Solipsism Gradient

Messages from the future: iPhone unboxed. Also, from an idea of Peter Hirshberg‘s, Doc Searls wrote a news report from MacWorld 2008:

Apple introduces one-button iPhone Shuffle

The vast and adoring audience at Steve Jobs’ annual Macworld performance heaved a sigh of relief when the Apple CEO announced the radically minimal new iPhone Shuffle. The company’s first sub-$100 iPhone extends the iPhone line both a downprice and a downscale direction, beyond the $200 candy-bar-sized iPhone Nano, introduced last September.

…

When pressed, the iPhone Shuffle dials a random number from its phone book.

“Our research showed that people don’t care who they call as much as they care about being on the phone,” said Jobs. “We also found that most cell phone users hate routine, and prefer to be surprised. That’s just as true for people answering calls as it is for people making them. It’s much more liberating, and far more social, to call people at random than it is to call them deliberately.”

Hilarious.

This post intentionally left blank. Fnord.

So, there I was in my trusty BBEdit (thanks Rich!) twiddling HTML code for a friend’s website, trying to get stuff aligned “just so”, checking out the CSS, cleaning up some redundant markup – and of course reloading the browser after every change to be absolutely sure it worked. My friend, who knows how to operate her Mac but is otherwise non-technical, watched this with astonishment… after we were finished (took most of an evening) she exclaimed, in German, “Das ist ja zum Mäusemelken!”

I burst out laughing at this colloquial expression I hadn’t encountered before, and which literally means “that’s for milking mice!”, but actually is used in the sense of “that’s extremely exasperating!”. Or so Google tells me. However, in the sense of twiddling with HTML code – or Objective-C code for that matter – it struck me that it can be taken literally. To quote Tom Digby’s “Little Tiny Eyes” (found via Tim Bray):

“OH YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY EYES FOR READING LITTLE TEENY PRINT

LIKE YOU NEED LITTLE TEENY HANDS FOR MILKING MICE.”

Yep, you have to position those little teeny hands just so and be extremely patient because it’ll take a long time to do it right and get enough… and it takes a very peculiar and determined kind of person to sit there N hours per day, day in and day out, just twiddling away at the little bits to get everything running “just so”.

And that is why my main page has the subtitle “finely crafted software for the Macintosh”. Hm. Should I change this to “Digital Mice Milking” or something? But I suppose that, just because I put this title on this post, that Google will already put me somewhere on its mousemilking results, forever after confusing hapless NIH researchers. But then, that’s the price of fame…

Maybe of the month. This is from Tricks of the Trade, by Matthew Baldwin (aka the Defective Yeti), my emphasis added:

Every year there seems to be a technical whatsit that management recognizes as the sexy-cool new thing but doesn’t really understand. This year, for instance, a programmer can always tack the phrase “and I’m thinking of incorporating some XML functionality” onto a project summary to explain why he’l need an extra week, account for a missed deadline, or impress a superior. In this respect, the gap between software engineers and birthday clowns is almost negligible.

Worth a read.

camilotelles wrote:

funny

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/809.html

Thanks, Camilo, I was about to link to that myself…

Posted by camilotelles:
funny

http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/809.html

Here’s a roundup…

…see also Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes. Personally, I think the BBC’s Spaghetti Harvest is unbeatable.

Update: Chuq von Rospach reveals the truth about the RDF.

OMG.

Today’s some sort of lucky day for me. Eight (!!) e-mails came in, telling me that:

The result of our computer draw (#978) selected your name and email address attached to e-ticket number: 56475600545 188 with Serial number 5368/02 drew the lucky numbers:05 21 23 28 40 48 26( Bonus Ball), which subsequently won you the lottery in the 2nd category i.e. match 5 plus bonus.

You have therefore been approved to claim a total sum of £2,500,000(Two Million Five Hundred Thousand Pounds Sterling) in cash credited to file KTU/9023118308/03.

This is from a total cash prize of £10,000,000 shared amongst the first Four (4) lucky winners in this category i.e. Match 5 plus bonus.

Now I’m singling out this particular one, as beyond displaying the usual imbecilities implied in its construction and deployment, this particular imbecile also put hundreds of addresses explicitly visible in the “To:” header.