Drewski

Jun 27

[Apparently, click-through doesn’t work? Larger size here.]

My most recent screenshot, for Mike.

A few details:

Main menu applet at top left (reduces space-sucking Applications/Places/System)
Quick Lounge applet houses all my launchers at the same time
Fast User Switcher collapsed to simply show “Users”, which in my opinion makes more sense anyway.
Gourmet Recipe Manager on-screen, nice little program. (Kadai Aloo, nice little dish.)
Clearlooks with custom Tango-palette colors to make things a little darker. Tango icons (because, what else?).
Wallpaper, as always, from InterfaceLift.

Comments?

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Jun 26

Word Cloud for my Delicious tags

See original on Wordle

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Jun 20

Forced participation

So I’m attending the University of Phoenix’s online program. Generally, pretty good. To keep everything lively and interpersonal, we usually have some sort of participation requirement. Something like 2 comments, 4 days a week. Given the online context, I’d say that’s reasonable, yes?

However, my current class has an additional requirement that each comment must be 200 words. When responding to someone else’s thoughts/answers, there seems to be a big difference between 100 and 200 words, let me tell you. But it seems that most people (and I will probably be in this boat myself) still write about 100 words of quality and then beef it up with another hundred of filler. It’s kind of a joke.

Not only that, but then I have to go and read everyone else’s comments too. This is going to be a long five weeks until I get to my next course.

(153, by the way.)

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LastTab extension updated for Firefox 3

LastTab is probably one of my favorite extensions, in terms of how much I take it for granted. (Delicious comes close.)

I’ve been Ctrl+Tab’ing left and right for weeks since upgrading to Firefox 3. Maybe one of the only features I latched on to from my bygone days using Opera. (Alt+Tab switches applications based on most recent use; why wouldn’t you want the same from your tabbed browser? Seriously!)

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Jun 19

Phoenix Mars Mission finds ice

“Dice-size crumbs of bright material have vanished from inside a trench where they were photographed by NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander four days ago, convincing scientists that the material was frozen water that vaporized after digging exposed it.” (emphasis mine)

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Netflix Community Blog: Profiles feature going away

I’m not here to complain; there are enough (valid and mostly coherent) rants and raves in the comments on Netflix’s blog.

Here’s what gets me: the more you are using Netflix—rating movies, adding to your queue, the more profiles you have, etc.—the more this will impact you. It’s basically like pissing on your power users.

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Jun 13

What’s in your Awesomebar?

For those that have upgraded to Firefox 3, the Awesomebar shows both frequent and recent (“frecent”) sites that you have visited. At this moment, what’s in your top 10 if you click the drop-down arrow? Here are mine at work:

An internal website (Bomgar)
co.mments - Track your conversations
Twitter
Tumblr
Demonoid.com - Torrent list
Facebook | Home
Men : Target (I was shopping once)
meebo - online web IM for AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk messengers
Ubuntero
Netflix

What’s in yours? Anything surprising?

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Jun 11

“God I hate trying to have a conversation through Twitter. It’s like IRC by telegram. That’s what we get for overloading a system I guess.” Twıtter Blacklist

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Jun 9

“Even the most adventurous Mozart symphony is still at least as structurally formulaic as an Indiana Jones movie, and often much more so. But the form—the formula—is just the scaffolding for craft. It’s not the signposts, it’s how you get there—the lead-up to each dramatic waystation determines the dramatic payoff. Some might demur that you listen to music for the emotional effect, and craft is not emotion. But the emotional content depends on the craft with which it’s implied, illustrated, imparted—and I would strenuously argue that craft carries its own emotional content, that there’s a shared exaltation of the human condition in the apprehension of exceptional craft.” Matthew Guerrieri

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Jun 8

“At 10 cents each, [texting costs $734] per MB - or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs [of $166 per megabyte].”

Zach on the related issue of telecoms selling phones: “Can you imagine having to buy your faucet from the water company?”

(via New York Times Blog)

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