Very good thing to keep in mind as you see those media clips of people (presumably those who already are insured) speaking out against health care reform:
I’m pretty sick of hearing rich-ass white people complain about health care reform leaving them out to die. As fucking if.
It’s not a roadmap but it’s great insight into Cultured Code:
Believe it or not, we have been working on over-the-air sync since the beginning of this year. In the meantime, our goal changed from “something that works” check out our competition if you want to know what we mean by that to “a really sweet solution”. The tough challenge here is to develop a highly performance-oriented solution that works for everybody. In particular, we wanted it to work for Mac and iPhone users alike, without requiring a MobileMe account or any WebDAV disk for that matter.
The whole issue is indeed complex and interesting enough to warrant its own blog post, but suffice it here to say that we are well under way to providing the above-mentioned “really sweet solution”
This is great news to me and is the key reason why I recently switched from The Hit List back to Things. Ultimately I trust that the people behind Things will continue to advance the app at a pace and in a way that I will be happy with. My only gripe with Things is that it doesn’t support nested items, but in the scheme of things that’s a fairly small issue.
Alex Payne on the inevitable urge to find better technology:
It’s about computer usage as a creative act, something that becomes harder and harder to experience the more proficient one gets with a computer.
Geeks who go through the same thing every year – and I know you’re out there – understand what I’m describing. The slickness of the Apple platform is at once brilliant and constricting, a sports car that even a veteran mechanic wouldn’t dare pop the hood of. It gives one the feeling that there’s nothing left to do because Apple has done it all. Most days, that’s exactly what I want, so I can focus on doing what Apple doesn’t. During Switching Season, though, I can’t escape wanting to do it all myself.
Searching for openness, simplicity, and a hackable sense of experimentation in the modern personal computing landscape is a fruitless endeavor, or at least one incompatible with also having a tool to get real work done.
Andrew Sullivan will be taking the rest of August off and writes:
Here’s my dream: Ill read books – books on paper, books I have been wanting to read or re-read for a long time and have been unable to absorb because of constant daily bloggery; and Ill sleep and nap; and spend time with my neglected husband and beagles; and try to get a little more perspective on the last couple of years. The spiritual life also suffers from living so much in the world so constantly. A little emptiness is what I yearn for.
I say good for him. Sometimes I think it’d be good for everyone to take a month off the grid during the year; I think that it’d provide a better perspective on what you actually need the internet for.
As I’ve mentioned before I’ve been using Shaun Inman’s Fever for a while now as my sole RSS reader. The more I use it the more I come to love it and in the last few days I’ve realized why: it does exactly what I want it to and no more.
In my case I want to use my RSS reader for one thing: reading. This is why I felt that it was worth $30 to move away from Google Reader.
As Google has developed Reader over the past years and months I’ve felt that they’ve strayed from the original idea of providing a lightweight and fast way to stay on top of the news that’s important to you. If I want to share an article, save it for later, email it to a friend, or “like” it I have my own ways of doing that and don’t want those features to infringe upon the primary purpose of my RSS reader.
The fact that I was so willing to drop $30 on a product that I couldn’t even use a demo of is a testament to my faith in Shaun Inman as well as my simple frustration with Google. It also got me thinking about news in general and the experiences that most (if not all) major news organizations provide.
The Daily Kos goes after Politico for the way that it handled Palin’s claim over the health care plan:
Seriously? Seriously?
Yes, seriously. It falls to Politico to take a story about a national figure making up wholesale a crooked and ridiculous story about how Democratic “Death Panels” are coming after her disabled child if we dare reform healthcare, and turn it into an absolutely straight news story.Well done, Politico. Absolutely masterful. I couldnt come up with a more embarrassing example of the national political media as lazy, stupid, worse-than-useless prop if I tried.
As the Daily Kos points out it should not be too much to ask for an institution like Politico to point out how blatantly ignorant and idiotic Palin’s statement is. Instead of doing so though they simply quote her and lend a ounce of credibility to her claim.
A reader of Andrew Sullivan’s writes:
How did [Howard Stern] go from a must-hear personality who was constantly in the news for his antics or his outrageousness to a “whatever happened to?” has been? Simply, he was put behind a pay wall. Oprah has her own channel, but I’ve never heard it mentioned. If the King of All Media and a woman who has enough influence to swing a national election can’t get people to pay, why on earth does Murdoch think he can?
A good point for sure.
I’ve never been a fan of Kid Rock but this is just depressing:
It’s gay. If one more person asks me if I have a Twitter, I’m going to tell them, ‘Twitter this shit, motherfucker. I don’t have anything to say, and what I have to say is not that relevant. Anything that is relevant, I’m going to bottle it up and then squeeze it onto a record somewhere.’
What ever happened to just saying, “No, I don’t use it because I don’t have a use for it”?
From a post discussing the disconnect between talking about solutions and addressing the underlying problem:
The difficult conversation about the problem is far more useful than the endless effort on solutions.
An interesting observation from the most recent articles from A List Apart:
Client sites are children you give to adoptive parents to raise. When it’s your own site, you have only yourself to take the credit or the blame for how things work out. You have the luxury to find and fix and agonize and obsess, but it’s also hard to know when to stop. I knew I’d achieved my personal goal for the redesign when another designer said that it didn’t feel like a complete departure from my old design, but a natural maturation and evolution.
That sort of natural evolution and maturation is what I’m trying to do this summer for the Whitman Pioneer. We’ll see how it ends up.