Comic Sans
6/12/2009 – 6:40 pmSome folks may be aware of my bitter dislike of the Comic Sans typeface. Here is a cool video I just love about Comic Sans.
Comic Sans from Sam and Anita on Vimeo.
YT?
5/14/2009 – 6:57 pmInstant messaging is great. People often don’t respond to email or check it regularly, but like a phone call IM is more interactive without the commitment level of a phone call. There are other enhancements like voice, video, and file transfer - but for me the most valuable feature is presence information (you listening to me out-of-office notification).
Here’s the problem though - one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. How hard is it to just set an auto-away on your IM client. If you walk away from the computer it sets you to away when you are… yeah, away. People do not do this, they end up being always available, thus the creation of a new protocol… the YT protocol.
Once one person starts doing yt? everyone starts. It spreads like an infectious disease - or like that idiotic habit of flipping up your wind shield wipers at the slightest threat of a flurry. This renders the great presence information in IM nearly useless. For those fortunate enough to have an immunity to this disease, it stands for “you there?”. I can understand abbreviating long phrases, like bbiab or lmfao - but really, you can’t type out “you there?”.
I have a new group in my IM clients now called Broken. Anyone who types yt to me in an IM session is instantly moved to this list which will always remain collapsed. I wish all IM protocols had the “warn” feature that AIM has and I had a script to automatically warn them as a slight scarlet letter for those bad apples. I encourage everyone to pay it forward by blocking or hiding all buddies that choose to spread this. Thank you.
Right Winger
5/12/2009 – 4:39 pmFriends have told me consistently that they they think I am sort of a “right winger”, which I find fairly amazing and irritating. To be fair I would probably be similarly irritated if I were called a “left winger” - but in any case I was thinking this morning at all of my views that must lead to this conclusion…
- anti-imperialism taking a heavy-handed approach and imposing on other countries, whether through economic hit-man style financial impositions or bombing is wrong.
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anti-corporatocracy yes, our government is in the pocket of large corporations. yes, this is bad for individuals.
- atheist most right wingers are atheist right?
- firearms for the masses is dangerous although I fully support our right to keep arms, I think packing a gat at the Costco is very dangerous - kinda like swimming pools and motorcycles.
- civil liberties as it turns out, I think all people - yup all types (even Scientologists, racists, and gingers) - have the same right to life, liberty, and property.
- anti-captial punishment Penn and Teller firmed me up on this one, but people do bad things for financial gain, compulsion, or stupidity - the death penalty is not much of a deterrent in any of these cases - it’s mostly just to make people feel better. Killing is bad.
- pro-choice killing is bad, and killing babies is bad, but at the end of the day I support a woman’s right to choose
So you can see where people would call me a right winger right? Actually, if you can maybe you can explain it to me. I think it comes down to this - if you believe in rationality, free trade, and fundamentally reject the idea that wealth redistribution (whether through corporate favors or high taxes on the most productive members of our society) - then you are “right wing”. Am I right?
