Blog

Like I need to cram more stuff in what has to be an already over-heated box, but this 20-in-1 panel fits into a standard 5.25″ drive bay. All the I/O you could want.

Link

[via Boing Boing]

Then don’t vote for Rick Santorum. This idiot introduced a bill that’s just vague enough that the National Weather Service (you know, the one that’s tax-funded) might have to take itself offline. I’m not going to quote the article because you need to read the whole thing. The quotes from Barry Myers, Executive Vice President at AccuWeather, are so ludicrous, I don’t know if I should laugh or cry.

Don’t visit AccuWeather. In fact, if they’re so opposed to public services, let them get their own data. How do we legislate that? I’m sure we could find some headline-seeking Senator to sponsor it.

Link [via Geek News Central]

Ok, this post is a little of me bragging, which I’m a little worried about doing. But, I have a greater point, so you’ll have to bear with the bragging.

I got a phone call today from someone at MadCap software Now that that’s out of the way, I can get on with the point. This person just wanted to talk. I’m not some super-elite figure in any field. I talked about their product and they wanted to follow up on that.

Excuse me while I put my professional hat on my knee for a second.

That is so off-the-wall, freakin’ cool, it makes you jealous for the people that work there. How many employers have you worked for that would allow, much less encourage, you to call someone who just randomly talked about your product on their website? I know I haven’t worked for one. In fact, I worked for a company that, if I called a customer without a salesman, a marketing guy, and someone from legal in the room–well, I’d have been out on my butt.

I have this feeling that if you could graph “amount of communication with customers” against “size of company”, it would look like a foreslash (“\”). That’s really a shame because customers are constantly trying to communicate with the companies from which they buy products. When you hear stories of website email forms that are just ignored, it makes you shake your head.

I’m going to sound like Scoble here, but MadCap, start a blog. I know corporate blogging is touchy, but maybe Mike Hamilton or some people from the development team could blog and open the discussion up to the whole community. We’re blogging about you; seems only fair that you get to talk back.

Since someone in this household is playing the crap out of this game right now, I thought this might be interesting reading.

The New York Times has a very interesting piece on the invented language of Tho Fan for Jade Empire. The 2,500-word language was created in four months for about $2,000 by University of Alberta linguist Wolf Wikeley. The Ph.D. candidate even created a history for the language and then tested it out by translating the first chapter of John’s Gospel into it. It’s a great read, make sure you check it out.

Jade Empire for Xbox Speaks Language All Its Own [NYT]

[Via Kotaku]

Enter the CD info and this page generates a PDF to make a paper CD case. There’s even a search function so you don’t have to enter them yourself.

Link

Cool things starting to happen at Flickr now that they have Yahoo! money to burn. They’ve doubled the free account upload amount and doubled the number of photos in the stream. Pro accounts got an extension on their payments (basically doubling their contract lives), and new Pro accounts get more uploads (2 gigs) at half the price.

Very cool. Now if they do video, we can stop hearing about Google Video.

Link

Apparently they elected a Pope today. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, will lead about a billion Catholics… well, we don’t know where. Sounds like he won’t be around long, as he’s 78. The prophecy draws nearer! Many laugh at St. Malachy’s Prophecy (with good reason), but Ratzinger took the name Benedict, a nod to the prophecy. The 2nd to last Pope, according to St. Malachy, was going to be from the Benedictine order (which I can’t confirm of Ratzinger is or isn’t). In a Church where chance doesn’t exist, taking the name Benedict is a fairly significant symbol.

Should be some interesting news, kooky or otherwise, in the next few days.

Link

I don’t know how I feel about this, but Adobe and Macromedia announced that Adobe was buying Macromedia for around 3.4 billion. My gut reaction is that this could be very bad for the design market as these two companies were basically direct competitors. I keep thinking how much I disliked Go Live versus Dreamweaver and shudder at the innovation that wouldn’t have happened in the market if these two companies were fighting for market share.

I hope the new company can maintain its focus on both sets of people that have traditionally been serviced by one or the other company: Adobe was squarely aimed at the design professional where Macromedia had web development in its pocket. There’s always crossover, but given the Photoshop/Fireworks or Go Live/Dreamweaver choice, you could usually predict where the decision would fall.

It will be interesting to see this pan out (if it does).

Ars Technica – Adobe gobbles up Macromedia in pure-stock buy out worth 3.4 Billion Dollars

A quick funny from the world of Fark. After linking to this page, this comment got thrown out.

Snarfangel [TotalFark]

If knowledge is power, I’d say this guy puts out 2-3 watts, max.

Brilliant.

Check out the rest of the thread as it descends into flamewar; it’s usually pretty entertaining to watch one on Fark.

I took the What Age Will You Die quiz after seeing it on J-Walk. The first time I did it, I got this result.

I thought, how can I improve that a little? So I read over my answers and changed “Do you get at least a half hour of exercise, six days a week?” from No to Yes. Seems like a pretty standard, simple to implement lifestyle change; it should up that 67 to at least 70, right? Uhm….

Not exactly. Luckily, if I start practicing yoga or meditating, it counteracts all that harmful exercise and gets me back to 67. Whew. I wonder how many people take this crap at face value? You know what, I don’t want to know the answer to that question.