Microsoft's iPod

With all the buzz about Microsoft "Origami", this video is quite timely (and funny).

(Hat tip to GMSV.)

Slow on the uptake, again

One of the stories I like to tell to convey to people how clueless I can be sometimes is the story of how, when I was in university, I was doing my best to keep up with many rapidly changing fields of technology. I had hit a sort of overload, though, and when I heard about this new thing called the "World Wide Web" and something called "Netscape" I thought to myself "no, I don't have time to learn about that right now". It was maybe a year later that I saw a demo of Netscape and did the proverbial Simpsonian forehead-slap.

To a much less significant degree, I had the same experience this morning when I finally signed up for a del.icio.us account and started entering and tagging my bookmarks. I had a vague idea that del.icio.us was some kind of bookmarking service, but I thought "that's kinda stupid, every browser I've ever used does bookmarks". Sure, I got that since it was web-based you could have your bookmarks anywhere, but I have .Mac bookmark syncing, so what do I need that for? Still, I kept seeing references to it, so I thought I'd best check it out.

Duh.

Like many things on the internet, there's more to del.icio.us than you'd guess at first glance. You can tag your bookmarks (through a slightly nifty interface), and (here it comes) find new stuff by finding related bookmarks that other people have tagged. So it's kind of like a less automatic Google, which might lead to finding higher quality pages. Anyway, not earth shattering, but still kind of neat.

Lame

I just remembered this from last year's WWDC. Some of the swag that Apple gave us developers last year were these sporty WWDC water bottles. At one session, I overheard a guy in the row in front of me saying to his friends: "I like how they made this thing exactly big enough for two Red Bulls and some ice". The tone of his voice clearly implied that Apple's bottle-designers had put a lot of thought into the size of these bottles and had settled on this particular size because it would hold exactly two Red Bull and some ice.

I was just thinking about how stupid that was.

NetNewsWire: Cured!

I had previously written about my NNW addiction. Here's an update. Despite a heroinesque addiction to blogs, news, and other pointless stuff (and oh, much of it is indeed without a point. Like CNN.), I have managed to trim my daily NNW fix considerably using a combination of schemes.

First, I got a real job. My new job requires me to work pretty much all the time, so there's precious little time to spend reading blogs.

Next, I'm trying out the Heavy (non-Lite) version of NNW. I wanted to try it out for the purpose of syncing my news site OPML files across several computers. It (sort of) works for that, but as a side effect, this has increased the number of sites that I check regularly, since I had different site lists on different computers and merging them makes a bigger list.

Between those things, what has happened is that every time I fire up NNW there are more unread stories than I can possibly read. Coincidentally, when I originally created the icon above for the original post, I had to mark a bunch of stories unread to get the 201 unread items before taking the screen shot. I did it for effect. As I write this, however, I really do have 201 unread stories, and I'm probably not going to read more than a handful. I'll just skim thru titles as quickly as possible, read just a few articles, and then toss the rest.

Problem solved!

Welcome Grade 9's!

Earlier today I stumbled across the JuicyStudio Readability Test and, after submitting this page got the following results:

1. Gunning Fog Index = 9.14 (represents years of schooling needed to understand content)


2. Flesch Reading Ease = 72.5 (out of 100, higher number more readable)


3. Flesch-Kincaid Grade = 6.05 (roughly, the years of school needed to understand content)

The first thing I notice is that there's a pretty big discrepancy between Gunning Fog and Flesch-Kincaid: three years is 50% of the FK score. I guess it's grain of salt time. Still, it's nice to see that I write at (at least) a grade 6 level. Well, a dumb Grade 6, anyway. The Flesch Ease level is interesting though because a score of 60-70 is supposedly the 'target' level, so at 72, I'm actually writing at a level slightly above what I "should" be targeting. Presumably this readability measure is calibrated to average reading level, meaning that most people read at less than a Grade 9 level according to the more generous Gunning Fog Index, or less than Grade 6 according to the less optimistic scale.

Which leads me to wonder: If most people read at less than a Grade 9 level and you have to go to school through grade 12, then do reading skills degrade, or are there more drop-outs and fewer college graduates than I'm aware of, or are these tests just maybe bogus?

Why Kids Are Great

I have to admit one thing about having a child that always delights me is how unencumbered they are by convention and habit. Today's data point: Lisa and I were making pizza (she's not quite two yet), and I let her spread the sauce on the crust — which she did very carefully — then while I scattered random veggies over the pie, it was her job to put the pepperoni slices on.

After I got her completely clear on the fact that she was not allowed to take a bite out of each slice before placing it on the pizza I thought that I'd covered all necessary sausage placement information. Not true. While I wasn't looking, she made a neat little pile of pepperoni slices right there on the pie. That would have been an interesting pizza.