what's iphone'n':
Man, I love The Macalope. The way he and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber (I still think they’re the same person) tear down the jackasses of the PC blogosphere is just exquisite. In a world where taking shots at Apple just to exasperate the Mac community, gain attention on Digg and get people to check out your article because you’re a hack, or worse, John C. Dvorak, and can’t gain attention any other way, the Macalope is doing more than tow the Apple line, he and Gruber are fighting The Monster The Blogosphere Hath Spawned.
Since corporate media companies have mined the phenomenon known as blogging to the point of death, “journalists” has become a twentieth century notion. You gotta be a blogger to have cred and get read… cool, did I just make up a catchy phrase? Bloggers were known for their on the spot writing and thus became the next best thing to being at the moment. Books are slow, magazines are monthly or weekly at best, but blogs, oh man, so instant. How can you go wrong with blogs? Why read anything else?
Dude, that was so five minutes ago. Hit “refresh” on your browser… see, it literally was so five minutes ago.
Another thing that was mined from blogs was their IMHO-ness. Bloggers opined about their lunch, the movie they saw last night and how they’re battling with their cell phone carrier to get some charges reversed. “This is giving me a headache, I hate it, they suck.” No fact-checking necessary to hit “submit” on that Blogspot page. Your opinion is now out there.
Rats can fit through the smallest of spaces
Fuck journalism and all that baggage, I’m gonna be a blogger and write the next Great American Shit Pile. I’m gonna work for a huge media corporation but hide under the title of blogger and write yellow journalism. The pissiest shade of yellow, in fact!
So I guess it doesn’t really surprise me that Gruber and the Macalope seemed to have increased their take-downs of jackasses in the past few months. And they’re doing it with well thought out writing, logic, and analysis. Ironically, they’ve kinda reversed gears and are defeating the hacks out there with the one thing corporate, quota-based bloggers don’t have: time.
And that’s why you should read Modicum of Modernity – I’m not paid AND I’m a shitty writer. Best o’ both.
Wii both down, y’all
The new Wii comercial has aired and is now on YouTube. Watch it here. I pity YouTube’s bandwidth bills this month.
More fun than the Price Is Right
I’m really enjoying this Mac Heist shareware promoting adventure. It’s full of fictional emails sent to fictional Apple employees that lead to fictional websites with fictional product shots and DMGs. It’s amazing how much detail the people at Mac Heist have put into this scavenger hunt-like game. Fictional personal websites with pictures of family members. Hilarious, albeit Mac nerd-centric, forum posts in the fictional internal website for Apple (like the fake post from Phil Schiller stating he lost his iPod nano somewhere and if anyone sees it, let him know.). Also in the fictional internal Apple website is the Employee Handbook with a rule that states, “All members of Jonathan Ives design team must drive Audi TT’s” playing around with that ‘fancy designer’ stereotype.
There will be multiple heists/puzzles for a few weeks and the loot is free software donated by small developers. I’ll admit the first load of ‘cash’ was not of much use to me, but a high school or college student should appreciate them (3 software items in one heist reward!).
They try to play up the whole clandestine angle, but I think you can get a Mac Heist account with little effort. I got mine while reading a post on TUAW and I think you might even be able to just sign up on the MacHeist website. Once inside, the forums can help you if you get stuck, but don’t spoil the fun for yourself.
I guess registered members get 7 invites to hand out, so I can send out those too. Lemme know.
Roger that, Mission Control, we have no date for tonight. I repeat: we have no date for tonight. Patch me into Guild Wars, over.
Some dudes point in front of Vista banner
Well I think this shows what Microsoft thinks of the home consumer. ‘Meh, we’ll get to you when we get a chance.’ Apple LOVES the home consumer, they want to suck your BALLSes they love you so much! Windows Vista is STILL coming out in 2007, it’s the corporate edition (and Office 2007) that’s being released on November 30th. The corporations are more important than you, Joe Living Room.
The great people volunteering their time over at Textpattern have released an update. There are some admin-side interface changes and added flexibility. One thing I’m lovin’ right now is the ability to see your images in a ‘recently added’ type of arrangement. Often when I’m writing a post with a picture, I’ll upload the picture at that moment. After uploading the picture I used to have to hunt it down in the images area to retrieve the Textile code, but now my recently uploaded image is the first one up top. Now, if only they could add some sort of ‘use recently uploaded image’ function to the Write tab, we’d be in business!
It’s still a great improvement and worth the two minutes to update your installation.
