Dorkitude by Kyle Wild

Mozilla drops the ball with Firefox 3 launch

2008-06-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

Today, Firefox planned to take a stab at getting into the Guinness Book of World Records for most downloads, with its launch of Firefox 3.0. I was one of over a million people who pledged to download it, largely to evaluate its Mac performance, since Google's apps are notoriously awful in the Apple browser Safari (as competitor Zoho has managed to squeeze much more sophisticated interaction out of JavaScript on all four major browsers, this problem is almost certainly on Google's end [insert snide comment about Google's recruiting habits]).

But disaster struck within 30 minutes: the Firefox download site went down.

Dear Mozilla: Take a lesson from the Bay's startups and forward thinkers, and jump on board with Amazon S3 next time.

Regarding the Supreme Court ruling about Habeas Corpus

2008-06-13T11:04:00.000-07:00

Before I found today's article by Glenn Greenwald in the course of my research, I was going to write precisely this. I felt a combination of disappointment that I would not be writing this article and vindication that someone more versed in this area shares my exact opinion. Read it.

Apple has www.me.com !!

2008-06-09T13:26:00.001-07:00

holy crap, apple has www.me.com -- i wonder how much this prime piece of real estate set them back

here's a copy of the email from apple:

Dear .Mac member:

Today Apple announced a new Internet service called MobileMe - taking the best of .Mac and adding a host of new features. As a current .Mac member, your account will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe in July. For a closer look, watch the MobileMe Guided Tour and read below for an overview of your new service.

Mac integration you know and love. With MobileMe, you'll continue to enjoy features that take advantage of seamless integration with Mac OS X and iLife - Back to My Mac; access to your iDisk in the Finder; Mac-to-Mac syncing of Dock items, preferences, and more; iWeb site publishing; and photo and movie sharing directly from iPhoto '08 and iMovie '08.

New web applications for when you're away from your Mac. MobileMe features a suite of web applications at www.me.com that have the familiar look and feel of the applications on your Mac. Because these web applications stay in sync with your Mac and other devices, you'll have the same information wherever you go. Here's what you'll find at me.com:

Mail, the anchor of the new suite, is even better with a refined interface.

Contacts has a new three-pane interface, contact groups, maps integration, search, and photo support.

Calendar is a brand-new web application that feels just like iCal, featuring multiple calendars, click-and-drag event creation, and more.

Gallery lets you manage your collection of shared photos and movies from anywhere. You can now upload photos, rearrange their order, and set sharing preferences, all from a browser.

iDisk now has the familiar look of the Mac OS X Finder. It features drag-and-drop filing and an easy new way to share large documents, by sending an email with a link for downloading the file.

Account lets you manage settings such as storage allocation.

To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or later.

Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar. In addition to Mac-to-Mac syncing, MobileMe now keeps your iPhone, your iPod touch, and even a PC in sync. MobileMe pushes new contacts, calendar items, and bookmarks to your Mac or PC, and over the air to your iPhone or iPod touch. For example, if you add a calendar event on the web, the change will automatically be pushed to your Mac and iPhone. New email will be pushed to your iPhone in seconds, eliminating the need to check for messages manually.

As a MobileMe subscriber, you can continue to use your mac.com address for email. You will also be issued a me.com address with the same user name that you can use if you prefer. The choice is yours.

Double the online storage. To give you plenty of space for your email, photos, and other files, MobileMe doubles your storage from 10GB to 20GB for an individual subscription.

We'll be sure to update you when the new service goes live. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the upcoming transition from .Mac to MobileMe, please visit the MobileMe FAQ.

Sincerely,

The MobileMe Team

Fox News sucks, Mr. T rocks.

2008-04-18T09:54:00.001-07:00

This morning, I was watching Fox News' guerilla tabloid journalism as they attacked Father Pfleger and continued their tired tabloid campaign to try to re-brand Rev. Wright as an anti-American bigot. It's hilarious to watch, but very sad when I remember that a lot of people back home actually think of Fox News as reliable source of information. I guess if they say "Fair & Balanced" over and over again enough times, these people believe it -- just like seems to happen if they keep repeating the flavor-of-the-week character assassinations of Obama.

But then... then! Immediately after the interview, the following super loud WoW commercial took over and soon had me filling my empty room with screams of comedic agony. "I'm Mr. T and this is my night elf mohawk!"

You have to see it.

Facebook relegated to "fast follower" status -- and the innovator is.. AOL??

2008-03-14T14:12:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, AOL bought Bebo, a large online social network in the UK and Europe. AOL discussed plans to integrate AIM, their market-leading IM platform, into Bebo.

A whole 24 hours later, Facebook has now announced that they will release an IM system of their own, stepping on the toes of many companies who have spent the past year developing IM and chat on Facebook's platform.

Competing with your own customers? Check. Out of ideas, so you'd prefer to steal some from AOL? check. Looks like Facebook is the new Microsoft.

"Please let me break the law from your machine"

2008-03-14T12:16:00.001-07:00

Wow, disturbing post on Craigslist Baltimore:

I need a machine that I can remote desktop into. I need it to be a windows machine that has a fast internet connection- a decent processor (1-2 ghrtz or so), about 2 gb of ram. I will only need to use the machine for about 1 hour per day max between the hours of 9:30 am - 1:30 pm.
I will use little disk space on the machine and will just run a mildly processor-intensive program on the machine in 10 minute intervals max of 3 times a day, but probably only at 10 am and at 1 pm mostly on fridays and saturdays.
I will pay per month for this access- probably enough to pay for your monthly internet bill.
Let me know what type of machine you have- processor speed, ram, operating system and what type of internet connection you have and how much you would charge per month.
Thanks

I hope he's going to use it to take fractions of a cent off each transaction in a pool of billions!

Molly Ivins

2008-03-04T01:53:00.000-08:00

Some of you probably know who Molly Ivins was. I learned about her when Shelly and I saw the Molly Ivins tribute on Book TV (viewable here -- but only in Real Media format, regrettably). Based on the descriptions and eulogy-ish speeches (and poem!) dedicated to her, she was totally awesome. Speakers included: Maya Angelou, Kathleen Chalfont, Gail Collins, Lou Dubose, Garrison Keillor, John Leonard, Eden Lipson, Anthony Romero, and Calvin Trillin.

I just learned that she wrote the following article before she died -- very insightful.

Molly Ivins: Not. Endorsing. Hillary.

Wisdom from Time Cube

2008-02-21T02:16:00.000-08:00

I think maybe I should pull a Jefferson Bible on Time Cube.

here's a starter quote:

"education"
inflicts a dog brain upon
Students - ability to be
taught servitude - but
an inability to ever think
opposite of brainwashing
and indoctrination - very
unlikely to ever recover
to acknowledge

CNN covers up Obama's delegate lead?

2008-02-06T14:27:00.001-08:00

Despite a loss in California, and despite Hillary Clinton's advantage in the race for "super delegates" (or as I call them, the approval of the establishment), Barack Obama has taken the lead in terms of delegates earned. Here's the Politico article on it from this morning at about 8AM Pacific. MSNBC reported soon afterwards, and has updated its frontpage listing as pictured here:

Of course, this was big news in the Obama mailing lists. In fact, it was actually news to many CNN-only friends of mine, just ten minutes ago -- a full six hours since Obama took the lead, CNN.com still looked like this:

Notice the "updated 1 minute ago" line... Now it's pretty well-documented time is a precious piece of this race. With every week that has gone by since December, Obama has gained ground on Clinton. For supporters of Clinton, who is practically an incumbent, the remaining primaries can't come soon enough, whereas Obamans are hoping their candidate has time to get his new and inspiring message across to challenge the establishment.

As far as I can tell, CNN.com's slow play on updating their page can only be interpreted as an attempt to buy Clinton one more day with "frontrunner" status.

Update: Now, at 3:02PM pacific, CNN (the TV program) is still talking about how Clinton has more delegates. It is still being spun as a "he won more states, she won more delegates" situation and they are still citing the numbers from some 7 hours ago.

Draw your own furniture

2008-02-02T17:39:00.000-08:00

Draw your own furniture! This rocks. It's 3D printed after being hand-designed in just a few seconds.

Different Salutations Across Party Lines

2008-01-31T13:54:00.000-08:00

If you want to see what names candidates use to refer to each other, check out this visualization on the New York Times website.

It seems that whenever republicans refer to a democrat, and whenever democrats refer to a republican, they use the informal Firstname Lastname format. When referring to a member of the same party, on the other hand, candidates use titles like Governor and Senator. Is this a new pattern or has this always been the case? Is it strategic or accidental?

awesome whopper freakout spoof

2008-01-09T22:58:00.000-08:00

A spoof of the Whopper Freakout campaign, in which Burger King tells unsuspecting customers that their famous Whopper burger has been discontinued, and films their outrage. The campaign reminds me of when Tom Sawyer faked his death and watched his own funeral secretly.

User Abuse: American Airlines will do anything for money

2007-12-24T15:32:00.001-08:00

When I went to unsubscribe from the American Airlines Reward Network's annoying email updates, which are basically just ad spam (complete are paid links to Rewards Network sites), I was met with the following:

The text: "If you unsubscribe from email updates, your benefits will be reduced to 1 mile per dollar spent." It continues, "only members who have signed up to receive emails and provided a valid, deliverable email address will be eligible for our top dining reward levels."

That's right -- they've followed the law in allowing people to unsubscribe from their ad spam messages, but doing so removes most of the users' benefits!

I guess this is what they have to do to make money, since Virgin America, Jet Blue, and Southwest are wiping the floor with their pansy asses. American Airlines, you'd better cross your fingers for a corporate welfare check, you no-business-plan-having wastes of space.

Diverse users demand diverse products -- Nintendo of Japan

2007-12-22T03:08:00.000-08:00

More women than men play Nintendo in Japan.

According to the Fall 2007 Nintendo Conference, more than half of Japanese Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS players are female. Since Japan is to the video game industry what the Bay Area is to the web -- that is to say, it's the undisputed innovation center -- this is great news for those of us who care about video game diversity.

In 2008, I'm far less excited about playing my 50th menu-driven RPG than I am about finding another genre-shattering, barrier-breaking masterpiece like Katamari Damacy was and Spore hopes to be. And it seems that these unique games have much larger rapport with female audiences -- if only because they represent a new consumer base for games and as such are not entrenched in taxonomical comfort zones such as "Platformer", "Shooter", and "Beat Em Up".

Maybe this diversifying player base helps to explain why the last few years have included such paradigm shifting games as Brain Age, Cooking Mama, Trauma Center, and Elebits. It's not that unique games never existed before (a statement that would be logically fallacious anyway), but it seems to me that in my lifetime, unclassifiable games such as these have ever been nearly successful as they are at this moment. One can only hope it continues.

source
"13:56: For each household, the DS has 3.0 users, the Wii has 3.5 users. DS has a 53% female user base. Wii has a 51% female user base."

World War VII Watch, edition 1 (December 6, 2007)

2007-12-06T14:20:00.000-08:00

Sarcos, a company who doesn't seem to have chosen sides in World War VII: Humans vs. Androids, has just thrown a Deron-esque dime for the latter faction: humanoid robots (or Androids) that could totally own the Humans in Joust (pictured):

These androids come with a pretty pimpin' backpack and are capable of keeping their balance when punched, shoved, or kicked -- presumably even when a bowling ball is thrown into their chests. They're pretty cuddly now, and lack offensive abilities, but a strict biotechnological analysis reveals that they may be able to attain offensive powers easily:

That's right. They Have Fingers. This means one of these metal badasses could fire a gun or tank -- and it could pull the trigger even if people were trying to kick it over.

Score one for the Androids.

Watch the first five minutes of The Golden Compass

2007-12-06T02:22:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how this got online, but I hope it was intentionally leaked to YouTube in a brilliant guerrilla marketing move. I'm far more hooked by this five minute intro than by any pre-opening ad campaign in recent memory.

Whether it was intentional or not, I'm making this mofo viral. WATCH!

YES. MORE HIGH DOLLAR MAGICAL FANTASY MOVIES PLEASE.

Host on Fox News exemplifies their "fair and balanced" slogan (with surprise twist ending)

2007-12-06T02:07:00.000-08:00

Check out the surprise twist ending! You'll never see it coming.

awesome Fathead commercial (with surprise twist ending)

2007-11-30T13:36:00.000-08:00

I've spent the week in LA at Shelly's apartment, which is awesome but for the fact that she works all day. So I've passed the time mostly by scarfing hummus and watching ESPN repeat the same hour of content six times a day.

Every once in a while during my sports binge, this brilliant commercial for Fathead came on. I needed to share it. I kept youtubing for "fathead" and "fathead commercial", to no avail. Eventually I just started googling random lines from the commercial's monologue, and found a blog post over at AdFreak.

Check it out:

I've gotta say, it's pretty shocking when volume goes up 20 notches and the script suddenly drops from brilliant to this:

Chubby Sports Infomercial Guy: GET YOUR FAVORITE FATHEADS FROM THE *CRUNCH* NFL PLUS MLB, NBA, *CRUNCH* NASCAR, AND MORE> GO *CRUNCH* TO FATHEAD DOT *CRUNCH* COM NOW.

protectors of the monopoly on indoctrination

2007-11-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

Bill Donohue of the Catholic League has issued a statement demanding that all Christians boycott The Golden Compass (site, imdb), a new film based on the first book in Philip Pullman's trilogy, His Dark Materials. I find it particularly telling that Mr. Donohue feels so threatened by a work of the fantasy fiction genre. Competitive much?

BBC article

Obama: Not running to join the kind of Washington groupthink that led us to war

2007-10-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

I think my favorite part is the following:

"And the conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002. This is the conventional thinking that measures experience only by the years you've been in Washington, not by your time spent serving in the wider world. This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place - the outdated assumptions and the refusal to talk openly to the American people.

Well I'm not running for President to conform to Washington's conventional thinking - I'm running to challenge it."

My letter to Barack Obama

2007-10-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

What follows is a copy of a campaign email I received from Obama for America:

To: Kyle Wild
From: Barack Obama
Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:31:30 -0400

Kyle --

Last night each of the presidential campaigns reported their third-quarter
fundraising numbers.

The results are clear. We continue to build the largest grassroots
movement in history, but Washington lobbyists and special interests
rallied to help Hillary Clinton out-raise us for the first time.

If we want real change in this country, then we need to prove that
together we are stronger than the lobbyist-driven money machine that has
dominated Washington for too long.

The situation here is simple. We are $2.1 million behind. We must close
that gap right now. I need you to make a donation of $25:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Hillary Clinton aggressively seeks money from Washington lobbyists and
special interest PACs. She's even said that these lobbyists represent real
Americans.

She's wrong.

I think it's time to turn the page on that kind of politics, and that's
why I have not accepted a dime from Washington lobbyists and special
interest PACs in this race. We rely on a network of more than 350,000
ordinary people to make us competitive -- more supporters than all the
other Democratic candidates combined.

Washington lobbyists have chosen their candidate and are determined to
provide her with an overwhelming advantage. But you can even up this
contest.

In the face of the most entrenched political machine in Democratic
politics, I believe a movement of ordinary Americans can change our
country. And you can prove that right now.

I need you to make a donation to close the gap:

https://donate.barackobama.com/closethegap

Barack

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Paid for by Obama for America

My reply follows:

[please forward this to Barack Obama]

Barack,

Is it true that you want to appeal to the new, hip, internet-savvy generation of young voters (not to mention online purchasers)?

Then accept payments via PayPal, Google Checkout, Obopay, and Amazon's payment system. This will lower the barrier to entry for transactions on your site, which is well-known as the safest way to get people to spend money on the internet, whether the transaction is charitable or commercial. People like me are happy to donate a second time, but it's redundant and a real pain in the butt for us to reach literally into our pockets (or more probably into our messenger bags) and pull out a piece of plastic, when that information is already more securely accessible on the internet in digital form. In short, we have been spoiled by these and other excellent payment services to expect the best in website User Experience.

Further, by accepting payments from these growing online standards, you can implicitly acknowledge that the new economy's payment is just as good as that of the old.

Best of luck,
Kyle Wild

Any ideas how I can get him to read it?

Facebook 'Booktracker' application; my first review (The Edison Gene)

2007-09-19T02:19:00.001-07:00

Booktracker rocks. Go sign up for it! You can add a book by searching for the author, title, or ISBN.

Then, you can post books that you are reading, have read, or want to read. You can pick one of these categories to display automatically in your Facebook profile. In this screenshot of my profile, I've chosen to show by default the books I'm "currently reading":

The app is also nice because it keeps a record of when I read certain books. I hope the creator of Booktracker makes an archive of book additions eventually, because I'd love to one day have a historical record of when I started and finished reading any given book, from now on, plus my own reviews of each book.

To that end, I recently posted the following short review to my Books application on Facebook (full text below image):

Thom Hartmann's The Edison Gene is an important perspective on the gift of ADHD, the state of ADHD in psychology and education, and potential options for raising ADHD children. In the book, Hartmann consistently challenges the "disorder view" that ADHD is some sort of problem to be cured. In doing so, he appeals to history, modern science, and, above all, the evolutionary psychology theory of ADHD, which explains that this genetic trait for a tendency towards agitation and creativity was chosen for the world's most agitated, creative roles: inventors, explorers, hunters. Hartmann shows sound reasoning in demonstrating why the characteristics associated with ADHD would have been useful in the environment of early humans.

---

I have a simple theory of ADHD based on evolutionary psychology.

In man's gradual conquest of the globe, it seems to me that natural selection must have always favored explorers. Explorers and expatriates are generally fueled by agitation, creativity, and nonconformism. A population that yielded a larger-than-normal number of people with these traits therefore had a larger-than-normal number of explorers. The traits, of course, occur today most frequently in people whom American society labels as "ADHD". People with these traits exported their population's genetic information across the globe, diversifying the geography of like strains, and thus avoiding forms of extinction by geographic anomaly (flood, drought, ice age, etc.).

Google's Blogger Play launches, begins to spiral out of control

2007-09-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

Blogger Play is a great new site made by the Blogger team. It shows a pretty slideshow of images as they are uploaded by Blogger users.

This is a much more visual form of the scrolling display that can be found in most of the buildings here on Google campus. I predict that it will be equally addictive.

After hearing the product had been released, I spent about 30 seconds on Blogger Play before seeing this:

Uh oh. Does that mean that by posting to this Blogger Blog the above image, which now will appear in Blogger Play for other viewers, I am setting into motion an infinitely nested set of images?? IT WILL SPIRAL OUT OF CONTROL

Flex coolness: www.officialmancave.com

2007-09-01T18:35:00.000-07:00

I was checking on a domain I wanted to buy, eless.com, and, much to my dismay it's owned by a domain farmer. For some reason, one of the ads these squatter-spammers had on the domain piqued my interest. Taking care not to click the ad, for this would reward the evil industry of squatter-spammers, I copied the domain and pasted it into my browser bar: http://www.officialmancave.com

It seems like this is an Alltel-funded advertisement experience. I see clear examples of Flex components such as the book component in use, and they feel really nice within The Man Cave experience. All hail Flex! Check it out!

Jobfox - the eHarmony of job sites?

2007-08-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

I just spent 20 minutes on this site and feel like it knows me better than any prospective employer has ever known me.

Since I wasted that much time at work already, I'll forgo writing a full entry about this, and summarize what I would have written in the following analogy:

Jobfox : Monster/CareerBuilders/HotJobs :: eHarmony : Craigslist Personals

They get bonus points for the "boss over shoulder" link at the bottom. This is a welcome nod to the computer gaming industry of the 80's and early 90's.

If you want to be really wowed, go here and click on some objects in the experience map: