tezmc's comments

Similar to this, I noticed a pretty crappy thing Google are doing on Youtube on the ipad last night. I did a youtube search and went to tap the first result only to have it replaced with an ad just before I clicked it, taking me through to some ad.

I experimented with this a couple of times, both times I did a search, and about 0.5-1 second after the page loaded the first search result was shifted down and its position taken by an ad link that looked the same as a search result.

Having become hooked on watching the feeds over Christmas I actually have been thinking about going to the next one.

You've probably already seen it, but in case you haven't: her talk at 30C3 was excellent and is worth a watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-2k6TMPMRo

I don't quite know why, but I want that carpet.

Wasn't it similar with Japan in the eighties?

You'd also have to include flyovers and opportunities for refuelling. The route would end up looking like a piece of cooked spaghetti was dropped on the map.

I assume Venezuela could give him a passport or some sort of temporary travel document.

How they're going to actually get him to Venezuela without the plane being forced down and searched is another thing entirely.

If this document is genuine, it's a little ironic that they forgot to include his middle name.

They might mean for launching apps by typing and using auto-completion.

Here's my personal story with Windows 8. I built a PC about a month ago after using macs for several years. I'd heard all the horror stories about Win8 and was going to get Windows 7, but someone recommended that I get 8 instead, saying that it wasn't anywhere near as bad as people were saying.

They were right, it's not, though it does have more of a learning curve than it should.

I missed having a start menu at first, but that went away when I discovered I could easily launch apps or control panels in a similar way to how I did it on the mac. On the mac I used Quicksilver - I'd hit ctrl-space type a few letters of the name and hit enter to launch the app. On windows 8 you can do the same by hitting the windows key, typing a few letters and hitting enter. In addition, I have the applications I use most pinned to the taskbar.

I'd originally planned to install one of the 3rd party start menus, but ended up not needing to.

Thanks for reminding me about them! I ordered a catalogue from them a couple of years ago but never got around to ordering anything. I'll definitely take another look.

I'm not sure I'd say that most commercial seed stock is hybridised. I'm in the UK too and in my experience most varieties you can buy are still the kind where you can harvest seeds and plant again the following year.

That said, I ignore the hybrid F1 varieties too. Mainly because I enjoy harvesting my own seeds and selecting the best (or weirdest mutations) each year that are best adapted to conditions where I live. Hybrids can be pretty expensive too and you generally only get a few seeds.

narcissistic personality disorder?

I had a small remote control toy car when I was a child. One day I got freaked out when I heard voices coming out of it.

It turned out I wasn't going mad, the thing was picking up local CB radio.

Let's face it though, no music quite conjures up the feeling of Geocities like a terrible midi version of a beck song.

Should have included a few "under construction" GIFs too IMO.

That's not really a good analogy. The 'F you, pay me' guy was talking about being assertive and sticking up for yourself in the face of clients who are trying to get you to do work for free/not pay their bills etc. (that's if we're talking about the same person)

A better analogy would be that the OP is more like the client of the 'f you, pay me' guy.

I've never wanted growl on my system, and yet somehow it keeps ending up on there without my seeming to have any say in the matter. At least this has given me the reason to uninstall it yet again.

I already have enough distractions as it is.

I had a similar experience at around the same age. In my case it was Douglas Adam's 1990 documentary for the BBC called Hyperland. All about the Internet and the web before I'd even heard of such things. I remember thinking at the time that the stuff in the documentary would never happen in my lifetime.

Luckily it's on Youtube so I can reminisce. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOsPKjbMvxY

For your database example he'd be absolutely right to do so. Removal of inconsistencies is a detail that too many programmers think isn't important, but something as simple as a column name can cause all kinds of consequences down the line.

If it stayed in a programmer further down the line would have to spend a few moments trying to decide if s/he should be using customer_id or cust_id, might have to go into the database to double-check, might have to write additional code to handle special case tables with cust_id, all of which requires additional testing and adds to the amount of cruft code that needs to be maintained, whereas they could have just written generic code to consistently use customer_id in all cases.

It's like some sort of code butterfly effect.

Of course, if it was a manager who called me on Sunday who was incompetent or who had poor taste in visual or code design... well... then it would be a different story.

The design is ok, but I don't like the way they've broken usability, standards and everything else.

I had hoped people would have learned from the Gawker disaster that requiring javascript to be able to see any content at all is a bad idea. I use the NoScript plugin in firefox and all I got was a blank screen at first.

The other commenters said most of it already but here's what I do. I follow multiple headline accounts (BBC, Sky, Al Jazeera, Reuters etc), those tweets usually have a headline and a link to the article if I want to read the rest.

I follow around 100 accounts at any one time, and frequently prune the list so it doesn't get to busy or full of stuff I'm no longer interested in.

I also follow specific journalists, politicians, science and tech people who also often link to things they're reading which are useful background for what's going on.

By far the most useful thing is creating custom columns in tweetdeck for search terms. Think of it like this: rather than subscribing to an RSS feed for a site and hoping they post stuff I'm interested in, it's more like automatically generating a news feed on any subject you're interested in. I have a bunch of saved searches on all kinds of subjects, some of them may only get one or two tweets a week, but it keeps me up to date.

Another benefit to using searches is that it's a good way to discover people who are consistently tweeting interesting stuff so you can follow them. Without the search I would never have heard of or thought of following some of the people I do.