Ten Reasons Why

In his Tangled Up In White post, John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes about the “green” revisions to the most recent batch of Apple headphones that serendipitously make them slightly more tangle free. I had to purchase a new set of headphones in September when my original iPhone headphones went from functional to complete disintegration in a period of about 72 hours. When those things fail, they fail. I probably should have done my research and bought some uber-headphones for a couple hundred bucks, but instead I dropped into the AT&T store a block from the office and got a pair of the new Apple headphones (the ones that shipped with the iPhone 3G). I can attest to Gruber’s estimation that they are more “rubbery” than “plasticky,” but that’s not really the point of this post.
The point of this post is whether your headphones are rubbery or plasticky should be irrelevant to the effectiveness of keeping them untangled, because you should be following the One True Way Of Headphone Wrapping. Wrapi-do in Japanese, I believe. Also affectionately known as The Devil Horn Method. All snark aside (momentarily at least), this little hack really has kept my buds tangle-free for years now.
Here’s how it works: Pretend you’re at a Def Leppard concert and make the devil horns with your left hand. (Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean — middle and ring fingers bent and held down by the thumb, index and pinky extended.) Tuck the buds underneath the middle and ring fingers to secure them and use your devil horns as posts around which to loop the cord. (Some people advocate a figure-eight wrap, but I find a simple loop works fine.) Leave a couple inches of cord at the end. Slide the loop off the devil horns, and wrap the remaining cord around the middle of the loops, creating a little bundle. Thread the plug end through the loop opposite the buds and give it a gentle pull to tighten the bundle. This little package now fits neatly in your pocket, is almost entirely tangle proof, and unravels with ease.
There’s no video of true wrapi-do, but here are two that come close. This dude has the right idea, but he has clearly never attended a Def Leppard concert:

On the other hand (haha, get it?), this fellow has nearly perfected the devil horn methodology, although the flailing thumb concern me a bit.
The figure-eight wrap is acceptable, if a bit ostentatious, but he goes off track with that whack tuck move at the end, instead of threading the plug through the loop appropriately. That’s just wrong. You’ll never get to nationals with form like that, bub.
UPDATE: Daring Fireball linked here and also to a perfect example of wrapi-do. This is dead on:

Uncategorized

I was quite impressed with the voter turnout today. This is my sixth year voting in this precinct — and second presidential election, which, in DC, is the only time you see any significant voter turnout since we don’t have Congressional representives/senators who can vote.
Kudos go out to the poll workers at my precinct, who kept the line moving swiftly.

Line for the polling location,
originally uploaded by True_Gritt.

Uncategorized

Colin Powell, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State, during his endorsement of Barack Obama on last weekend’s Meet the Press:

I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

(Full transcript. Comments above on page 2 of the transcript.)
I can accept stupidity among the populace. There will always be angry, scared, bigoted people. I can even accept that some of those angry, scared, bigoted people are powerful enough to wind up in positions of authority in places like the National Review that allow them to spread their angry, scared, bigoted ideas on a national stage.
But what’s really demoralizing to me is that this is the first time I’ve heard a major public figure in American politics raise the appropriate response to the purely idiotic question of whether Barack Obama is a Muslim (or an Arab, since most of the angry, scared bigots don’t understand the difference). The right response is so what if he is?
Bravo, Powell. I wish more public figures had the courage to say that.

Politics

Or not.
Okay, so there really should be question marks, not exclamation points, at the end of that headline, but if you’re trying to start a Mac rumor, you just can’t go with question marks. It’s all about projecting the confidence. ;-)
John Gruber of Daring Fireball notes that Apple had dropped the “Mac” from the name of their operating system. Evidence is this photo of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference 2008 hall, all geared up for next week’s conference. It pretty clearly shows banners that say only “OS X Leopard” and “OS X iPhone” — no “Mac” branding to be found anywhere.
That’s a contrast to the last two WWDCs where all the branding was “Mac OS X Leopard.” You can bet that Apple’s marketing team doesn’t make big glaring mistakes like “Oops, we left out a major part of the brand from all the conference signage,” so it’s a safe bet this is a new branding strategy. The question is why?
The easy and most expedient answer is given by the other banner in the photo, the one for OS X iPhone. Now that OS X is the underpinning for the desktop OS and the mobile OS, calling it Mac OS X is a bit bizarre since, well, the iPhone isn’t a Mac.
However, they could just as easily have left “Mac OS X” as “Mac OS X” and called the iPhone flavor “iPhone OS X” or (better, IMHO) “Mobile OS X.” No real pressing need to drop the Mac from the OS X brand.
The other factoid contributing to my rumor-mongering is the rumor that broke two days ago that Apple will announce OS X 10.6 (code named “Snow Leopard”) at WWDC and that OS X 10.6 will be the first Intel-only release of OS X, i.e. the first version that does not support the now-legacy PowerPC processors.
Dropping the Mac-specific branding from OS X plus announcing the first Intel-only version OS X — seems like things are nicely set up to allow for licensing of OS X to third-party hardware vendors.
OMG, OS X soon available for non-Apple hardware!!!! Extra bonus exclamation points: !!!!!

Apple

Simply brilliant: photoshop the main character out of one of the most insipid and un-funny comic strips and you get Garfield Minus Garfield, a delightfully existential exploration of the mind of a mildly insane man. I’m torn between thinking that it reveals a depth to Garfield’s characterization that I hadn’t previously given the strip credit for and thinking that making the strip better by removing the main character reveals just how crappy Garfield really is.
Now the New York Times has gotten hip to Garfield Minus Garfield

Culture

Blogging this primarily so I don’t forget it: the 50 Best Commercial Parodies. Gems from SNL, In Living Color, MadTV, Chapelle’s Show, etc.
Not sure I agree with the rankings; they appear to skew toward 1970’s era SNL, although I was LOL pleased to re-discover #3, “Robot Insurance.”

Television

Improv Everywhere pulls public stunts that usually have a tinge of the bizarre. They’re probably best known for their annual — yes, annual — No Pants Day where, at a pre-determined time on a pre-determined date, thousands of people worldwide drop their trousers in major subway systems and ride the trains in full pants-free glory. Frequently, their pranks poke fun at corporate targets, e.g. getting 80 people to dress up like Best Buy employees and loiter around a specific Best Buy answering questions and being friendly or having 100+ shirtless men pose in an Abercrombie & Fitch store that had a shirtless male model as a greeter.
But the Best Game Ever prank is by far the best prank ever. Not only does it create a public spectacle, but it brings joy to a bunch of kids by turning a random, everyday little league game into a major league event covered by NBC Sports, complete with Jumbotron, Goodyear blimp, and chest-painted fans.
[via Kottke]

Culture

If you don’t get the reference, it’s from , which as we learn here is derived from this. Thus ends this week’s lesson in old school Internet memes.
PAK CHOOIE UNF!

Culture

With disappointing repetitiveness, I stumble across some bozo up in arms over some company that’s attempting to “steal your copyright.” These are usually in a lather because they’ve actually read the Terms of Service for [insert web-based application here] and noticed language that looks something like this:

“the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.”

A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I’ve had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I’m responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn’t take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it’s called the Internet.

Read more…

Intellectual Property, Technology & Internet

This New York Times article, “A Journey to Baseball’s Alternate Universe,” is the kind of thing that almost makes me wish I enjoyed math. Almost.

In a fit of scientific skepticism, we decided to calculate how unlikely Joltin’ Joe’s [56-game hitting streak] really was. Using a comprehensive collection of baseball statistics from 1871 to 2005, we simulated the entire history of baseball 10,000 times in a computer. In essence, we programmed the computer to construct an enormous set of parallel baseball universes, all with the same players but subject to the vagaries of chance in each one.

Although it doesn’t quite set free my inner mathematician, it does bring out the writer in me, that little inner voice that says “What if . . .?”
What if one of those 10,000 alternate Joe DiMaggios — one who was less successful in baseball and didn’t marry Marilyn Monroe — slipped through the dimensional interface into the universe where Joe DiMaggio is the baseball legend that he is in ours? Or vice versa?
Crap. Now I’m gonna have to go read a DiMaggio biography.

Other