On last night’s Daily Show I caught a glimpse of a new “Get A Mac” ad from Apple. You know, those fun little 30-second spots featuring John Hodgman as a PC and Justin Long as a Mac.
In this one, PC’s new Windows Vista operating system is serious about security. So serious the it comes with an “agent”. See what I mean…
I thought this was funny since I have heard about the semi-intrusive feature in Vista that repeatedly asks for permission to do simple things. Despite that, and some other egregious user interface and general user-hating flaws in the system, I will probably be the owner of a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate by the end of this day. That’s only because I will be getting it at the extreme discount that Microsoft employees get it for. It can’t hurt to have a copy of Redmond’s latest and greatest around, can it?
…”You are attempting to install Vista on your awesome MacBook Pro, cancel or allow?”
Do you experience confusion? Anxiety? Feelings that your life is out of your control?
Televised advertisements for prescription drugs may be partly to blame, new research suggests.
The Annals of Family Medicine has published the results of a study that discusses the negative impacts of all the prescription drug advertisements we see on television. I discussed the same in a post I made back in November of 2005, “Here’s a pill, won’t you have another?”
On another note, Super Bowl XLI was incredibly lame. I did not follow the NFL season but I would love to know how the Chicago Bears even got to the national championship game with an offense that plays for the other team.
That is what happens when it snows in Seattle. Well, at least its *some* of what happens.
Oh you thought we were through with the freak winter in the Pacific Northwest this year? Not a chance. A couple of weeks ago on a nice (relative) Monday in Bellevue, the weathermen — nay, meteorologists — of the area predicted three inches of snow for Monday evening. Everyone quivered and shook in their Birkenstocks and Uggz and took off early from work to get home before the blizzard and the traffic. Turns out they were wrong as usual and we got maybe 0.1 inches of snow Monday night.
So Tuesday comes around and they once again predict doom and gloom for the Seattle area and multiple inches of snow. Fool me twice? Pshaw, I say. So I’m at work typing away around 4:30 as I hear the half-conversations of the people on the phone around me. “No kidding… the roads are all blocked up in Kirkland?… That much snow on the ground?…” Of course I glance outside from where I’m sitting and I see nothing but cloudy skies and oncoming sunset. A piddling fifteen minutes pass, the sun sets of course and we have nighttime darkness at 4:45, and I take a second glance outside to see… snow! Snow coming down probably as hard as I have ever seen snow come down. Well I try to pack up and get out of there as soon as I can but by the time I got to my car in the garage and got out, there was already a good half an inch to an inch of fresh powder covering the ground. I did okay driving around the outside portions of the parking lot but as soon as I took the left onto the slightly uphill street, my car didn’t make it more than 25 feet before going into spin city. Granted, I drive a rear-wheel drive sports car with ultra-low-profile summer performance tires on it, so this was not a big surprise to me (or those watching for that matter). I probably would have done better if I had waited for some of the snow to compact, harden, or melt off in an hour or two as cars drove over and past it. Anyway, I reversed over to the side of the road leaving my car for the night, and walked back up to the office, very much defeated by the weather gods.
Luckily for me my boss lives very close to my place and he offered to give me a lift home. He did not however spare any opportunities to make fun of the many more 3 Series or other similar vehicles also stranded on the side of the road as we took our 10-minute-turned-1.5-hour drive home. Thanks Mike. All I have to say to that is, “Yay, Armen!”
The events of that Tuesday weren’t all though; we got more snow again on Saturday and again a couple of days after that. Suffice to say that some side and back roads were well and frozen for over a week. This all gave me the opportunity to score what I think are some pretty photos.
Note, the roads seem snow-free because I didn’t snap this shot until Thursday morning, and this is a very high traffic road. Click through to my Flickr photostream to see a few more shots of the snow around my place. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of my poor car stranded on the side of the road for you to make fun of.
The last few days we have seen some conciliatory gestures by the weather around here; mostly clear days with some very light sprinkling tossed in. A few years ago I might have complained; this year I consider that a blessing. And please, if you live in an area where it snows, ever, learn how to drive (or when to pull over) in those conditions; unlike the idiot in the video up there.
Hey those guys in the white lab coats can sometimes be as boring to me as for anyone, but you’ve got to hand it to them when they cook up some really fun stuff. Fluids that become solid when you hit them (dilitants), auxetic materials that get thicker when you stretch them out, superfluids that have no friction and can flow right up the sides of a container, and ferrofluids that are liquids with tiny metals in them and can float in magnetic fields.
If you’d like to see videos of these crazy materials in action, check out The Stuff of Dreams by New Scientist. Here is a teaser video of ferrofluids in action to get you started…
In case you haven’t heard, a little storm hit the Pacific Northwest and Seattle last Thursday night. It brought rain, hurricane-force winds of over 70mph, and hundreds of fallen trees and downed power lines. Enough to leave over a million people without power on Friday.
On Thursday night the power flickered off/on several times until it finally died around 10pm. I knocked out early and woke up in the morning to find the power wasn’t back yet. I had no idea the extent of the damage around the area, and since the power at my place has gone out during almost every remotely hard storm we’ve seen, I had no reason to assume that it would be as bad as it was.
I headed to work on Friday morning. No, strike that, I tried to go to work. I spent about 45 minutes dodging a bunch of nut-jobs darting across intersections with dead traffic lights. These imbeciles will gladly flash a piece of plastic at you as proof that they know how to drive. When it comes down to it though, they prove their mental capacity mimics that of a banana slug. Do you really think that trying to just force your way into the middle of the intersection with your giant SUV is speeding up anyone’s, including your, commute? If people would take turns sending one car from each lane in each direction in a counter-clockwise or clockwise fashion, things would move quickly and smoothly. Instead what happened was a cluster that backed cars up for as far as the eye could see. Getting back home was no easy task either; trying to dodge backed up lines of cars as well as the numerous blocked roads and downed trees allowed me to find a new roundabout route from work to home.
Needless to say, at this point the magnitude of the disaster was becoming clear to me. There was no power at work which meant there was no work. I spent most of the day Friday doing a bunch of stuff around the house that needed to be done anyway and didn’t require electricity. I tried to run some errands, but the power was out everywhere, even in Redmond. Trying to leave Bellevue headed south, to where there was power, was an exercise in patience I was not up for.
Later that night Matt and I did make it out to Renton to find the area jam-packed with more people than have probably ever been in the area. Every fast food place, gas station, and grocery store had lines spilling out of it. After recharging ourselves and my car we headed home to find that Matt had power but I did not. I braved the cold in my apartment for one more night but when I woke up Saturday morning freezing in my own bed, I knew I had to get out of there. I grabbed my things and headed over to Matt’s place Saturday morning; and I’m still there as I write this post.
Its certainly been an interesting weekend. You may be wondering why I labeled this post part 2 of 2. Well, there is another crazy Seattle disaster story I’ve been meaning to retell here which I haven’t gotten around to yet. I will try to do that soon though. It involved me, a plane, and a lot of white stuff.
If you have seen stronger and funnier evidence than this phone call that a high school degree from a public school in this country proves little to nothing about a person’s intelligence, I would love to see it.
This poor sap spends an hour on the phone (20 minutes recorded below) with no less than 5 Verizon Wireless reps trying to explain to them that $0.002, which is what they read from their screens and papers, is not the same as saying something costs “0.002 cents“. Not a single one of them is able to see the difference. I know, you don’t believe me. Just listen to the thing right below.
Hello people!? Just because it came after a dollar sign and a decimal point doesn’t mean you can read it “cents” willy nilly. I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh as I listened to this recording. Of course I erred on the side of fun and I laughed uncontrollably throughout the call. Here’s hoping that you do too.
Epilogue: According to the blog this guy set up, VerizonMath, after several days, hundreds of thousands of people learning of the incident, and no doubt hundreds of them writing or calling to Verizon, VZW has finally admitted their mistake, refunded the guy’s money, and promised to edit their reference materials to make things clearer for their 2nd-grade-educated reps.
Let’s be clear. I have no beef with you if you answer support calls for a living. I do think you’re incompetent if you don’t know how much money $0.002 is.
It’s always so encouraging to look at the weather forecast and see a week of rain coming your way. That’s just a little taste of the typical Seattle winter week. There are still plenty of things to do to keep busy though. Last Friday I attended the Leopard Tech Talk by Apple on the latest developer tools and features of the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 a.k.a. Leopard. I’m particularly looking forward to being able to use Dashcode to help with some Dashboard development I might be doing in the near future. Also, while sitting in one of the sessions, I had an idea for a widget that is such a no-brainer that I have no idea how I didn’t think of it until now. I’ll tell you all about it if I actually get around to finishing it.
This weekend I saw the movie Stranger than Fiction which I thought had looked interesting since the first time I saw the trailer. Although I wouldn’t call the film revolutionary, it is at the very least a little different than most of the drivel in theaters today. It is a fun little story about a non-descript IRS agent Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrel, who is a character in a book being written by a famous author. One day he starts hearing the author’s voice in his head as she narrates the story of his life “accurately, and with a better vocabulary”. Turns out that Harold is not just a character in the unfinished book, but a real person. I won’t spoil the rest of the plot for you but suffice to say that while it was enjoyable, I think the original book ending would have suited the movie better as well.
Oh and speaking of Hollywood drivel, a blog called Drivl has a post about ten things that software code does in movies that it never does in real life. I love this list because it points out how the computer interaction in most movies is so very silly. My favorite of course is #9: “People who write code use mice”. For years, running on decades now, computer users in films and television have been banging away frantically at keyboards while performing all manner of tasks that would be impossible or extremely difficult to accomplish without the aid of a mouse or other pointing device. CSI agents touching up photos using their keyboard? Not likely. I guess clicking a mouse is not as dramatic as banging away on a keyboard.
Hey there! I’ve been out of town and doing lots of stuff so I expect to post a barrage of content over the next week or two about all that. For now, working in reverse-chronological order, let’s explore the ancient art of snowshoeing.
Last week some of the guys at work suggested we go snowshoeing and since it was an outdoor activity I had yet to try, I could hardly turn them down. I went to REI for the first time to gear up and rent the snowshoes. REI is an interesting place; I had no idea it was a consumer co-op. I’m a member now, yay.
Then we got up on Saturday at a weekday-like 8am to head out to the Snoqualmie area in search of the Gold Creek Trail. Lucky for us, the road to get to the trail was snowed in so we ended up snow-shoeing up to the trailhead rather than starting there.
Snowshoeing is definitely a cool way to go hiking in the winter and reach areas you normally couldn’t on foot. On the other hand, dragging around metal extensions attached to already heavy hiking boots is not on my ankles’ favorite list of things to do at this point. So while I had a great time exploring the area with the guys, I won’t be snowshoeing every weekend hereafter.
I guess this is as good a time as any to mention that between all the activity, the site changed hosts from 1&1 (those chumps gave me three free years of hosting!) to Dreamhost.
This is it, it is finally here… today is the big day. Expedia.com introduces their travel rewards program in conjunction with Citi’s ThankYou Network. This program was over a year in the making and a result of the hard work of many people in both groups (myself included).
Here is what you want to know about this program and the ThankYou Network in general:
Starting today, you can earn ThankYou Points for booking hotels, vacation packages, cruises, and activities on Expedia.com. Depending on what you book you get 1-2 points per dollar spent. You earn these points no matter how you pay for the travel!
You still earn the loyalty points you normally would from the airline, hotel, or car suppliers.
If you make the booking using an eligible Citi credit card, you earn another 1 point per dollar spent plus a point for every mile you fly.
So for example you book a flight+hotel trip for two from New York to Las Vegas that costs you $1400 on a Citi PremierPass credit card. You could earn upwards of 6,500 ThankYou Points for just that one booking!
Then you can redeem your ThankYou Points for all kinds of things including gift cards, gifts, and most importantly, more travel. There are no blackout dates for the travel redemptions and no tricky rules. The Travel Rewards portion of the ThankYou Network site is powered by Expedia and is what I have spent most of my first 15 months at Expedia working on.
You need to be a ThankYou member to sign in to the site and see what I’ve built but it is free and easy to join so, what are you waiting for? Go sign up for your free ThankYou Network account now!
I’ll include the press release after the jump and also post my personal thoughts about working on the program later…
Yesterday I made my second annual homage to the Seattle Auto Show with Scott and Nick. Lest you all get excited or jealous that you didn’t make it, let me cool your boots right now. The Seattle Auto show is a joke of a show when compared to the LA Auto Show I have been visiting for years now. I would liken it more to a place where all your local dealers come together to showcase the same cars you could see in the showroom; they just save you from driving lot to lot.
Besides the usual showroom floor equipment, we were treated to these throwback concept cars from the show circuit of the last couple of years: Dodge Rampage, Ford Bronco, and Ford Shelby GR-1. We were just enamored with these cars, really. Meanwhile we were left pining to see new cars like the beautiful Audi R8 or even the new Audi TT.
Speaking of Audi, of all the cars at the show we probably were most impressed with their lineup. The cars are beautiful from the outside and even more amazing on the inside. The sound that of the A8L’s door being shut got us excited it sounded so solid and well-built. I can’t say that has ever happened to me. Every surface looks good and feels even better to touch; the door panels, the dash, the seats, you name it. Audi really has no competition when it comes to interior design and quality.
Quick hits on other new cars I finally saw in person at the show:
Acura MDX - Overbearing and ugly front fascia, interior seriously lacking in the luxury department
Acura RDX - Nifty little premium SUV, if you’re into that sort of thing
BMW M6 - Unpainted carbon fiber roof, V10 engine. I need not say more
BMW 3 Coupe - Looks good in person from the outside, nearly identical on the inside. Will continue to sell ridiculously well even though it costs more than others
Dodge Caliber - Looks good for a compact, hard pressed to find a cheaper interior though
Honda CR-V - Looks like a fish with an underbite. And who designed that awkward D-pillar??
Infiniti G35 - Looks like it got a bad facelift on the outside, inside is still overly busy with buttons and techno-gadgetry in a bad way
Lexus - Zzzzz… sorry, I fell asleep while walking through the Lexus section
VW Rabbit - Scotty keeps telling me what a great value this car is for under $15K. After sitting inside the new one I would have a hard time disagreeing with him.
Don’t get me wrong now, we still had a good time at the show. We just spent most of it riding our Euro-driving high horse, ripping on the cheap interiors of the domestics or the awkward exterior design of the Saab’s and Subaru’s of the world. And we topped it all off with a nice Oktoberfest meal at Gordon Biersch. I had been craving steak for a few days…
