Lightly Organized Chaos

Or more specifically, the nonsense that some sites are propagating in the name of the iPad. I know they’re just trying to garner page-views by starting controversy, but it’s still sheer nonsense nonetheless. Here’s a quick sampling:

5 Reasons Why We Are Already Depressed About The iPad — Seriously? This article wouldn’t even be worth mentioning except to question the waste of ad dollars on the site for this sort of drivel. I know the iPad is big news, but this sorry excuse for a hack journalist (yeah, Tim Difford, I’m talking to you) shouldn’t be collecting a paycheck with so many other worthy people out of a job.

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From the people who brought us “Canabalt“, there’s now Gravity Hook HD. It’s only available online at the moment, but it’s coming soon for the iPhone. I’m already kinda into it. It’s not Canabalt, but it’s still pretty fun. Like Doodle Jump with different mechanics.

Story of a silly, pointless, avoidable death: here.

Seriously, who cares why the 3-year-old messed with a loaded gun left on the table. Prosecute the parents for endangering the child by making a loaded weapon available. Somehow making this the fault of the Wii, which does not come with a “solid black automatic-looking type mechanism” by default, is just plain silly. Especially since the 3-year-old didn’t shoot the TV — which is what you’d do with a Wii gun. Who ever wrote the article is either a twit or just too willing to be conned by parents trying to avoid arrest.

I’m a big fan of the AMC original series Mad Men, but somehow I think the Brooks Brothers suit designed by the costume director was a better product tie-in:

Betty Meets Barbie as Mattel Launches Mad Men Collector Dolls

In the last 4 years, Akismet has handled 102,497 spam comments. That’s better than 25k spam messages a year. Pretty impressive when you consider that Google Analytics says the site had less than 10k pageviews last year. I know that the spambots do not generate trackable pageviews, but it’s pretty sad that more log space and energy goes into serving them than legitimate site visitors.

Lately Mike Taylor over at the Reinvigorated Programmer has been on a roll with a couple of interesting blog posts (at least interesting enough to make Slashdot). First he blogged about deterioration of programming into pure drudgery and more recently he’s disagreed with Dijkstra on the value of BASIC as a first programming language. Here are links to the articles:

• Whatever happened to programming?
• Where Dijkstra went wrong: the value of BASIC as a first programming language

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Since I just posted about the Corrado, and I sometimes get asked about my fondness for cars, I thought I’d take the liberty of linking to an article from Esquire magazine that just about sums it up for me:

The Conversion of an Apathetic Driver

Any questions?

(OK, that’s a picture of the R8 — because really who are we kidding?)

After more than 20 years as an Apple user, and well over a decade as an investor, it’s articles like this one that have me considering dumping my stock:

5 reasons to buy Apple stock again

Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the mainstream this pro-Apple. Either they’re poised to take over the industry, or it’s all going to go sideways quick.

I’m a bit odd when it comes to car repair. I like to get my hands dirty, but I’m not really reliable enough to accomplish all the work I need to do on the cars. The result is that my Corrado is constantly in need of some attention, and recently that attention is almost exclusively dealing with drained car batteries. Somewhere a previous owner has spliced in an accessory that’s draining the car’s battery, but I haven’t taken the time to track it down. In the mean time, I’ve gone through 2 Optima car batteries and spent too much time and money keeping the batteries charged.

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I took Anne’s advice (after much hand-wringing trying to get Virtual Pinmame working), and purchased Williams Pinball Hall of Fame (for the XBox 360). Mostly, I got this one (as opposed to the Gottlieb version) because it has two of my all time favorite pinball machine in it: Funhouse and Medieval Madness.

I have to say it’s a pretty good representation of playing on the full machines — although I often want better camera angles to choose from. My mad skillz at Funhouse seem to have translated over, and my high score on the actual machine seems pretty close to my current high score in the video game. I’m not sure, but playing the video game might constitute a decent form of practice for real pinball.

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