Category: Uncategorized

I like Twitter, I think they do good stuff. (I tweet as jreffell.) I like retweeting, and it’s been fascinating to see Twitter’s community form the loose norms of the practice. It reminds me of the early use of PayPal by eBay sellers who preferred it to Billpoint, or (truly ancient history) some of the…

The map looked pretty reasonable, except for implying a left turn from Lincoln onto 19th, which you can’t do. The detailed directions are a little more creative. It turns out that Google Maps has shown an unhealthy love for U-turns before. I figure the Googlebots have been watching Bullitt a few too many times.

We have this poster, the one on the left, hanging in our kitchen. Apparently we aren't alone in this. I like it, because it reminds me of my family, and because I think it's the sort of thing it's helpful to see first thing in the morning when the day is smacking you upside the…

Here's Stephen Colbert, while interviewing Neil Gaiman, singing the Tom Bombadil song:

Quoted in full from his blog: eBay is apparently doing everything it can to discourage the kind of auction-based digital flea market it so gloriously was in its beginning. It's becoming increasingly difficult to use, that way, and many buyers and sellers of wondrous fifth-hand hyper-specialist gomi are getting very discouraged. A market is being…

I'm reading The Lord of the Rings again. I've read it many, many times. This probably isn't surprising. I first read The Hobbit at a very young age, but The Lord of the Rings wasn't in the kids section, and it was intimidatingly long, even for me. But when I was a little older —…

I mentioned in Decluttering my digital inboxes that I'd been pruning my feed reader. The ones I removed were either defunct, not as interesting as they used to be, or interesting but wrongly paced (IO9 for instance is a great way to keep up on the trashy side of science-fiction media — if you can…

First, this post is total Adam Nash bait. Today's Fresh Air had on P. W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century. It's a pretty discussion on a number of fronts, including technical, ethical, policy, and even interface design issues. (Apparently, for example, the military based designs…

I'm a loose Inbox = 0 adherent. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can read plenty about it here.) As an example, my personal email inbox is currently at 3, and my work email inbox is at 10. This is pretty damn good for me, and I've spent a chunk of 2009…

I'm going to try something a little different in 2009, now that this blog has been left fallow for a while. Now that the soil has had a little time to replenish itself and the pests have died down a bit, we can start again … and maybe not torture that metaphor any more than…