How to be a New Media Douchebag

The video New Media Douchebags in Plain English was posted back in October, but it’s new to me and might be new to you:

Read on for more…

What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Startup

What They Don’t Tell You About Starting a Startup: “Most of the times when we discuss startups, we only discuss success stories. We just see the end result of entrepreneurs making multi-million dollars. We talk about what a great life that entrepreneur must be living now. We always neglect the other side of entrepreneurs’ life. […]

Are You Sure You Want to Be in San Francisco?

Over at Signal vs. Noise, 37signals’ blog, David Heinemeier Hansson asks Are you sure you want to be in San Francisco?

Read on for more…

After a Month in Vista, This Pretty Much Sums Up My Feelings About Operating Systems

When I moved to my current position as Nerd Wrangler at b5media, I arrived to discover that the computer waiting for me was a Toshiba P200, a 17″ beast of a laptop that I’ve named “The Coffee Table”. This is the first time in about 5 years that I’ve worked with Windows as my primary operating system, and after a month in Vista, my feelings about operating systems are pretty much summarized by the picture below:

More on my experiences in a later post.

[Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.]

Creative Labs: Where No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

When driver incompatibilities with Windows Vista caused Creative Labs’ Audigy series of sound cards to lose some of their functionality, one “Daniel_K” stepped up and wrote some workaround software that restored those missing features. You’d think that this act — essentially crowdsourcing at its best — would be applauded by the fine folks at Creative. You be wrong.

Read on for more about how Creative did not let a good deed go unpunished.

Zero Punctuation’s Review of “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune”

The quick version of the Zero Punctuation review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune: Some very nice visuals, nothing new either gameplay- or plot-wise, and if you’re a white supremacist, you’ll love this game. Watch the full review!

Responses to “Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley and Seattle”

A couple of articles have already appeared in response to Ideas to Steal from Silicon Valley and Seattle. I do a quick review of them in this article. Read on for more…

Silicon Island: Montreal’s High-Tech Community

In today’s Montreal Gazette article, there’s an article titled Silicon Island? that looks at their high-tech community’s grassroots movement. Read on for more…

Zed Shaw’s Writeup of CUSEC 2008

Zed Shaw’s title for his writeup of the CUSEC 2008 conference sums up his opinions: CUSEC 2008 Rocked Hard!…

10 Secrets to Success

Continuing the recent run of lists of career tips, here’s 10 Secrets to Success…

So Where’s Rails on the Hype Cycle Now?

My guess is right about here:

Click here to see a larger version of the graph.

What to Do if You’re Laid Off in the 2008 Recession

If you’re deep in Odd Todd country — that is to say, laid off — Robert Scoble has a list of items that tells you What to Do if You’re Laid Off in the 2008 Recession.

Is Chandler’s Demise Evidence that Dynamic Languages Can’t Scale?

Manageability.org asks the question “Is Chandler’s Demise Evidence that Dynamic Languages Can’t Scale?”. For a quick reply, I’ll quote a Reddit comment: “Even if it was, such a badly-managed project wouldn’t be a good example.” Software projects have failed long before the current dynamic language hoopla — see Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood’s article, The Long, […]

Contender for Most Insane Tech Article of the Year: “Why the OLPC Promotes Terrorism”

If someone’s compiling a list of the most off-the-wall out-of-touch-with-reality tech blogger posts of the year, I want to nominate Robert Graham’s post at Errata Security titled Why the OLPC Promotes Terrorism. It’s so filled with the type of over-the-top pronouncements that one normally sees on extreme right-wing blogs that I had to reread to make sure that it wasn’t parody, and even now I’m not 100% sure. (Next to this article, Zed’s rant sounds rather restrained…)

Gizmodo’s Self-Righteous Claptrap Debunked — By Gizmodo!

In an article defending their actions at CES, Gizmodo editor Brian Lam cited his reporter’s misuse of the TV-B-Gone device as a defiant act of journalistic independence and integrity, vaingloriously calling it “civil disobedience”. However, an October 2004 Gizmodo review of TV-B-Gone does a far better job of explaining the type of person who’d use the device…

Rant Said Zed: I’m Too Sexy for My Rails

(The resemblance between Fred “Right Said Fred” Fairbrass and Zed Shaw — uncanny, isn’t it?)

Inspired by the now-infamous rant by Zed Shaw, I’m changing my presentation topic at Tuesday’s TSOT Ruby/Rails Project Night to “Rant Said Zed: I’m Too Sexy for My Rails (or: Lessons and Challenges from Zed Shaw’s Rant”). If you’re free Tuesday evening, you might want to catch this.

2008 is the “Year of RSS”…for the 5th Year in a Row

I think that “The Year of RSS” is turning into “The Rapture” — always imminent, but never actually coming to pass.

Etiquette Reminder

A quick reminder to my readership: If you’re going to be a jackass in the comments (like “Brian” was in this one), your comment will either not get approved, or — as in Brian’s case — “disemvowelled”. You’re in my virtual living room, and I expect you to behave accordingly.

Windows Vista Annoyances

I just got an announcement from the folks at O’Reilly about their new book, Windows Vista Annoyances. I thought to myself, “Well, that’s good for 500 pages of material”. Then I checked the page count: 664. Heh.

Assrockets and Opportunities (or: Why I Changed Jobs)

Why I Changed Jobs: The Best Guess
A number of people have approached me — both online and in person — and attempted to guess what it was that made me consider leaving my Technical Evangelist job at Tucows, a job that I enjoyed and to which I was well-suited.
The person who came closest, a “long-time […]