Don’t trust anyone in business
If things were really this funny, I might ever consider working there: The Microsoft Office (with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant)
The perils of electronic voting
I thought that San Francisco’s paper ballots were kind of archaic when we first moved here, but now they’re reassuring in a way. The malfeasance that can arise is mostly the traditional kind (like throwing out the ballots).
Here’s a funny illustration of what can go wrong with electronic voting (thanks Lary!) - Homer tries to vote for Obama:
Backblog
Even though I haven’t posted a single word to a blog for more than two years, that doesn’t mean that time elapsed without my finding stories that were interesting, touching, and/or amusing. As I intended to resume blogging at any moment, I bookmarked these items in a “to blog” folder.
Of course, now that I’m back in the saddle, I’m beginning to mine that folder for content. I’ll probably toss more than half of what’s in there, often because the article is outdated or irrelevant (OMG, Johnny Depp and Tim Burton are remaking “Sweeney Todd”!), but sometimes because it’s difficult for me to get up the energy or outrage to discuss something that really had me fired up 18 months ago (the HPV vaccine debates). But many items are (hopefully) timeless.
Anyway, in case you notice that I’m suddenly posting a bunch of articles from 2006-2007, this is why. To start, some of my favorite XKCD comics from that period:
Is there a third option?
From my fortune cookie last night: “You will do better in real estate than in stocks.”
I bet there’s a memo
New Microsoft ad actually created on a Mac.
Makes you wonder what kind of meetings they’re having about their creative process this week, and whether the slant is “Don’t use Macs for Microsoft work” or “Make sure you don’t get caught”…
Multiple copies of bookmarks in Firefox 3
Another day, another browser annoyance. Firefox 3 removed (some would say “fixed”) the ability to bookmark the same page multiple times, allowing the user to save the bookmark in several folders. I rely pretty heavily on this feature, and I didn’t notice that the first few times I tried to do it, I accidentally moved (edited) the bookmark instead of adding a second one. Now I’m digging back through my recent bookmarks and trying to make sure that they’re all in the proper locations.
The new process: Bookmark the link. Now, go to the Bookmarks menu and select Organize Bookmarks. Find the bookmark, copy it and paste it, then move the second bookmark into the second folder. Repeat as needed. (Thanks to this thread for the solution.) Way more convoluted than just hitting Cmd+D again and picking a second folder.
I guess now I can disable my “Bookmark Duplicate Detector” add-on, since I won’t be duplicating any bookmarks accidentally…
What could possibly go wrong?
Another Emmy moment:
As a side note: The Emmy folks are taking their sweet time getting these things online. I mean really, it’s more than a day after the awards, and their YouTube page doesn’t have any new information. By next week, no one will care (or more likely, everyone will have already viewed unofficial videos like the one above).
I’m sure all the Emmy folks went out after the awards, got drunk, and partied like rock stars. But couldn’t they outsource this stuff to some video editors? It’s not that difficult to just slice up some preexisting content and upload it - again, see the unofficial videos already online.