Usually, on-board clocks for PCs are not known for their long-term ability to stay correct. So I was surprised and impressed when I plugged in my old P4, that’s been sitting in a closet for over a year, if not two, to find him only 3 minutes off from reality.
In another year or so, it should be done applying all the Windows updates that have been put out since he last went to sleep.
Even on Facebook, it would seem that the truism, “If I bleeds, it leads” holds for posts as well as traditional media. At least if one judges response to my two posts this weekend. The post about possibly breaking my toe got lots of responses. The post about winning a TV got only one ‘congratulations’.
Interesting.
Call me unobservant. Just this morning I noticed that with the little mini-views of program-windows in the win7 toolbar, iTunes and Rhapsody both have little mini controls for previous/next/pause, so you can interact without having to give full focus. Skype has controls for changing your away status. I wonder what other programs support the feature.
After months of silence from most of the projects I backed, suddenly several of them are shipping out rewards, in time for Christmas. I got my cool Pogo bunny USB stick and T-shirt just the other day, the T-shirt, CD and poster from Haley Harris and Ben Nippes, and woke this morning to a shipping notice from the pack light peeps.
We could soon break 50% on the percentage of projects actually seen through to completion =)
You’d think the people who work at Real Networks would treat the only division that actually has a future, Rhapsody, with a little respect. They are the only part of the company that has any sort of potential for revenue and profit these days. And yet they managed to release an update that completely breaks the Rhapsody client. That means they literally didn’t do a single smoke test on the product before release. Talk about a massive display of incompetence. If I worked in QA at Real networks, I’d be polishing my resume, because I would know I deserve to be fired. I mean for crimmeny’s sake, you just days ago announced your big acquisition and transition for all the Napster people, and you break your own product during that critical getting-to-know-the-new-guys phase. You might as well have poured all the money you spent on the Best Buy customers down the drain for all the goodwill you’ve wasted.
Someone left a bunch of 5-hour energy drinks and a mini-flyer in our kitchenette area at work.
I once met a guy, named ‘Step’ Buddy Anderson. A retired jazz man, he’d made a book that explained what he called “The Digital Clock Game”, a book filled with a beat poetic vision of life as a game, where anytime you looked at a digital clock, you ‘got’ something. I can’t remember any of the phrases he assigned for different times, so this example is just my own made up one, “10:10 it’s that time again, 20:20 you know it’s dark honey, 12:34 see who’s at the door”. They were cute, and he talked about how you should always just be ready to make up your own phrase for any time that you caught, nor limit yourself to his suggestions for times he had covered. But key in the book was the point that you weren’t supposed to cheat at the game; you had to catch a time purely by accident, not by sitting at a clock waiting for it to occur.
And so it is with pride that I can say I managed to ‘catch’ 11:11 on 11/11/2011, in my kitchen, on the microwave.
this one’s for you Step Buddy.
Out of the 7 musical projects I’ve sponsored on Kickstarter so far, only one has delivered everything they were supposed to, and recorded their cover song. One is in jail, awaiting deportation, so who knows where that project is going. Another responded to my first email and says they’ll have my stuff in a month or two. One responded within hours of my posting something to the project page, having never responded to emails, and sent me a picture of the package about to go into the mail this morning. A third, though not responding directly to my query, has posted another update which, while setting the stage for more disappointment (the artist apparently never had plans to follow through on the physical discs unless he got a regular label to sponsor him, grar), claims that someday he will. One artist has made no response at all, and seems to be actively ignoring kickstarter now, since she is posting to her facebook and website.
The 3 projects that are for physical goods seem to be progressing more reliably, if status updates are to be believed, though one is getting into the danger zone of non-communication (2 weeks since “shipping soon!”).
The software project isn’t saying much, but their expected lead time is a bit longer.
In the end, we shall see. I certainly won’t be sponsoring anything more, until Kickstarter come up with some way of escrowing the funds to ensure people get what they paid for.
Back in the days of President Clinton, when you wrote him an email, he’d send you back a physical form letter addressing your topic. When GWB took office, they stopped answering, or probably even reading them. When Obama took office, I hoped there’d be a return to the responsive, even if just in surface actions, government.
Just now, I got an email from Obama, thanking me writing. Either his response team is really slow, like months and months after the letter slow, or he’s sent out this email to every person whoever emailed something, out of some sort of OWS reaction? I dunno.
Or somebody hit the bulk-resend button on everyone who sent him emails about Egypt, back in April.
The chair massage woman at work just told me my face looks all swollen on one side, but when I look in the mirror, I don’t notice anything. I would feel kinda weird going around to people at work and asking if I look funny today. Like, do I amuse you funny or about to die from alien invasion funny?
