No Compelling Content

Interesting Things on the web that I am doing.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . June 7, 2010 . 8:33PM

I am an internet man, so I’m usually on the web pretty hard.

Today, I learned about the super-cool-but-never-mass-produced-and-well-named B-58 Hustler, which was the first in the proud heritage of American jet-powered aircraft that could end the world or at least ruin your day. Early jet pilots were either insane or crazy, depending on your point of view. Chuck Horner and Tom Clancy’s oddly-awesome Every Man A Tiger, in which Horner relates his mucho appreciated military careet, including flying some aircraft that look definately non-gravity defying.

Then, I read about two years worth of Overcompansating (for perhaps the third time) – I’ll be god-damned if it doesn’t speak to this man’s soul.

My doubleTwist experiment is going badly, as the program doesn’t know how to kill with fire earlier copies of podcasts and nobody needs 9 episodes of the History of Rome in triplicate on their phone.  Especially since the Evo’s battery wouldn’t last through 3 of them in the subway system, RF emitting frantically for a reply, slowly microwaving my left leg.

Still looking for an awesome manual typewriter in some thrift store in this city so I can fall in love with it, ignore it for six months and then sell it for a tidy profit on ebay come Chrismastime.

Good day, in all.

School’s almost out – uncork some new pictures!

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . May 10, 2010 . 11:07AM

here’s a sneak preview of the Spring 2010 photoset:

and before you ask, yes, I was watching Quincy, ME while playing with my camera.

Happy belated iPad day. Here’s a van-side worthy wallpaper.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . April 4, 2010 . 1:02AM

I can’t take credit for the illustration, but I ran across this when I was looking through my old D&D books.

Raistlin battling Fistandantilus back in ye olden 2nd edition.

Anyways, I chopped it up into the right resolution (1024×768, portrait) for those Ipad havers. Or someone using a five year old 15″ LCD wrong.

Direct Link, just in case.

Until the pixel ratio is a little closer to 16:10 or 16:9, I won’t be getting an iPad, btw.

[Podcast] Quick discussion of Final Fantasy XIII

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . March 10, 2010 . 1:48PM

In which Nelson and I talk about the beginning experiences of playing Final Fantasy XIII. I’m a little disapointed so far, but Nelson (the die hard FF fanboi) tells me to keep my chin up until we get a little farther along.

Final Fantasy XIII – Chapter 1

why oh why do mobile phone companies make me want to punch them so very much?

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . November 3, 2009 . 6:01PM

Okay, let me start with the following: I’m not a un-fan of AT&T – but they are the low-hanging fruit this evening. I’m really tired of the US carriers simply lying about each others services.

via the recent Engadget article AT&T sues Verizon over ‘there’s a map for that’ ads – a lawsuit that basically lets them get a headline in the trade, and mainstream press with the following statement:

In essence, we believe the ads mislead consumers into believing that AT&T doesn’t offer ANY wireless service in the vast majority of the country. In fact, AT&T’s wireless network blankets the US, reaching approximately 296M people. Additionally, our 3G service is available in over 9,600 cities and towns. Verizon’s misleading advertising tactics appear to be a response to AT&T’s strong leadership in smartphones. We have twice the number of smartphone customers… and we’ve beaten them two quarters in a row on net post-paid subscribers. We also had lower churn — a sign that customers are quite happy with the service they receive.

Wow, that is just begging for someone to “help make sense of it” – lets begin.

In essence, we believe the ads mislead consumers into believing that AT&T doesn’t offer ANY wireless service in the vast majority of the country.

Offer and provide being a key difference here.

In fact, AT&T’s wireless network blankets the US, reaching approximately 296M people. Additionally, our 3G service is available in over 9,600 cities and towns.

Listen, I don’t care how many fucking towns, villages, wal-marts, and gangbangs your shitty 3G coverage reaches. THE FUCKING SERVICE DOESN’T WORK FOR SHIT IN PLACES THAT ARE ON THE MAP.

Verizon’s misleading advertising tactics appear to be

It’s kind of off-topic to mention this. Why not speculate Verizon got the idea to do this while sucking off devil cock in hell.

a response to AT&T’s strong leadership in smartphones.

Everyone gives Apple lots of money. That is not leadership. My cheap girlfriend who doesn’t spend money on premium peanut butter has an iMac.

We have twice the number of smartphone customers…

ellipses are never good writing, unless they appear in angst-ridden teen vampire dialog…

…

…

or mocking bad writing.

and we’ve beaten them two quarters in a row on net post-paid subscribers.

We also had lower churn –

trading up to ye old double minus, the … said they missed…

…

…

you.

Amish people don’t believe that making less butter is something to brag about, either.

a sign that customers are quite happy with the service they receive.

or they’re in contracts. Or maybe they don’t like mobile phone calls interrupting their days.

All in all, this full-of-lies-and-distortions press release is about a lawsuit that doesn’t matter over an advertisement that America will collectively forget by the end of the year.

edit 1: fixed some obvious grammatical errors that I feel plenty bad enough about without your damned help.

Cleaning Up My Desktop

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . October 19, 2009 . 12:35PM

Reading: Middlesex
Getting Read To Me: Atlas Shrugged
Watching: Dexter, Californication, House, Bones

So, I’ve been nurturing some wierd interests as of late, and instead of just emailing Jenny about it, how about I take a second and share with you, Internet? It would seem that as my courseload gets heavier, I find new and improved ways of goofing off.

School season means septa season which means podcast season. The problem is that I’ve managed to dry the well of podcasts I really like, and thusly started listening to entirely too much spoken word “junk,” including Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rynd. This is one of those books that one is “expected to know” when trying to compare intellect penises with some douchebag on the Internet. And what the hell, I liked Bioshock. I’d like to point you towards the Introduction of the text, in which the author basically says that nobody edited this floating wonder of dense word-poop. If you are okay with that, we are okay.

Also, I love how all the “masters of industry, thus the universe” are all smokers – because your context is showing! Ewww, nobody likes those bras anymore, thats all I saying.

Richard Jeni, by the way, genius. Much more engaging.

Elsewhere, Good Old Games is an amazing website that has some very decent product, they get do interesting computer science work (revamp old code to remove DRM, that ought to be fun!) and also are amusingly British. But what I looove more than anything is the design they use on thier product (and elsewhere) pages. Presumably, they use a photoshop filter to de-grey an area and toss some type above it. It’s wonderful and simple and I’m all sorts of pissed I didn’t think of it. I have the design chops of a manilla envelope full of pipe cleaners.

Basically what I’m saying is that they’re better at computers than I am.

Here’s a picture of Seinfeld’s head on a famous Bruce Lee photo, done in pencil on a tshirt. That is very far removed from those abs themselves. It’s random, and what else is there, really? It’s from Topatoco.

Ever catch yourself wondering where Ross Perot learned how to break out a chart to prove a political point? Oh, that was pretty easy to find out:

This happened on my way to find a copy of this print, which unfortunately cost more than the deleted scenes of the Zapruder film:

I can’t wait until I’m rich enough to have a decent-sized one of these, right next to my “Keep Calm” print – monochromaticization FTW. This shot, for me at least, reminds me of the duty and honor of brotherhood. And that’s something that definitely deserves to look at your TV as you sit under it, eating cheese from a can.

I just became a social media expert, time to dust up the resume.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . October 9, 2009 . 12:58PM

There’s these twitter accounts where someone says “hey! I’m going to be fake steve jooobs” and then they get all excited and maybe even say something really funny before they get yelled at by their boss for goofing off online and then they’re never heard from again. Maybe they forgot all about having that clever idea, maybe they finally succumbed to the desire to live in a place without Internet, who knows.

(in case this isn’t obvious – this is every tweet on this account)

I wonder how many of these exist? And since I’m the first person I’ve ever heard of think on this phenomena, I get to name it, right? Thats how it works in Astronomy, according to my weekly viewing of Armageddon.

Let’s call these accounts… blue dwarfs? brown accounts? Crap, I need to name this to get social media expert pasted on my resume.

blue flashpans!

You’ve heard it here first, folks – Blue Flashpans (see the capitals?) are Twitter accounts that briefly were funny and now are defunct. You may call it a Stankiewicz-vector Twitter account. The formulae for identification of these will follow when I get this white paper published.

I never have time to read?

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . March 26, 2009 . 9:19AM

Or so it would seem lately. Then, I got to thinking, “what is it that I read all day?” as I often catch myself in that situation. So, I made a list on a handy post-it note instead of reading the Aeneid.

Print:

• The Economist
• Portfolio
• Wired
• Business Week

Web:

• Web Worker Daily
• Gizmodo
• Engadget
• Engadget Mobile
• Mobile Phone News
• Phone Scoop
• ZDnet
• Penny Arcade
• PVP
• Order Of The Stick
• Digg (just the frontpage)
• LIfehacker
• 43 Folders
• Kotaku
• Joystiq

Podcasts:

• CAGcast
• History Of Rome
• Joystiq Podcast
• Bloomberg On The Economy
• This Week In Tech
• Diggnation
• Totally Rad Show
• Dungeons And Dragons Podcast
• Downloadable Content
• Countdown with Keith Olbermann
• Co-Op

This is why I never review books as often as I want to.

Google Video Closing? What am I to watch at work?!?

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . March 4, 2009 . 7:41PM

This is hardly more than tweet-worthy, i understand that Google Video isn’t REALLY closing, but just to stop accepting downloads.

If you have filtered Internet access – there’s only a few ways one can do it. My work has what’s called “whitelists” of sites that can be accessed. Because we might have to use gmail for whatever reason (i think to set up some customer’s email accounts) the domain http*://*.google.* works – I have access to video.google.com. Every other video site on the internet is not on the whitelist. If I want to, eh, i dunno, watch a full length interview with Richard Nixon, let’s say – I can do that. Also, the “just download this right fast” link is useful for getting video on my PSP, which is difficult to find the right format for.

Anyways, google video, besides the obvious reasons why it’s better than youtube (slow to take down protected IP, bigger, longer, and downloads) – don’t forget about those still under the yoke of filtered internet 35+ hours a week!

Fixing No Compelling Content Part 2: Turning a pile of kvetches into a spec sheet.

by Zacharias @ http://inexactitu.de . January 28, 2008 . 1:03PM

Here in part 2, I put away both the pitchfork and torch and do some good thinking about how much of the page I want to use for the content, whilst starting to think about color and thematic elements.  (more…)