“I think I’m just getting better at knowing my abilities. Like, I don’t know how long it takes to cook a turkey, but I know exactly how long it takes me to set fire to the kitchen.”

— The Bloggess

I want some of these...


After a visit to the Cactus Garden at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory, this is one of the plants I want to have growing in my yard. I don’t know what it is, or how moisture-tolerant it is, but wouldn’t a front yard full of these make for a wonderful Halloween trick-or-treat experience?

Mystery plant from the Ethel M Chocolate Factory Cactus Garden

Sadly, the “factory tour” doesn’t necessarily include having the factory be operational; it appears that it’s currently a Monday through Thursday thing, so if you see it advertised as part of a Hoover Dam or Lake Mead package, understand that you may just see a shut-down food line, without oompa-loompas or chocolate rivers. Go anyway, if you have any interest in cacti or special prices on chocolates.

(the other must-have from the garden is what I can only refer to as a “balloon-animal cactus”)

iPad for Education? Not!


A while back, I sent my mother a link to Scratch, an educational programming environment for children. She’s one of the relatively few PhDs in the education field who really goes out and teaches children, so I knew she’d be interested. So were her kids; they love it, and they’re learning a lot more than just how to write programs.

Naturally, someone released an iPhone/iPad app to allow a user to run their Scratch programs. The response from the MIT folks who run Scratch was “hey, check this out”. That was early March. Yesterday, as part of their new policy outlawing all third-party development tools, Apple removed it from the app store.

Nice work, Steve; way to throw out a dozen babies with the (Adobe CS5-flavored) bath water. If you were trying to improve the quality of apps in the store, oh, who am I kidding, we both know that’s a bullshit rationalization. Gruber bought it, and preened when you made him think he was a penetrating analyst for saying so, but it ain’t so. The app store is flooded with crap, and is such a poor shopping experience that customers are forced to wade neck-deep into the sewers to find the tiny handful of useful apps (this is what Gruber calls “the killer app” for the iPad; no doubt he also thinks dumpster-diving would be a great first date).

It’s about control. About forcing people to do things The Steve Way. With Flash CS5, tens of thousands of Windows-based developers would have been able to write iPhone and iPad apps, and Steve would rather require the price of development to include the price of a Mac. Apple is, as we’re often reminded, first and foremost a hardware company. The change was timed to fuck Adobe’s major release, but that was just a bonus.

Big rock, little flower


Head-sized rock in Grand Canyon

Dodd-ering Fool


Senator Chris Dodd (D-Corrupt) has proposed a 120-day waiting period on investing in brand-new startup companies. This is not an April Fool’s joke.

iPad Lust: C-ko must be mine!


[Update: Official iPad app list (iTunes link)]

I’ve been very skeptical about the iPad. Even if you ignored Apple’s legendary “never buy a 1.0” problem with new hardware and software, there was a very serious problem that Steve Jobs and his famous Reality Distortion Field failed to answer at the announcement, or any time since: what’s it good for?

Shiny. Sexy. Big iPod Touch. Horribly mis-managed —and micro-managed— app store. Extremely closed content model. Out of the box, there’s really nothing to do with it except show off your disposable income in a time of high unemployment and rising taxes. And all those eager app-store developers (or, more precisely, the ones who remain eager after the real pros got sick of Apple’s capricious policies and gave up) specialize in pretty, shallow, toy software. Great for an iPhone that fits in your pocket, but they’re not going to sell a 1.5-pound battery-powered cookbook with a high-gloss screen.

Today, Appaddvice has a list of third-party software that will be available at launch, scraped from Apple’s pre-release web site. And now I have to buy one, because their list includes some real killer apps.

more...

Amazon Recommends... therapy


These may be my favorite oddball Amazon recommendations ever:

Because I bought Slow Cooking Curry & Spice Dishes, Amazon recommends
The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Move Through Depression & Create a Life Worth Living
Because I own Better Homes and Gardens Complete Step-By-Step Cookbook, Amazon recommends
Principles of Neural Science
Amazon Recommends...

Solution: don't let the dumbasses graduate


Problem: a few students at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, are upset that the date on the school’s diplomas is written as In the Year of Our Lord…. Seriously.

Refund their money and send them back to grade school; I don’t think a college has any courses remedial enough for this crew.

Context matters


"You strap your Prosthetic Leg to your back and head out for some adventure."

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”