But then I realized I would rather eat cake. And not just today, but continually. So instead of starting the weight-loss challenge today with the guys, I bought a piece of cake and taunted my buddy Rob with a photo. Love that internet. |
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Man, the hits just keep coming. Yesterday, Erik Zabel admitted to taking EPO in the 90's, although he says he only tried it for a little while before deciding against it due to health risks. Today, Bjarne Riis - the winner of the 1996 Tour de France and current CSC team manager - admitted to taking EPO in the 1996 (Former Tour de France winner Riis admits doping). "My yellow jersey is in box at home, you can come and collect it," said Riis of his 1996 Tour performance. "What matters to me are my memories." Who's next? Ugh. |
I just posted vmstat widget which shows a simple, clean snapshot of current system memory usage on your Mac. Check it out. |
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This week, just before the start of the Giro d'Italia, the drama of the Operation Puerto drug scandal has kicked into gear once again. As ever, we're still awaiting actual proof that anyone specific did anything specific. Although, for a change, several riders are confessing their involvement. Sadly, many other riders are being dragged along, guilty or not, while this doping affair plods along at a retardedly slow pace. It was one year ago that the drama began. New t-shirt slogan, perhaps? Be a professional cyclist today Ugh. So anyway. I was saying something. Oh right, the latest round of casualties...
After a year of this silly, drawn-out drama, I officially care less about cycling and the Grand Tours, and find I'm only moderately interested in catching up on the latest drug scandal details. At the end of the day, I really don't give a shit if any of the pros are taking drugs. Seriously. They all have access to the same stuff, the same fancy doctors, the same medical advantages - it's a level playing field. Just let them race and make it fun again. Most of the stuff the organizations and teams are trying to do against doping isn't working, because the cheaters can (and do) easily stay several steps ahead. |
Dear MPAA and movie production companies, I recently found an amusing take on the MPAA secret HD-DVD encryption processing key mess. At heart is the MPAA's claim that a single number is legally protected by the DMCA. Nobody can know about it, talk about it, copy it, store it, repeat it, etc. Anything that messes with their number is off limits. Hmm. If that's true (please suspend reality and go along with it), then it is also legally protected for me to have my own special number that's protected by the DMCA, too, and www.freedom-to-tinker.com helped me out. Here's my super-secret, don't-copy-this-or-I'll-SUE-YOU number: D4 C1 96 CA 0F 69 E5 42 4D 26 B8 2A E9 59 F9 A7 So www.freedom-to-tinker.com will generate a new number, just for you, and then use that number to encrypt a copyrighted haiku. So what? By encrypting that haiku, your number is then considered a circumvention device capable of decrypting the haiku without your permission. But then immediately, the site owner gives all rights to you to decrypt the haiku. That means the DMCA should now make it illegal for anyone to mess with, copy, publish, etc. your special number. Stupid, isn't it? The whole situation is made even more ridiculous when you look at the landscape of cinema today: movie viewership isn't down because of theft or piracy, it's down because most movies suck. This nonsense with the MPAA shutting down websites (for printing their secret number) is just silly, and it's only fanning the flames. Sites like 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com (whoa! could that be the MPAA's super-secret number? as a website name?!) are popping up with huge lists of other sites, all of them are determined to print that number, just to be a thorn in the MPAA's butt. (Please, just try making movies that do not suck....) |
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Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) is boldly claiming that Apple's new iPhone will be a failure (Microsoft's Ballmer having a 'great time'). Wow. If anyone out there actually believes that, here's your wake-up call: Ballmer is nuts. Microsoft's search, MSN, barely squeakes out 10% of overall search traffic (way behind Google and Yahoo), yet somehow Ballmer claims "Microsoft has the most visitors". Hmm... could this be related to www.msn.com set as default start page for most copies of Internet Explorer? And there are millions of Windows users out there who don't how to change the start page? I'm willing to bet the answer is yes. But "default start page" is not "search user". I think what Ballmer meant to say was, "lots of people automatically land on MSN, but for every 10 of those people, 9 of them don't use it and instead go out of their way to use either Google or Yahoo." Microsoft's Zune music player is waaaaaaay behind the iPod (and other music players) in sales, which is understandable because the Zune is an ugly brown hunk of crap with dumb features. The Zune is trying really, really hard to sell 1 million units (not in any specific period of time, just hit the 1 million mark at some point). Meanwhile, Apple sells something like 20 million iPods every quarter. Microsoft's Xbox 360 group lost $315 million in one fiscal quarter. I guess selling the consoles below your production cost isn't such a great idea after all. Ouch. And Microsoft's newest operating system - Windows Vista - is selling so poorly that Dell recently began offering new laptops to customers with Windows XP installed... not Vista. But Windows XP is five years old. Did I leave anything out? I guess I could pick on Microsoft's new Office suite with the "ribbon" that seems to have confused more users than it's helped (there are lots of hacks out there to make your new Office suite look & feel like the old office suite - that is, without the ribbon). Oh right, I almost forgot the constant sharp decrease in Internet Explorer usage. Millions of people are using Firefox, and more are ditching Microsoft's crap browser for something better every single day. Meanwhile, Ballmer swears the iPhone will fail. Given the above examples (certainly there are more), it seems pretty clear that Microsoft isn't a great example of success. In fact, most of what they're doing these days seems pretty terrible. Therefore, we've established that Ballmer's opinions about the iPhone are useless, because he's in charge of a company that's rapidly losing ground on all fronts. Also, Cingular has gauged iPhone interest from ~2 million potential buyers. Hardly sounds like it's going to flop. I know more people who are planning to buy an iPhone than those who own (or plan to own) Vista, Zune, or an Xbox 360 - combined. So what the hell is going on with Ballmer? In part, it's his job to get in front of big media and say stupid things that somehow try to make his company look good. For phones, he must stand up and say Windows Mobile is awesome, etc., despite the fact that it's garbage (I know guys who use Windows Mobile-based phones and they suck - missed calls, lost messages, crappy interface, way too hard to use). But beyond that, I suspect the writing is on the wall at Microsoft. It's not the same place it used to be, and surely Ballmer knows this as well as anyone else. Of course, rather than take it like a man, he's acting like a scared little dog. He's like a scared, threatened little dog, backed into a tight corner, and all he can really do is freak out and bite people. Oh, I also like this lame attack on Google's online applications (like spreadsheets): "[Google has] come out with some of the lowest functionality, lowest capability applications of all time. [Laughter]." -- Steve Ballmer This guy is on another freaking planet! It is precisely because Google's spreadsheet application is simple and clean that people love it! Sadly, I own a copy of Excel but I rarely use it, instead choosing simpler, cleaner alternatives like Google Spreadsheets. Most projects at Google demonstrate a firm understanding of the 80/20 rule - that is, 80% of your users are going to use 20% of your features, so find out the 20% that people need and deliver. Everything else is kinda wasting your time. In fact, lots of additional features can hurt you, because with every extra, unwanted feature you add beyond your 20%, you run a serious risk of complicating your software interface so much that users are confused, so then you spend a ton of time+energy trying to build an entirely new interface paradigm like the "ribbon", which it turns out most users don't understand either. Meanwhile 80% of your users are left banging their heads against your awful application trying to use the 20% of the features that they can't find because they're all buried in a sea of useless functionality. Ugh. Dear Steve Ballmer, |