I Kill Spies

In 1978 I remember my dad coming back from his morning jog… in the mornings when I was little he would go out for a run, and occaisionally I would go with him. I would take the small loop and he would take the long one, and we would meet towards the end and run the last part together.

We would bring in the paper, which would usually be delivered while we were out. It occurs to me that back then I was getting up two or three hours before I do now. Hooray for progress!

I hadn’t gone with him this time, and he came back to take a shower, like he always did, waiting for my mother to finish with hers… This morning he had the paper with him, and he was talking to my mother while she was in the shower…

Something was very wrong. My dad was crying. He kept saying things like “they killed the kids,” and “all those people.” We sat down and he told me that the people in Jonestown had been forced to drink poison Kool-Aid… even the kids there. I think that’s my first memory of my father crying.

Piles are an interface concept patented in 1994- you make piles of documents, and piles with more content would appear bigger… so now you could have a cluttered Desktop on your computer as well as in real life!

Although, one thing that would be pretty cool- when an items is in “piles”, you can have something in multiple piles at once, unlike on your real-life desk.

Here’s sort of a ranty article from Ask Tog
Web link of note: Piles demo
(At http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/piles.html)

The studio who is responsible for:

• Ghost In the Shell
• Jin-Roh, a great animated movie about a totalitarian secret society in the Tokyo police
• The new Ghost In the Shell movie, INNOCENCE: Ghost In the Shell
• The TV series Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
• the animation in Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino)

Web link of note: Production IG
(At http://www.productionig.com/)

Warren Ellis’ blog. Pretty great.
Web link of note: Die Puny Humans!
(At http://www.diepunyhumans.com/)

Web link of note: Miss Digital World
(At http://www.missdigitalworld.com/)

Web link of note: The Dark Side of eBay
(At http://www.livejournal.com/community/darksideofebay/)

Web link of note: Comics: Fright Night
(At http://www.frightnight.org/)

Web link of note: Comixpedia
(At http://www.comixpedia.com)

In the 1880s, the Artic was the great unexplored country. Some believed that once past the wall of ice explorers would find a hidden continent with temperate weather.

The Greely Expedition made its way up the coast of what is now Canada, settling in Liberty Bay for a year-long stay… when they couldn’t find any food, they waited to be relieved by a resupply ship the following year. The ship never came, stopped by ice farther down the coast.

A year later (year two) another ship was sent to resupply them- and it sank. As the expedition was down to forty days of rations they decided to make a run south to Cape Sabine… where seven of their 30+ men were rescued eight months later. They survived by eating water fleas, their boots and pants, and each other.

Greely was pretty incompetant. And personally, I would have just shot a few of these fools for incompetance earlier on, before they ate all my food.

This book is really long. If you read it, skim the first third, because not much happens there. All the bickering, starving and cannibalism happens in the last 100 pages.

0399145893

There used to be this software called Netflix Fanatic. It was apparently a client that ran on OS X, which managed your NetFlix queue.
Add, remove, re-order, browse.

But the author’s employer (Apple) didn’t like him giving it away… so now it’s gone. Some of the drama is documented on TidBITS and more on the actual dispute at Think Secret (an Apple rumors site).

So what I’m thinking is: why not develop this thing in XUL (using the Mozilla Application Framework) ? Viva!

Just a thought. Like I need more to do or something.