“No You Girls” by Franz Ferdinand rubs me the wrong way lyrically. The tune is awesome; I just don’t think the lyrics match the awesomeness. I think it has something to do with the way that the syllables in the lyrics don’t match the tone and feel of the song… like “Kiss me”. You have the percussive ‘k’ sound which works, but the rest of the vocal sounds are all soft and subdued. The percussiveness in the rest of the phrases just doesn’t match what’s going on with the rhythm of the song and it just irritates me to no end. If someone came up with better ones, I’d post a recording of me singing them at a karaoke bar.
Getting stuck behind a Toyota Prius is about the worst thing that can happen to you on a commute. It just seems like no matter what you do, they’re in the carpool late driving either at or 5 mph below the speed limit for no good god damn reason. I think I’ve figured it out why with some help from a friend.
The Prius has a MPG indicator on the instrument panel and it’s very very prominent. I’m guessing that most drivers play the “get the best gas mileage” game during their commute (hence the slow and steady). I think as more vehicles incorporate this “economy” feature, you’ll see the traffic start slowing in your local highways. I’m inclined to think this is a bad thing (especially for people driving in the carpool lanes during off-hours) because other drivers are incredibly intolerant of the slow pokes and will erratically weave in and out of traffic changing lanes at least two or three times in order to work their way around these penny pinching tree huggers. I used to think that it was because the Prius just couldn’t accelerate for crap until a friend of mine got one for a rental and we tested that theory. The Prius (2nd gen) accelerates just fine, it’s just the grinch at the steering wheel who is holding back.
A plea to auto manufacturers: either kill this feature or make it really difficult to look at while driving; it’s a hazard to the rest of us.
If you’re on Facebook and receive email notifications you may notice that you can now reply to emails to add to the comments on the posts you either like or have already commented on. After thinking about this a bit more, I noticed it’s going to be interesting when the Gmail folks go on vacation and setup vacation reminders. I wonder if the Facebook comment system is going to automatically filter out those messages or let them fly. It seems like this is going to be an opportunity for spammers to infiltrate publicly visible profiles and really abuse the Facebook comments section. Have you noticed this happening yet?
I was a huge fan of Macromedia before Adobe acquired the company and disclaimer: I was an investor up until right after the acquisition was announced. It was a really smart move by Adobe to snap up Macromedia, but since the addition of (relatively good) video support in Flash 7 I feel the software product has gone downhill.
Here’s why:
- HTML 5 will kill the need for Flash to play video on the web. All that we need now is browsers that support HTML 5
- Flash 10 is BLOATED! Why do I need 3D object manipulation code in my video player? I don’t. If I did I would expect support for it to be available as a plug-in… and then my plug-in would need a plug-in and that’s just ridiculous.
- It is the web browser’s duty to display web content. Video is a major part of the web now and has been for quite some time. It’s about time that this feature be moved to the browser.
- I can play 720p HD video movie trailer downloads, but Flash 10 constantly trips up on my machine with Hulu’s 480p streams which are way more compressed than DVD video. I have to exit full screen mode in order for the frame buffer to catch back up. It’s annoying when you can’t watch an episode of television without having to switch from full-screen to windowed mode (to top that, when you go to the next video in continuous play and exit full screen mode, it forces Hulu to refresh the page you’re on and that displays the video’s intro screen again to rebuffer your show… but that’s another annoyance altogether). This frequently happens when there’s a lot of action on the screen (I’m guessing it’s a keyframe issue somewhere in Flash or the codec that Flash uses on my system).
- Flash grabs all keyboard input when it is in focus: I have hated this for years and I’m really bitter about it. This is a feature to make sure that when you’re playing a game and your mouse leaves the game window (presumably you bump it while in the heat of button mashing your keyboard) and you get frustrated because the game you’re playing stops responding to your input. This “feature” should not be on by default. It should be a programmatic option for games.
- ActionScript is a sorry excuse for a programming language. This is probably the reason why front-end web developers (those who write JavaScript, HTML and CSS code) get stuck with writing or maintaining ActionScript code. Blech! There are open-source implementations of the Java API… why not use one of those? Oh wait, that’s because Java FX is already gunning for Flash as an alternative (that actually supports the finer features like 3D rendering). Disclaimer: I seriously looked at ActionScript when version 1.0 was released and I glanced at version 2.0, but I still have yet to evaluate 3.0 so maybe things changed and I’m being harsh in my disdain.
- Flash can store tracking data much like cookies do, however, cookies are a well-defined web standard and the Flash cowboys do whatever the hell they want with it (within some reason so Flash components on different pages can’t get at each other’s data), but it’s still potentially a very large security hole.
- Flash is way to prolific of a plug-in on the web. On one hand, way to go Macromedia! You killed it! On the other hand: it’s time to make it a web standard so one company doesn’t hold us all hostage with crappy software.
Now with that said, I need to say that the browser implementers sure as hell better get video playback right. I don’t know if I trust the people who write browser software to write video playback software. If Google Chrome had an ad-blocking plug-in that worked as well as Firefox’s Ad Blocker Plus, I would switch instantly, but I’m still clinging to Firefox.
The 500 block of University Avenue in Palo Alto has been recently plagued by theft and vandalism. Last night vandals sprayed green graffiti on the Wells Fargo Mortgage building, the apartment building next to the bank and tipped over then broke planters across the street at Alain Pinel Real Estate across the street. The night before the Wells Fargo was tagged for the first time and the Apple Store down the street on University Ave had its 2″ thick plate glass windows struck repeatedly with a hammer.
Over the past few days, there have been several break-ins in the Cowper parking garage and early last Sunday morning some ass-hat(s) threw a rock through a window of one of the buildings on the 500 block.
I hope those responsible are caught and assigned many hours of community service… hopefully involving the clean up of their savagery.
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