2 August 2011, early evening
“These overnight text editors don’t reflect well on the genre or the platform. We are raising the bar, elevating the standard.” — Bare Bones Software President Rich Siegel in 2005
A lot of Mac users you meet today switched as Mac OS X matured, over the last 7-8 years or so. I switched when Windows 95 came out. I sincerely enjoyed using various flavours of DOS on my trusty 486. Windows 95 launched with a series of shitty betas (you had to pay for) followed by a snazzy ad campaign. Though I was a young man, I could tell that Windows 95 was a piece of junk. I did the sensible thing and switched to a Powerbook 5300cs running System 7.5.3. Believe me when I say, “it was dope.”
I used my Powerbook during my first term of University. By this point Macs were running OS 9. I would write Java programs in BBEdit and build them using the OS 9 Java toolchain. Programming in Java on a Mac in 1999 was pretty horrible. BBEdit on the otherhand was pretty great. I used it as my text editor of choice throughout university. (At least when I was working on my Mac. On the school’s Unix machines I used Vim.) The last big project I worked on using BBEdit was my compiler.
This blog has been around long enough that I can look and see when I first linked to the then new TextMate. Upon its launch it was greeted with a lot of confusion and mixed interest. Between 2004 and 2006 TextMate went from this fringe application used by a few people to basically the defacto text editor for the Mac. BBEdit’s core userbase always struck me as people who had used it prior to the launch of MacOS X. By 2006 lots of people were coding up the next hot Rails app on their brand new Mac using TextMate. 2006 was when I switched from BBEdit to TextMate.
The latest version of BBEdit launched with the release of Lion. It brings with it a slew of new features and updates. TextMate on the other hand hasn’t had any real updates of note since 2007. Any advancement in the application really came from its bundles. With the launch of Lion came a wiki page for TextMate outlining what was broken and possible work arounds. TextMate 2 has been in development for something like 5-6 years. I stopped using TextMate a little while ago because it started to feel sluggish on my iMac. I now exclusively use Vim. (MacVim to be precise.) I remember reading the Rich Siegel comment in 2005 and thinking he was being a bit of a dick. It took 6 years, but it turns out maybe he was right about TextMate.
BBedit 10 is now priced at a pretty aggressive $40. I’m curious to see if it can win back its place as the number one text editor on the Mac.
[1] Technology
5 July 2011, terribly early in the morning
I was listening to Marco Arment’s show on 5by5 yesterday. Normally it is pretty on point, but yesterdays show seemed so wrong about Google+ I thought I’d say a few words. (A few of the Apple tech blogs that I read seems to be hating on Google+, seemingly because it’s from Google or because they hate social networks. This 5by5 show just stands out in my mind since I spent so much time listening to the damn show.)
To start off, Marco hadn’t even used Google+ when the show was recorded. Many of the tech blogs I read are also critical of the service despite not being invited to use it. Criticizing something you haven’t used before is silly. I would think that goes without saying.
Marco felt that Google had nothing to offer beyond what Facebook currently offers, all the while lacking the user base Facebook currently has. He talks about how if he could log in to Google+, he’d expect to see 4 geek friends, each talking about the testing out the site, and that’s about it. Meanwhile, even his Grandmother is on Facebook. My mom is on Facebook. That’s some serious market penetration. That said, she wasn’t on the site anywhere close to day one. Facebook at launch was full of Ivy League kids, and it expanded from there. Like today, when it launched there was a big well established player with a huge user base. People move from network to network when there are compelling reasons to move. I used to use ICQ, then switched to MSN, and am now settled on Google Talk. Each switch happened organically. All it really takes is a couple people who you have to talk and their communication medium of choice will usually win out. The question is whether Google+ will snag that set of key people. I would add that these sorts of social networks don’t have to be a zero-sum game. If the user base for Google+ never moves beyond a bunch of nerdy boys and girls that isn’t the worse thing ever. I suspect for many people, a social network their mom isn’t on is actually a compelling feature.
It also seems clear to me what Google is trying to do to differentiate itself from Facebook. Without looking at their crazy demo site, here are three things that come to my mind after using the site briefly and reading some blog posts from Google.
- Google is quite up front about how it plans to share what you post to the site. I commented upon logging in for the first time that all the requests to use this and that information were creeping me out, but they were really doing nothing different from Facebook, they were just not being secret about any of it. Google+ also has a very clear model for how you group your friends and family, and share information with them. Facebook’s privacy controls are inscrutable. Worse, they seem to be obfuscated on purpose.
- Google makes it very easy to export your data out of Google+. (It plans to make it easy to export data out of all of its services.) Facebook is a black hole for your stuff.
- Google makes it very easy to delete your account, and everything associated with it. You don’t have to find a page on WikiHow explaining what you need to do to delete your account. You don’t have to understand what deactivating your account means. You don’t have to wonder whether your account is actually gone or not. This is actually the one thing I like most about the service.
I don’t think I’ll use Google+ any more than I did Facebook. I don’t think Google is any less creepy than Facebook. Still, I can see that Google+ is a well thought out and well executed product, especially for something that just launched. I think it has a good chance of doing well. (Assuming they let other people use the site, anyway.)
[4] Technology
11 November 2010, terribly early in the morning
I went to the Gladstone with a coworker and Tyler to hear Ali and Matt from Well.ca talk about how they keep Well.ca chugging along. They discussed the software development process at Well, the tools they use to get things done, and the corporate culture that facilitates the work they do. Ali’s one of the smartest people I know, so if you’re interested in starting a start up I recommend you copy what he does, more or less verbatim.
Since i’m new to web development I thought the talk was particularly interesting and informative. I learned about a few cool projects that I will share with you now:
- Matt’s told the audience about an automation tool he wrote called doo that looks quite nice. It’s made out of surprisingly little code. Ruby is a strange beast.
- Ali showed off a jabber bot called well-partychat. It’s an implementation of Partychat you can run behind your own firewalls. Partychat is a way to do group chats with Jabber, regardless of how shitty or not your IM client is. Since most everyone already has a Jabber account, this is a good way to set up a persistent chat room. Since it’s in something people already have open and running, I can see how it would actually get used over something like status.net or Campfire.
- Well.ca have somehow managed to trick out Speedtracer to do all sorts of magic. Sadly, i’m not entirely sure how. Speedtracer looks like a seriously awesome project in and of itself. It’s a profiler for Chrome that can tell you all about your web application.
After the talk everyone headed over to the Rhino for drinks. How did that place become the defacto hangout for Toronto software geeks?
Life | Technology
31 May 2010, mid-morning
And so my experiment with Facebook ends. I deleted my account today. Shima actually deleted her account first. Now I apparently have to wait 14 days for Facebook to actually delete things, whatever that means. I suspect they keep your information around forever, but who knows. I’m not sure what I’ll miss on the site just yet. Certainly I have some friends and family who only share stuff via Facebook. I’ll just have to go back to shunning those people, like I used to in the good old days.
Life | Technology
12 December 2009, late at night
It’s 2:15 on a Friday night. I got back from LeVack Block on Ossington an hour or so ago. It was their two year anniversary. It was a pretty good party. Rather than sleep, I thought i’d figure out how to generate my Blansdowne site using Sinatra, instead of generating all the static pages up front. I’ve actually got it all working, though I need to handle errors better. I’m impressed at how productive I am this late at night.
Life | Technology
2 November 2009, terribly early in the morning
This is pretty neat: the city of Toronto is releasing a bunch of the data and information they collect online, via the portal toronto.ca/open. There is a companion site, dataTO.org They look to be following the lead of the US government, who recently created DATA.gov not too long ago. This stuff is all generated using tax payer money, so I think it makes sense that the data be available to the public. You can grab the entire TTC schedule as a series of text files now. There is a real time XML feed of events and festivals taking place in the city. This address validator web service looks like it could be used to do a lot of interesting things. I’ll be curious to see what sorts of things people start creating with the data released so far, and what other datasets the city plans to release. There isn’t much online right now, but it seems like a good start.
[3] Toronto | Technology
19 October 2009, early morning
I’ve been using (playing?) Foursquare for a few days now. It’s a simple enough idea, and it’s well executed: users can use the site (or mobile application) to let their friends know where they are, and what they are up to. The idea is that your friends could discover you’re nearby and come meet up. Similarly, you could learn your friends are out and join them. You don’t need to publish all your check-ins, so you can use the site privately. You can also push your check-ins out on to twitter, so people who aren’t using Foursquare can still see where you are.
There are other applications and services that do this. (BrightKite is the first that comes to mind, and you can certainly put this information out there using Twitter.) What makes Foursquare interesting is that to encourage people to use the service by setting itself up like a game. You get points for: telling your friends where you are; going to multiple places in a night; going to new places; going to the same place several times; etc. You are also awarded boyscout-like badges for completing various tasks. Finally, if you go to the same place enough times, you will be declared the mayor of that place. These points and titles are more or less meaningless, but if you’ve spent any amount of time online you’ll know that people still love to collect meaningless things. (Karma on Reddit and Slashdot is the first thing that comes to mind.) Some people have labelled this sort of thing prescriptive social software. Foursquare is encouraging a certain sort of behaviour from its users.
The NYT recently ran an article on the service, which touches on some of the ways it encourages people to get out and see the city, meet up with friends, etc. It also looks at possible ways the service could make money. Businesses might want to encourage people fight for their mayorship since it encourages more people to visit them. Similarly, businesses might want to add badges to the game that encourage users to come visit them. There seem to be plenty of ways to monetize something like this.
As with most things on the Internet, the site is probably more useful when you know a bunch of people using it.
Technology
1 October 2009, lunch time
I am on Google Wave. As they were with GMail, Google is being fairly tight with how they are rolling out the service. Twitter is full of “can I get an invite” messages. (My invite came from my friend Ryan, who works at Google now. By coincidence, he’s the same guy who invited me to GMail way back in the day.) Unlike GMail, invites aren’t sent out immediately. You nominate someone for an account and at some point they’ll be sent an invite. For a service like Google Wave this is a stupid way to get things going. GMail was actually usable even if you didn’t know anyone else using GMail — it’s just an email client. Wave is something new and fancy. As such, I can only “wave” to one other person with the service, my friend who invited me. Awesome? He hasn’t replied to my first wave yet. Maybe it’ll be more exciting by the end of the week, but I have my doubts.
[5] Technology
15 July 2009, early morning
The CRTC hearings that took place over the last week or so are fascinating to read about. Rogers did an embarrassingly bad job of presenting its point of view. On Monday, Rogers said, “It is the behaviour of the application, not the application itself that we are concerned with. If an application which could cure cancer acted in a certain way, it would be also be subject to traffic management.” Yes, Rogers testified they would throttle the cure for cancer. Bell didn’t fare much better yesterday, though there weren’t nearly as many bad sound bites. It did come out that they’ve cut monthly bandwidth caps by as much as 90% — some of their services now have a 2gb cap. And they throttle their traffic for 10 hours of the day. So you can pay for a 5mb connection and get a 80*kb* connection 1/3 of the time. (An 80kb connection is slightly faster than a modem.) What a deal! I really don’t understand how Bell can avoid hemorrhaging customers. They also spent much of their time on the stand avoiding questions or lying. Sadly, I think the CRTC is firmly in their pockets. The transcripts end with this comment from the chairmen to Bell: “I do not think we are very far apart. Thank you very much, we spent more time with you, but you did start the whole thing.”
If you aren’t already with TekSavvy you should switch. Vote with your feet. Bell and Rogers don’t deserve your money. (Even though their customers are apparently very happy.) If you switch to TekSavvy you can also avoid Bell’s internet throttling completely by using ML/PPP. You’ll also get to talk to real people when you call them for support. Seriously.
[3] Technology
8 July 2009, terribly early in the morning
Google is making an operating system. An operating system that sounds like it is designed solely to run web pages. What?
A few years back Kottke was arguing that Google would do something like this, develop a WebOS. I thought this was the dumbest idea ever. I still do. Web applications have come a long way, but at the end of the day they are still a bunch of web pages. Apple’s Mobile Me web site is fairly cutting edge when it comes to putting a rich UI up on the web, but even that seems lacking when compared to the ‘real’ versions of Mail, Calender, Addressbook, etc. Computers are stupid-fast nowadays. Yes, even those lame-ass netbooks are fairly powerful machines. To not take advantage of this computing power seems foolish. Why run an entire web browser if the end goal is to view and edit contacts in an address book?
Applications that seamlessly take advantage of the Internet in novel ways are to be applauded. If my file system backed itself up automatically and securely to computers half way across the world, that’d be amazing. Apple’s MobileMe offering got off to a rocky start, but I see that as the direction computing should be moving in. Apple has a suite of powerful applications that can communicate with the web to share what actually matters to you: your data. This seamless movement of data between applications, computers, etc, is what the computer industries goal should be. Trying to shoehorn everything into a web page, not so much.
Technology
20 February 2009, terribly early in the morning
I bought my Unicomp Spacesaver keyboard about a half year ago. At the time it was a little tricky to quantify how nice the keyboard felt. It was certainly a step up from my previous Dell piece of crap keyboard, but just how big a step?
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Technology
18 February 2009, early morning
I have emails from when I in grade 11 on my old Powerbook 5300CS. I read them when I was home a few weeks back. It was funny and scary reading what I wrote. Those emails are over 10 years old now. I wonder what people who have replaced email with Facebook will have to look back on in 10 years time. My guess is nothing, but you never know. I think the uproar over Facebook’s TOS was justified, but the bigger issue I have with Facebook is that it traps all your interactions with the site on the site. There is no way to programatically export your data. While their messaging system is convenient, it’s locked into Facebook. If Facebook folds, or they decide to ban you from the site, there go your “emails”. Kottke compared Facebook to AOL, and the comparison is apt. A site that traps your data isn’t worth your time.
[2] Technology
21 October 2008, early evening
Use Tomato/MLPPP to Stop Bell from Throttling your Internet Connection.
So the WRT54G router firmware I linked to earlier does in fact get around Bell’s (anti-competitive jack-ass) throttling of my Teksavvy internet connection. I love my router, I love Teksavvy, and I now love Tomato/MLPPP. I haven’t been able to download torrents during the evening for many months. (Bell throttles during off-peak hours, so while I was at work my torrents used to run at full speed.) I really didn’t expect a solution like this to develop: I was waiting for Bell to get their asses handed to them in court. Clearly, relying on your government to take a large corporation to task is an exercise in futility. If you’re on Teksavvy, and have a respectable router, I seriously recommend you upgrade to this firmware. Suck it, Bell!
So how does this work? MLPPP is used to aggregate several different network links into a single faster link — i.e. you can take several DSL connections and make a single faster one. With MLPPP the client will split a packet up into smaller fragments, and send each fragment with an additional MLPPP header over different links to the server. The server will then reassemble the original packet from the fragments it receives. You split your bandwidth over all your links, effectively creating a single faster one. You can run MLPPP over a single link, but it obviously offers you no advantage, as all your data is still going over the same link. In this case, the advantage comes from the fact that (for the time being) the hardware Bell uses to track and shape Internet traffic does not know how to process MLPPP traffic. Bell doesn’t reassemble the real packet to examine what is being sent, and thus can’t decide if it needs to be throttled. As long as your ISP understands the MLPPP protocol, you should be able to avoid throttling this way.
Update: TekSavvy now charges $3 for a static IP, access to newsgroups, and access to their ML/PPP server(s).
[1] Technology | Life
21 August 2008, early morning
Unspace discuss their past, and the future of Ruby. There are a lot of interesting links in the post, but of particular interest was the post about Hadoop by Ted Dziuba. (The subtitle, “On the emasculation of Twitter and Dirty Harry” is certainly enjoyable.) There is a lot of interesting stuff being done in Ruby, but like Dziuba, I find a lot of it quaint and half assed. Sometimes I get the feeling that the community around Rails seems to be a bit of a cargo cult. You have a core group of people who know what their doing, and a lot of people who echo what the core says, but who perhaps don’t quite grasp what’s going on. Someone discovers REST and all of a sudden everyone is going on about RESTful this or that. Someone discovers automated testing and everyone is going on about Runit and Rspec. Mind you I’m probably just an elitist C++ programmer. One day I’ll write a longer blog post about that, but not today.
Update: Rethink sort of mangled one of my comment’s, which i’ll repost here:
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Computer Science | Technology
7 August 2008, lunch time
My Unicomp Spacesaver arrived a few minutes ago. I knew it would be loud, but I think I underestimated just how loud it would be. There is a clackity-clack that comes with every key press. Typing out a sentence results in a not so quiet roar of noise. My plan was to use it at work, but i’m worried the noise is going to drive everyone around me nuts: our work space here is pretty quiet. I think this keyboard is a bit too loud. (Well, I know it is too loud, it’s really a question of just how annoying everyone else finds it.) Of course, it feels quite nice to type on. I’ll have to see if people start giving me dirty looks.
[6] Life | Technology
31 July 2008, early morning
I was talking to Tyler about Ruby Fringe yesterday: apparently it was a crazy success. I’m still disappointed I didn’t crash their last party. I did have some of their left over beer last night on the roof of their office, so I guess that’s something. People are going on about the conference like it was Woodstock. The fact they aren’t planning on doing another conference may mean it will end up developing the sort of mythos that surrounds Woodstock. At least amongst super-nerds like myself.
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Technology | Current Events
29 July 2008, terribly early in the morning
Matt recently wrote about how he uses the Inbox Zero method to manage his email. The general idea is that you don’t use your email inbox as a dumping ground for all the emails you need to deal with. You can read all about Inbox Zero on Merlin Mann’s web site. Like Matt I find the system works pretty well.
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Technology | Life
3 July 2008, terribly early in the morning
Tyler and Matt were laughing at me when I told them most of my music is saved as AAC files. It’s the reason my Muxtape is a bit lacking. I decided on this format a long time ago, after soliciting the opinions of my friends. AAC struck me as the format of the future, it being superior to the MP3 format and all. Reading what I had written then, I was working under the assumption that ACC would become as ubiquitous as MP3s. One day. Till then you can listen to RZA’s muxtape.
Technology
9 May 2008, terribly early in the morning
Tyler mentioned on his blog, in passing, that one reason he likes jQuery more than Prototype is that the formers syntax is a bit object-oriented.
prototype has syntax which strikes me as antithetical to OO principals. for example, Element.hide(‘comments’) instead of $(’#comments’).hide().
I was thinking about the above while writing some Python code at work. I now prefer Ruby to Python, but it took a little while for me to warm up to Ruby. Ruby has a very terse syntax, and there is a lot of room in the language to write programs that look like that are composed of magic and pixie dust. (This is especially true when you look at Rails code.) Once you have written a few programs in Ruby it is a bit easier to see what’s up: where people have decided to leave brackets off, etc. Ultimately I prefer Ruby because if I want to know how long a list is, I can do so as follows: [1,2,3].length(). In Python, the same task is accomplished as follows: len([1,2,3]). The later just seems ass-backwards to me now.
(Python’s object-oriented programming support seems pretty half-assed, but I’m no expert in the language so my opinions of it may stem from my ignorance more than anything else. Still, what’s with all the self parameters. And __init__? Come on, you can do better than that.)
Code | Technology
30 April 2008, terribly early in the morning
Shima and I sorted out wedding rings in the afternoon. She left for Karate, and I left for the Carlu. I was out with some of the Well.ca boys and girls yesterday night. Ali, Alex, and Chris were in town for Startup Camp North. They chose the event to launch Startup Index, a project they are working on along with the guys from Startup North. And I use the term ‘they’ loosely, since as far as I can tell, Chris does all the work. (Oh Snap!) I always feel a bit out of place when I go to events like this. At the Rails Pubnite, people always gave me this look of both disappointment and sympathy when I told them: a) I had a job b) writing C++ code c) for a company that hasn’t been a startup for a very long time. At this event, people assumed I worked at Well.ca, since that is who I was sitting with … and then I would correct them, and you could see that glimmer of disappointment. Of course, that didn’t last long, because Ali would inform them that I’m a Ruby guru, or a Rails master. I suppose that’s not a total lie, but it’s pretty close. That said, I’m going to have to start introducing myself as, “Ramanan: Ruby Master,” from now on. I think you just need to say stuff like that enough and it becomes true. Well.ca is the biggest online pharmacy in the world. Or it will be anyway.
[3] Life | Technology
14 January 2008, lunch time
There are three things I really like about GoogleReader: all your unread entries appear on one page; when you scroll past an entry it is marked as read; your reading history — read vs. unread stories — is always up to date since the application is hosted online. Any feed reading application that doesn’t beat GoogleReader at these three things really isn’t worth using.
NetNewsWire is awesome. First off, it’s fast — oh so fast — and works incredibly well. It has the single page view that GoogleReader has, and it also can be set to mark stuff as read as you scroll past it. I have it set up so that clicking on links opens pages up background; pressing the right arrow will open the news item you are reading in the background as well. This way, when you are done reading your feeds you can switch to your web browser to look over the links you thought were most interesting. NetNewsWire is by far the best newsreader I’ve used. I like it a lot more than GoogleReader. Sadly, all is not well in the world. NetNewsWire’s biggest fault doesn’t lie with the program itself, but with the cruft it is forced to play with: Newsgator’s online service, and FeedDemon.
FeedDemon is a RSS newsreader for Windows. Like NetNewsWire it is owned by NewsGator, and the two programs can be kept in sync using Newsgator’s online service. As far as I can tell, FeedDemon is a pile of junk. It is slow — oh so damn slow. GoogleReader running inside Firefox works much better. Worse still, there seems to be no way to view all your unread feeds on one page — I’d even settle for an easy way to view each unread article one after another. Reading feeds in FeedDemon is a slow cumbersome process.
NewsGator’s online service is also incredibly lacking when compared to GoogleReader. In my opinion it works better then FeedDemon, but that isn’t saying much. You can view all your unread posts on a page, but unlike GoogleReader, it paginates them if there are too many unread items. (NetNewsWire also paginates your news items into multiple pages, but it will automatically switch to the next page when you get to the bottom of the current page.) NewsGator also doesn’t mark stories as read when you scroll past them: you can set it to mark everything as read when the news page loads up — this is how Bloglines used to work — or when you click a ‘mark all as read’ button. The site is slower than GoogleReader to boot.
NetNewsWire is so nice to use I’ve been putting up with FeedDemon and NewsGator for the past few days. I’m not sure how long I can keep this up.
Weblogs | Technology
24 October 2007, mid-afternoon
I bought the PeepCode Rails Code Review eBook a few days back. It was a very impulsive decision. The eBook was $9, which isn’t much money in the grand scheme of things, and it seemed kind of cool. There was a time when I thought paying for an electronic book was the dumbest thing someone could do — I mean, really, it’s electronic, there’s nothing there. Actually, I still do feel that way to some extent, but I see buying this eBook differently: I think I’ve reached a point where I see purchases like this as some sort of budget philanthropy on my part. I think I’m willing to make the purchase because in my head I picture some dude trying to buy an iPhone or a new hard drive and I feel for them. I thought about all this while I bought TaskPaper a few moments ago. I’m hoping I use it a lot, but if I don’t, it really doesn’t bother me too much. I feel good making the purchase.
[ed. I was going to title this post “Why I have no money.”]
[4] Life | Technology
16 October 2007, early morning
I met Tyler at the Rhino Bar last night. Martini Boys informed me that, “When you walk into The Rhino you think, ‘I might get my ass kicked in this place’ — not a sentiment many Toronto bars inspire these days.” I love sketchy ass bars, so this sounded like it’d be my kind of place; sadly, when I arrived I wasn’t greeted by any lonely old men nursing pitchers by themselves. I guess Martini Boys hasn’t been back to the Rhino Bar recently. Parkdale just isn’t what it used to be. (Well, the drinks were still cheap, so that’s something.)
The monthly Ruby on Rails Pubnite was being held at the Rhino Bar. I’ve been meaning to go for ages, despite the fact I don’t actually do anything with Ruby on Rails. Tyler wanted to check it out: he knows a bunch of the people in that community, and, you know, actually works with Ruby on Rails. (Aside: an interesting Tyler comment from 2005.) It was far busier than I had thought it would be.
The Toronto Rails crowd are a friendly group of people. I ended up chatting with a couple people from Unspace, a couple people from Kaboose, a fellow from FreshBooks, and finally Rishi’s friend Constantine (it was strange seeing him there). If you are even remotely interested in Ruby on Rails is probably worth coming out to the Pubnite. It’s a very informal and relaxed environment. It’s easy to pop into conversations. When you stop to consider that the Ruby on Rails Pubnite caters to the geek crowd, this is a pretty amazing feat.
The whole experience makes me want to learn Rails.
[4] Restaurants and Bars | Technology
11 October 2007, early morning
Homer: Eh, what do you mean by `suggested donation’?
Clerk: Pay any amount you wish, sir.
Homer: And uh, what if I wish to pay … zero?
Clerk: That is up to you.
Homer: Ooh, so it’s up to me, is it?
Clerk: Yes.
Homer: I see. And you think that people are going to pay you $4.50 even though they don’t have to? Just out of the goodness of their… [laughs] Well, anything you say! Good luck, lady, you’re gonna need it!
I’m listening to Radiohead’s new album as I type this. This is the first of their albums I’ve bought.
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[5] Music | Technology
25 September 2007, early morning
I’m listening to John Gruber and Dan Benjamin ramble on about getting their wisdom teeth out. It’s time for a rambling-ass Shima and Ram podcast.
cue intro music
Ram: So last night I cleaned the bathroom.
Shima: Oh yeah, you totally did.
R: We need more of that powered bleach cleaner stuff.
S: I think you can buy it at food basics. Maybe are listeners can recommend some places. Listeners, you can email us your bleach suggestions at rambling@funkaoshi.com
R: That powered bleach really makes my hands feel weird. I should use gloves.
S: You don’t use gloves? Ram!
R: Yeah, you know how it is. Gloves get all wet and gross on the inside. Or maybe that’s all in my head.
S: Ram!
R: Lets take some viewer mail. Dave writes, “How long can you too ramble on about nothing?” Well Dave, pretty damn long i’d say.
S: I gave cut eye to the men standing in front of Club Paradise last night.
R: You love doing that, eh?
S: Yes. It’s the only way they’ll learn.
R: Its true.
and 45 minutes later cue outro music
Shima seems to find all the cool podcasts. I don’t have so much luck. The Talk Show isn’t as bad as I make it sound. It’s very much like morning radio. I also like how the show just starts with them talking: no annoying lead-in music is a big plus. It’s just too all over the place for my liking. And episode 10 is an hour long? Come on dudes. (Update: Actually, now 40 minutes in, I suppose it is strangely engaging.)
[4] Technology