A great open letter to IslandTel by Peter at Reinvented.net. As a member of a company in exactly the same scenario, I won’t shed any tears for IslandTel if they can’t leverage 100 years of monopoly to provide adequate service at competitive prices.
Author: Steven Garrity
update: it’s not so much macs, but the people who use them
update: it’s not so much macs, but the people who use them
I want a Titanium PowerBook as much as any self-respecting web designer, but this quote from a News.com story about the opening of the Apple store (QuickTime) in Washington D.C. gave me the creeps:
More than 500 zealous Mac fans lined up as early as 4 a.m. EDT for the chance to be the store’s first customer and to support Apple Computer’s retail experiment. The crowd–which earlier broke into chants of “Apple! Apple! Apple!”–roared when the stored open at 10 a.m. EDT.
These people have clearly not read Brave New World.
feces throwing monkeys
Read Everybody must get stoned by Ian O’Doherty at Salon.com. It is short and you will laugh out loud.
lessons learned in under 5k
I’ve spouted on and on about this year’s 5k competition. There was last year’s embarrassing entry, this year’s long-shot, a surprising win, phony humility, and now, a bitter, bitter twist. Apparently our entry was in the wrong category and we have been bumped from the winners list (see the 5k news page).
As I mentioned before, my goal this year was not to be mocked. I think this is worse. Anyone have any advice on how I should tell my mom?
For the record, I hold no grudges. It was me who put our entry in the wrong category and we had a lot of fun working on our submission. The contest is great, and I was glad to see (and this will sound even more sincere now that I’m a loser) that the judges appear to have picked the winners based on creativity and originality rather than technical wizardry. And the current the5k.org front page is absolutely beautiful.
The lesson learned: Don’t bother. Stay in your basement (look forward to our properly categorized entry next year).
from the muddy banks of high school
High School was an odd time. The days I remember most are those spent driving my parent’s Saturn to the beach with a Poor Old Lu cassette. The times spent in class and in between have mostly fallen victim to traumatic memory loss – the trauma being boredom and social awkwardness.
Enjoy this high school memory: The valedictorian nomination speech of Dan James, former high school delinquent / honours student, current top 50 CEO. After two other cookie-cutter valedictory nomination addresses, Dan took the stage in the cafeteria, removed the mike from the podium, and gave this, his valedectorian nomination address. He lost by a suspicious two votes.
farwell to douglas adams
My favourite part of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series was the frictionless spaceship. You could touch it, but not feel it.
Douglas Adams died this week at age 49. I wonder how long it will take Amazon.com to start peddling merchandise related to the deceased.
In addition to being an award winning web designer, I am also a humble, humble man.
After a humbling (read: humiliating) experience in last year’s 5k competition, I enlisted the help of my good friends Nick & Nathan from silverorange with a simple goal: To create an entry that would not be mocked openly (like last year).
Once this year’s entries went up on the5k.org, I was amazed. Our entry couldn’t compare to some of this year’s amazing submissions (two of my favourites where the 5k Chess, and the 3D Dolphin). While our entry was put to shame by the other entries, it was not openly mocked. The goal was met.
Then in a bizarre turn of events the5k.org published this year’s winners and our humble 5k audi tt vr gallery was among them. First shock, then disbelief, then joy, then a king size (fr: GRAND FORMAT) 85g Oh Henry! bar to celebrate. In the HTML Only category we were #2 for Function, and #3 Overall.
How our entry was more functional than a working 5k chess game I’ll never know. That said, it is nice to see the judges steer clear of turning it into a javascript-writing competition. The other winners are not the most technically impressive, but are all definitely very cool.
genius recognized
Our own Matt brings home the Milton Acorn Poetry award. Congratulations.
If you are not sure whether or not you should be congratulating him, you can read one of his poems at ForgetMagazine.com and decide for yourself.
forget the Quebec protests
There are a few fine articles on the FTAA protests in Quebec at ForgetMagazine this week.
I’ve avoided commenting on the protests on aov so far, since the topic is so amorphous (globalization, free-trade, corporate rule, human rights, media, ect.). It’s hard to have a discussion when there are no parameters. However, this isn’t to say that there can’t be meaningful discussion.
I watched CounterSpin on CBC (a fantastic show) the weekend of the protests and felt at the end of the hour that a lot of smart people had made a lot of appeals to emotion. I was left more confused than I was at the start.
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
George Orwell is cool. 1984 and Animal Farm are staples of the high-school English class. If you read them in high-school, reread them. If not, read them. I was directed to an article Orwell wrote which feels like a hopeful obituary for the English language.
If you do any writing, professionally or personally, you must read Politics and the English Language. I wonder how his comments pertain to web-log writing where there is little editing and the tone tends towards speech. However, anyone writing in any medium should benefit from these ideas.
A few highlights from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language:
“If you simplify your English, […] when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.”
“Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun), objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote, constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to dress up simple statements and give an air of scientific impartiality to biased judgments.”
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”
“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about.”