l-dopa

I just heard about this event. Apparently, someone stood up and shouted, “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!” at Attorney General Robert Mukasey while he was giving a speech last week. Mukasey fainted a little bit later into his speech.

It turns out that the guy who yelled it was a judge. That’s awesome.

µTorrent.

I tested the current Mac clients of µTorrent versus Transmission using the .iso file for the latest version of Ubuntu. Both clients were fast, reaching the maximum of the 1.2 MB/sec connection, but while Transmission’s download speed varied wildly between 300k and the 1.2 MB/sec cap (and Activity Monitor bore the variance out), µTorrent hit the 1.2 MB/sec mark early and maintained it all thoroughout the transfer. A second test narrowed the gap, but the edge still went to µTorrent.

This has been my experience using uTorrent on Windows also; µTorrent has always been a faster client than any other GUI torrent client out there. Transmission might have the edge with the elegant, tiny UI and the lovely web interface, but if you want the data fast, use µTorrent.

But this was just my highly unscientific test. What’s been your experience?

From the New York Times article about Obama having to surrender his Blackberry¹:

Three days before his first inauguration, George W. Bush sent a message to 42 friends and relatives that explained his predicament.

“Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is not to correspond in cyberspace,” Mr. Bush wrote from his old address, G94B@aol.com. “This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.”

LOLOLOL He’s got mail LOLOLOL

¹ This is idiotic, by the way. Concerns about security? All devices like that have remote wipe. Presidential Records Act? How hard is it to back up email — sure, the current administration couldn’t do it, but apparently they had enough trouble with the internet that they had to go with AOL. But whatever, the dude in chief should have an iPhone anyhow.

So I played with it for a while. Cracked jokes. Followed famous people. Followed not-so-famous people. Geolocated myself. Posted pictures via twitpic or douchetweet or fuckchirp or whatever lamprey-like fly-by-night jackass service reared up to add the moronic and superfluous features that the folks at Twitter were smart enough to originally eschew.

And my verdict is: It’s retarded. It’s AOL keywords.

It’s the CB radio of the 2000’s.

For all the connectivity Twitter supposedly offers, it offers no genuine connections at all. Everything is passive. You send out a “tweet”¹ into the universe with no idea or clue that anyone will answer. You have no idea if anyone heard you. You have no indication that anyone cares. It’s just a firehose of the pointless flotsam and jetsam of cultural minutia and lifestyle effluvium, delivered in a lightly distracting, OM NOM NOM-style all-you-can-eat infotainment/ego-casting stream to whatever millennial-enabled wireless device you’re willing to hook into it².

It’s like talking to yourself, out loud, on the bus. And it offers just about the same amount of useful feedback.

If Twitter is the future of online communication, or the future of blogging and/or journalism: I’m out. I want the communication I spend my ever-decreasing amount of free time on to be richer, clearer; not constrained by arbitrary limitations based on the maximum length of SMS text messages.

¹ I never thought I’d hate a single word more than the word ‘blog,’ but here we are.

² Also see: Facebook.

Dear Incase,

I know for a fact a couple months ago I reviewed this case on your site:

http://goincase.com/products/detail/protective-cover-cl59038

I reviewed the case fairly and accurately, and yet, you don’t have my review up there. Admittedly: My review was negative, because the case I purchased initally was made of stretchy, faulty rubber and distorted itself. It would slip off but in the meantime it allowed all this crunk to slip around back and stain and discolor my iPhone. Awesome!

Granted, the initially defective case was replaced (after complaint) free of charge, but now, the replacement has ripped at the top on the ‘tread seam’ near the headphone jack (as others’ have as well). So while I like the look of it — it looks like a mountain bike tire, in a good way — I haven’t been blown away by the quality of the case.

I’m a pretty loyal Incase customer — your MacBook Pro bag is quite nice — and I like the look and feel of this case enough that I visited your site with the intention of buying yet another case, faulty or not. But given that you nixed my previous review, I have to ask, why even bother having reviews at all? My advice is: If you’re not going to play fair and put up critical reviews, just take down that feature altogether. As it stands, it’s more than a little deceptive to only keep the positive reviews up.

~Jeff

You did it right.

Edit staff,

This weekend’s editorial strategy planning and retreat session was tremendously productive. This year’s topic of focus was Election 2008; as you know, America is counting on us to have the punniest, most outrageous headlines of all national newspapers, so it’s in our best interest as an organization to really pull together and work this all out ahead of time.

Senior Editor Cathy Cembura suggests, and I agree, that if Obama takes an early electoral lead we should probably go with “Can You Smell What Barack is Cooking?” — someone please check with Dwayne Johnson’s people to make sure he’s not a Libertarian or something. On the other hand, if Obama takes an early hit it’s been suggested we go with “Baracknophobia!”. Maybe someone from the Art Dept. could Photoshop Barack and Michelle’s heads onto a big scary spider or something. Get back to me.

Inside the package, Dennis Kuptner from Marketing suggests that we need to capture more of the ‘Defamer snark culture’ audience, and to that end he suggests a sidebar factbox with bullet-points in the top story that references 80’s rap icons Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock:

I WANT BARACK RIGHT NOW
* Obama came to town to get down
* He’s internationally known
* ALSO: Known to rock a microphone

On the flip side of this election, we’re thinking by far the most noteworthy aspect of John McCain’s candidacy is that he’s very, very old. Could someone talk with Murdoch’s people to see if we can get temporary rights to some clip art of Grandpa Simpson? If so, we should put that clip art next to every story we run. If McCain takes an early lead, we’re hoping to go with “America Depends on McCain” with a photo collage of McCain wearing a baby bonnet and holding a rattle — and if he takes an early hit we’ve decided to go with “Fallen, and He McCan’t Get Up” with a photo of McCain tumbling off the exit ramp of the Straight Talk Express. Again, Art. Dept. should start work on this A.S.A.P.

Very excited to be out in front of this! Also, huge layoffs to come, but we’ll discuss that further next week.

Steve

Dammit¹.

David Foster Wallace was one of my very favorite writers; his work was dense, funny, parenthetical, prophetic, kind, brilliantly astute and always a tremendously enjoyable read. While in college at Hampshire, I made a special trip to get the specific copy of his first novel, ‘Broom of the System,’ from the library at his school, Amherst College, only because I imagined it might be the most special copy of that particular book for him. I locked myself up in my dorm room for two weeks to devour ‘Infinite Jest.’ And the long piece on his experience on a cruise ship in ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing’ is easily the most hilarious piece of journalism ever.

And already people are quoting this 2005 Kenyon Commencement speech as some sort of evidence, although honestly there’s never any lack of ‘evidence’ when this kind of thing happens:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration.

He will be missed.

¹Most alarmingly: if someone this blindingly intelligent takes a look at our world and decides to cash out, what hope do the rest of us have?

Smart, funny, and serious, and he switches gears between the three seamlessly and with grace — the guy’s a pro. The question in my mind is not “Does Barack Obama deserve to be the next American President” but instead “Does America deserve Barack Obama as President?”

Honestly, probably not.

I mean, the fuckin’ View.

Interesting to note that the wikipedia has already been altered to make Palin’s odd non-reply seem less moronic.

So the new iPod nano is getting rave reviews:

One of the more frivolous delights of the nano 4G is the new shake-to-shuffle feature. Using the accelerometer, the player will switch to Shuffle mode when physically shaken—provided you’re in the Now Playing screen. The feature does mean, however, that iPod users who, in the past, have ignored the Hold switch will want to acquaint themselves with it. Trust me: it’s rare, but annoying to shake the player just enough to switch to shuffle mode accidentally. On the bright side: If the screen has gone dark, the shake feature is disabled—Apple assumes the nano is shaking inside your purse or pocket and not your hand if the screen is off.

Say, that reminds me of something, hey how about January 28th, 2006.

And you’re welcome. Every time you accidentally shuffle your songs from now on, you can think of me.

I’m not sure how useful this is going to be in day-to-day use, however. I personally find the list view-to-cover flow flip supremely annoying on my iPhone — it triggers too easily and offers little, and most times I wish the device had just stayed in list view mode.

See my couch! See my couch! It’s a real polar pouch!
See my office? Kind of drab! Until you liven up with crab!

(Photo ganked from here)

Single folks! Are you tired of eating entire meals in public from start to finish? Weary of watching full and complete movies all the way through? Sick to death of being in public without the withering, disapproving stares of your fellow citizens? Wouldn’t it be great if you had some way to experience what it’s like to have a baby — without all that ‘baby’?

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OMFG NOW YOU CAN!!! with the new ‘Fussy Baby Ringtone’ — just install on your iPhone and you too can become the outcast scourge of every social event you attend. It’s great for the movies, church, restaurants, lecture hall — anywhere where silence is held at a premium. Download and install it today!

Download ‘Fussy Baby’ ringtone for iPhone »