August 2008

I played with Photoshop a bit tonight while watching the Olympics and turned some of my favorite photos into iPhone wallpapers. (It’s certainly not hard to do — just resize any image to 320×480.) Here are 11 that I think look pretty good.

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Crap. There goes the rest of 2008. Take a look at Frenzic (iPhone version), “a fast-paced, addictive game that makes Tetris look like child’s play.”

I really can’t say enough good things about Adium. This awesome little Mac app lets you connect to ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, iChat, and GTalk instant messenger contacts all in one place. It is the holy grail of IM clients. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and am thoroughly pleased. (It’s also hosted by the rockin’ cool team at Network Redux.)

The words or not never follow the word whether. That’s it. That’s the rule. Whether implies or not. You don’t ever need to say both of them. The words or not should never be spoken. (They should certainly never be written.) Whether implies “or not”. Get it?

Mac users: You can use this link to subscribe to the Florida Gators 2008 Football iCal Schedule, published by Yahoo!.

For years now I’ve subscribed to Mark Hurst’s Good Experience newsletter. This week he wrote A Warning Sign on the Way to Digital Utopia, which should be required reading for anyone that owns a computer.
Less than twelve hours ago I sadly had to repeat a conversation I’ve had dozens — if not hundreds — of times in my life.

When you are doing something on your computer, save it. If it’s important, save often. If it’s really important, save often and save it somewhere other than the computer you’re using. If it’s really, really important, save often, save it somewhere other than your computer, and save it someplace other than the same place where your computer is.

That’s it. It’s not rocket science and it’s not complicated. It can be tedious, yes. It can feel like a waste of time, yes. But when you’re on the last page of your novel and you spill coffee on the keyboard and when you get home from Starbucks to find that the dog has eaten your backup CDs, you’ll be very, very glad that you have an extra copy at the office (or your mom’s house, or a safe-deposit box).

Mrs. Greenburg said in an interview that the delay was doubly unpleasant for her Maine coon cat, Sammy, who howled through the entire experience in a pet carrier in the back seat.

The comments on these amazing photos of the Large Hadron Collider are almost as awesome as the machine.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how annoying it is to get an “affirmation cookie” instead of one with an actual fortune. Well at lunch today one of my co-workers got what we thought was a horribly rude fortune cookie. Instead of the usual mindless drivel, instead of even a useless affirmation, the “directive” cookie he received at California Wok read, “Work on improving your exercise routine.” Ouch.