My Face When Economic Data Over Time Isn't Adjusted for Inflation

Two Serious Questions

How often do you click "Follow us on Facebook" links from a company's website?

How different is this from a web ring?

Thank you John Carmack

A quick note about something I just realized.

The most hotly anticipated computer game ten years ago was Quake 3.  Promising huge advances in graphics, AI, and online play, Quake 3 was one of the few "core"  games that seemed guaranteed to transcend the core market.  Hardcore gamers would see it as the next logical platform for competition.  Casual gamers would play it remotely with friends.  Graphics geeks (like me) would play it for the dynamic lighting and curved surfaces.

When the demo was released a few months before the game, something unusual happened.  The Mac and Linux versions came out first.  And not only did they come out first, they came out a full week before the Windows version.

This sent an enormous amount of lifelong Windows users (including me) scrambling to install Linux-- Something I probably wouldn't have done under any other circumstance.  Because this was years before installing Linux was streamlined or convenient in any way, it forced us to learn about booting from floppies, partitioning, filesystems, the command line, installing proprietary video drivers, and a host of other Linuxy skills.

It took me four days to get to the point where I could run the game.  I got to enjoy it three days before my friends, and it set me on a path that I've been on for ten years.

Thanks, John.

An Open Firefox Feature Request

I love tree-style tabs.  It suits my [scatterbrained] working style to have 50+ tabs open at a time.  I almost always middle-click links to put them in a new tab. This way, I can leave parent pages completely untouched while I go off on tangents, compare notes, etc.  I eventually return to the page I started on and continue on my merry way.

Increasingly, links no longer point to discrete pages but DHTML elements that are meant to change the appearance of the parent page.  They can't be opened in a new tab, and there's no reassurance that they won't mangle the page beyond recognition.  Not only that, but they're hard to identify-- Generally their destination ends in an anchor tag (i.e. "#content"), but other than that they are indistinguishable from normal off-page links.

I propose that middle clicking these links opens an overlay that can be easily closed.  This way, the damage can be undone, and the browsing experience can continue uninterrupted.

Well, that was an experience

This morning, I decided to take a short detour to Radio Shack to pick up some magnet wire.  While the decision seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, it lead to a very unreasonable series of events-- Starting with a bike ride across town to visit three different stores, and finally culminating inside a local machine shop where a toothless, semi-drunk store employee wrapped five feet of wire around a pencil and gave it to me free of charge. 

It's not that I'm upset about the day's events per se but the confused expressions on people's faces when I asked to buy such a common item.  Magnet wire is in virtually everything.   I concluded two things:

1)  I visited three very bad electronics stores.
2)  Tinkering with electronics is not as common as it should be.

In my dreams

Last night I had a dream that my parents had chartered an Antonov 225 cargo plane for a family trip to Pierre, South Dakota.

The plane had been massively upgraded.  Inside, it featured essential creature comforts like champagne, wi-fi, and a racquetball court.  The engines (and structural framework) had also been upgraded at great cost to allow for supersonic flight.

This unfortunately meant that I would reach destination of Pierre much faster.

The Most Disturbing Part About Twitter

...is that suddenly people like John Cleese, Shaq, and Ted Nugent have a better understanding of an applied technology than I do.

Jason Belmonte, Bowling Radical

Two days ago, an Australian man named Jason Belmonte walked away with the PBA tour title.  He's the first person to win using a two-handed technique:

Apparently, involving both hands allows him to achieve a greater amount of spin (630rpm versus the average professional's 400rpm), creating a significantly more forceful pin strike.

It's amazing to me that a sport as old and as simple as bowling can be revolutionized by single, somewhat obvious innovation.  I suppose Jason Belmonte can now join the ranks of Dick Fosbury, Rick Barry, Pete Gogolak, and other sports luminaries who did things the "wrong" way to great effect.