—the site is http://programming.reddit.com. I’m not a reddit member that I can remember. I also don’t participate in digg. Why? Just time I suppose.

The first piece of news that’s worth knowing is that Andy Baio of Waxy.org will be pursuing his blog full-time in the new year. I’ve been reading Waxy for a long time, and I wish him well in his new Post-Yahoo! and Post-Upcoming.org years!

Next up I have a pile of news about web and mobile development:

The SDK for Android Google Handset is out. The Android platform is darned interesting to me. The more I read about mobile, that is, “cell phones;” the more I think that it’s inevitable that more of what I do will end up on cell phones. I look forward to learning more about this.

Speaking of Mobile, did you know that the free web browser for mobile devices (it fits on my M500 Samsung mobile phome) Opera Mini 4 came out of beta? Well, it did, and it feels slightly faster, though by default the “start page” of the browser no longer has the field that shoots searches directly to Wikipedia, it does have a configurable search box. Power to you Opera! You’re a good egg!

For those of you who are interested in all things JavaScript, you should know that the Prototype and Scriptaculous libraries iterated version numbers. Read more about Prototype 1.6 and Scriptaculous 1.8 on Ajaxian.

Speaking of AJAX: There’s a nifty Google API for their search products called AjaxSearch. I look forward to a chance to use it on something public!

The “J” in AJAX is “JavaScript”—sadly, the state of JavaScript is so dismal that Douglas Crockford himself advises folks to install the FireFox plugin No Script. I find that a bit terrifying.

Also terrifying is the matter of capturing key events using JavaScript and the difficulty thereto: Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about this problem cross-platform and cross-browser.

Problems like this are the reason I have embraced libraries for functionality like this. Let someone else sweat out the details between the browser versions. I just want to write code.

Speaking of writing code, Google released an API for Gmail that exposes its’ functionalities to GreaseMonkey. This kind of extensibility is wonderful, but it has me vexed because I have no idea what I’d change about what I build now to make them ready for GreaseMonkey. I intend to learn though.

Enough tech! Now, here are some fun cutenesses:

ze frank sings! “and somehow I get over it”

John Scalzi went to the Creation Museum and all I got was this (excellent) post on his blog: note: colorful language and excellent reportage. No time to read? Check out his photo slideshow as well. Really funny stuff.

Jon Armstrong is married to a stubborn, stubborn woman. And that’s funny.

David Byrne went to Ikea and all I got was a darn blog post. He’s awesome though. Really.

Want to read me talk voluminously about tortilla snack food options? Read this. I love a good tortilla.

What I don’t necessarily love are disturbing and tentacled Orangina ads: here and here. NOTE: Disturbing and tentacled Orangina Ads are contained there. Please view responsibly. Also, the Oranginas I can get at lunchtime have high fructose corn syrup. Sad.

Now? Video time! Paul Rand on Design:

Whoa, we just veered back on-topic. Best to stop that! Let’s learn how to dress for success.

Speaking of success: History Channel. City Of The Future: Los Angeles 2106. It’s pretty darn cool. It feels rather more realistic than it would have in the past. I guess that’s normal for futuristic predictions.

That’s it for now! Onward!

via Uncle Eddy

Fun things I noted recently, Neil joined my MyBlogLog (we’re up to 1 member, yay!), and also that he had mentioned me in a blog post but I had missed it. Kind words. Neil’s a very funny writer.

Headed to work now. Yesterday was good. Hoping for likewise today.

Some strangeness afoot. Police apparently came in the house while I was in the tub and looked around looking for some dude (Ryan Reynolds?). They didn’t bug me.

Also, my Windows 2003 and my iTunes and my old 1GB iPod Shuffle are not playing well. Jerks.

Yuck!

I tried the iPod Reset Utility, I tried the instructions which included making a .BAT file, and I tried the normal process of allowing iTunes to reset the firmware. No dice and Windows would hang—complete freeze, and I was unable to quit iTunes as an application or as a process. UGLY. I also tried going into Hardware Manager, but the iPod would not be read there.

I was able to get it working on my older Mac G4. It’s slower, but with the Mac iPod Reset Utility things worked.

So I’m giving up syncing my podcasts from Windows and moving to the Mac. Really I need to get a new Mac—for work and for things like this, but that’s not in the budget yet, and if I can’t pay cash, I can’t do it.

Meanwhile, in the interwebs, where things are funny and do not require you to look at Windows Event Logs, check out this: Gabe and Max’s How to Get the Dreamlife of Your Dreams Using the Internet Thing

That made me laugh.

Elsewhere, this post by Adrian Belew about Frank Zappa made me cry.

I suggest you watch the funny video before you read the crying-making thing.

Onward!

Uncov got some para-journalistic love from Wired. I have mentioned uncov before. I have thought a bit more about the salty language Ted uses, and I’ve decided it’s really interesting to my brain to have the subject be computer science and business and have the language come out of, oh, Quentin Tarantino. Id meets intellect. WIN.

My new favorite movie blog is Slashfilm. A recent post is about Across the Universe, and the fact that it’s developing a cult following: Across the Universe: the Next Cult Sensation?. Several of us went to see it the weekend it came out over in Simi Valley and I enjoyed it. It put me in the mind of a Chicago or a Moulin Rouge. Parts of AtU get a little too surreal, but basically it holds together like a musical, it’s magical, and the music is rather well handled. Also, I was pretty proud to spot the Joe Cocker cameo. And there are others too, but I won’t ruin those.

And ooh, what’s this, a new Cat and Girl collection! Yay! I’ve mentioned this strip before. Here’s $8228.40 and a Metrocard, described as:

This 468 page brick of a book prints every episode of Donation Derby from its inception through December 2006. It adds a handy place index and brief interviews with your Donation Derby regulars. Buying this book supports my lavish lifestyle.

See, if you send money to Cat and Girl’s cartoonist, Dorothy, she will draw you a comic of what she buys with it. I love the concept. I’ve even donated. One of mine made the cut. You know, I already told you to read it!

Meanwhile… I’m ashamed to admit that I totally forgot about World Egg Day, which was Thursday. I missed the Frederator Studios piece. However, I can do some penance by linking to the wonderful and hallucinatory iloveegg.com:

Their animation is sort of wonderful.

In a serious and more academic realm than cartoon dancing singing eggs, Paul Kedrosky says Ooooh, Blogs are Now Authoritative, reporting that the National Institutes of Health style guide describes how to cite a blog post—Sample Citation and Introduction to Citing Blogs:

Also in a serious vein, KPBS should choose JeSais.

Over on BLDGBLOG, I love this rant: Greater Los Angeles. I don’t agree with it all, but that’s L.A. for you. Heh. While I’ve brought up L.A., let me suggest you check out the Militant Angeleno Blog. BLDGBLOG was a part of the big Science Fiction and Architecture thing Chris G and I went to a few months ago.

It’s raining here. We have some friends coming, and we’re tidying up. Alex’s birthday was yesterday—she turned 17!—and she and some friends are headed to Magic Mountain, driven by Leah. Man, I so don’t want to be 17 again. It’s a lovely day.

Wiio’s laws are humoristically formulated serious observations about how human communication usually fails except by accident. This document comments on the applicability and consequences of the laws, especially as regards to communication on the Internet.

1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.
   1. If communication can fail, it will
   2. If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails
   3. If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding
   4. If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails
2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage
3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message
4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds
   1. The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate
5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be
6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance
7. The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago

I really like that Steve Yegge fellow. He’s funny and smart and he builds stuff with computers. That’s my kind of people.

Stevey’s Blog Rants: Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume

Face it: all the traditional advice about trying to convince the hiring manager that you’re a plucky, scrappy young individual from a farm in Alabama who’s destined for greatness on account of your Uncle Ted having given you that pep talk after you fell off your horse when you were a kid — that advice may as well have come from the back end of your horse, because the hiring manager just wants to profile your current skill set. Mr. Plucky goes into the Round File.

Don’t get all depressed about this tip. People will start caring more about you as a person in later phases of the recruiting process, particularly if you’re one of those candidates who doesn’t really like showering.