Man. I really used to be a whole lot more social than I am now. Really.
Let me just toss this off
You know what would be cool?
It would be cool if there was some direct, intuitive way to share links with nearby laptop users. This need crops up all the time. Here’s a lil user narrative for all my UI homies out there in internet land, yo.
I’m at work, and someone mentions that Amy Winehouse is looking terrible lately, and I Google up a cellie vid of the shantoozie cooking up some rock (what a pity, tut tut) and agree yeah, man she looks terrible but then my friend mocks her shoes or whatever and I’m all there’s no shoes in this pic what are you lookin at and he’s all like there are too it’s over here on this site not that one fool and he IMs it to me or emails it or shouts the URL across the room including the gory dot com slash zero eight four three underscore alphanumeric stone age gibberish so incomprehensibly tolerated in this the twenty-first century of our lord.
Of course, I can’t hear, or I’m on a diff IM network, or my email is on another machine or summat, right? So we never synch up and I never, ever get a chance to viddy the shoes in question.
Pity, really.
So here’s what I would like: the sending user highlights the URL in the address bar of the browser (or any other defined object in the OS, really, such as a file or whatnart). Then the sending user swipes their mouse in my general direction and releases the file, as if they were throwing it at me!
Up pops a message, center screen, alerting me that a nearby user has attempted to send me something (like an IM alert, probably, but with the option to make it force-forgrounded). I can accept or ignore (or even turn off the alerts) and if I accept the object does what it’s supposed to – a URL opens a new browser window, a file opens in the native app, a viral payload executes and sends all my passwords to the great file cabinet in the sky before wiping the boot drive. Everybody wins!
Sending digital items in this fashion would be called ‘tossing off.’ Soon, everyone will be tossing off in the bright and shining future of digital-gesture computer interaction!
Regulator
Cooper’s Law: A person’s ability is inversely proportional to the complexity of their email signature.
Mappity mixity shaZAM
MAPfrappe uses Google Maps to conduct various comparisons.
I had been thinking how physically close we are to Vancouver BC and wondered how the distance from Seattle to Vancouver is by comparison to Northern European distances.
No doot aboot it – it’s closer for us than it is is for Parisians and Londoners.
Corn-fed platters!
A big TYVM to Eric for pointing out Hoosier Vinyl, pickin’ and sharin’ from my home state.
N point oh
Hm, I think I am starting to see some of the pipes I’d like to lay between this blog and other, newer online self-publication and social media services. I’m not quite ready to lay back upon my imperial ottoman and issue forth a series of feature requirements but I might be formulating some online goals for the first time since before we moved.
Vytorin
NYT on the Vytorin fiasco.
Andy's Diner gone?
The Stranger blogs the apparent end of Andy’s Diner, the collection of traincars on 4th Ave S. cobbled together into a bar-diner-locale-experience. Looks like the League might have missed a march. Bummer.
Cold cold heart
We live on a steep hill which reliably ices over in weather such as that we have tonight, and just as reliably, I grow more and more irritated with the helpless sound of spinning wheels and engines burnt out.
My irritation has moved me, this night, to place some random traffic cones abandoned in the neighborhood by a gas-main project active this summer (also to my irritation, due to the construction contractor’s persistent practice of parking their heavy equipment on my muddy front property, foolishly left unlandscaped for fifteen fee to the street by the house’s original constructors).
Stay, I say, not just the fuck off my lawn, but also my very street. Perhaps I’ll save a life or some insurance rate increases, but clearly altruism is not my motivation. It’s more irritation flowering through misanthropy into hatred.
