everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: humor

  • Friendster Ruins Uncovered

    Friendster Ruins Uncovered

    The Onion takes a crack at what future “internet archaeologists” from the “Friendster Excavation Project” discover when they run across the ruins of the ancient online civilization, Friendster.”

    One day users were posting a seemingly endless stream of bulletins about “awesome parties” and “cool shows” and then, nothing. Total silence. . . Their lives come to a complete stop, live flies trapped in amber.

    Internet Archaeologists Find Ruins Of ‘Friendster’ Civilization

    I rarely delete any of my social networking profiles but I deleted my Friendster profile just last week after reading the news of it’s sale to a company in Malaysia. Truthfully, I never really used the service and was only reminded of it when one of my contact’s birthdays was coming up.

    My favorite profile was Andy’s but with the redesign my old link no longer works.

  • Ringtone Symphony

    Izumi pointed me this old video from the Improv Everywhere performance troupe in which they orchestrate the simultaneous ringing of a large number of cellphones stored in a normally quiet place.

    Mayhem ensues.

  • IKEA Heights

    IKEA Heights is a mini-series shot entirely in the Burbank IKEA store without the store’s knowledge.

    I think we’re seeing the birth of a new genre. Flash Concerts and Urban Camouflage performance art to name a few.

    The Finns pronounce it ee-ki-ya by the way.

    Update: More recent entries in this genre include The Ikea fashion shoot or family portrait and this YouTuber who faked an entire Bali vacation with photos she took inside Ikea.

    I did not know it at the time I posted this (maybe he didn’t either?) but the 7-part series stars Randall Park who would go on to be a big star in the movie Always be My Maybe and the TV series, Fresh off the Boat.

  • Fisher-Price Snuffs Out View-Master

    View-Master

    Fisher-Price, the toy company that used to market them, has just eliminated almost all the View-Master titles that have been a staple of young lives for almost 70 years.

    – The Economist

    Rumor has it that Microsoft will license the rights to the View-Master and use them as a new and innovative distribution channel for their PowerPoint slideshows which will be made available with a special relationship with Kodak.

    Positioned as a low cost alternative to Apple’s iPod, the co-branded Microsoft Slide-Master© will be sold via Microsoft enterprise sales and partners as a no-nonsense business tool as an ideal tool to distribute training material.

    “In these lean times, it’s important to keep our costs down but continue to deliver,” said the head of HR Training at a major consulting firm.

    Microsoft will make available a special print format template that, once installed, will allow you to save your slideshows in the View-Master format and upload them to the Kodak Gallery online store which will print out the reels and ship them overnight.

  • Best Code Comment Ever

    Comments left by developers in the dead of the night are inside jokes left for others. Little winks of comic relief left for others that will be parsing through the sub-routines trying to wrangle software to get things working. Usually code comments are short but this one left by a frustrated programmer of a Photoshop viewer is epic.

    At this point, I’d like to take a moment to speak to you about the Adobe PSD format. PSD is not a good format. PSD is not even a bad format. Calling it such would be an insult to other bad formats, such as PCX or JPEG. No, PSD is an abysmal format. Having worked on this code for several weeks now, my hate for PSD has grown to a raging fire that burns with the fierce passion of a million suns.

    If there are two different ways of doing something, PSD will do both, in different places. It will then make up three more ways no sane human would think of, and do those too. PSD makes inconsistency an art form. Why, for instance, did it suddenly decide that *these* particular chunks should be aligned to four bytes, and that this alignment should *not* be included in the size? Other chunks in other places are either unaligned, or aligned with the alignment included in the size. Here, though, it is not included. Either one of these three behaviours would be fine. A sane format would pick one. PSD, of course, uses all three, and more.

    Trying to get data out of a PSD file is like trying to find something in the attic of your eccentric old uncle who died in a freak freshwater shark attack on his 58th birthday. That last detail may not be important for the purposes of the simile, but at this point I am spending a lot of time imagining amusing fates for the people responsible for this Rube Goldberg of a file format.

    Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to them for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

    PSD is not my favourite file format.

    via Fark

    UPDATE: If you want more code comments, check out Stack Overflow which has a collection of them.

  • Certain Destruction

    From brutal field tests we now turn to an entertaining ways to get rid of unnecessary documents. Presenting, The Unloader!

    A better way

  • Screenshot of MacBook Wheel Predictive Sentence Feature

    predictive text

    In the absence of any real substantive announcement from today’s MacWorld, people are talking up a fictional device announced by The Onion, the MacBook Wheel. I’m assuming you’ve already seen the video but here’s a screenshot of the predictive sentence feature with some choice samples.

  • Bluetooth Headset Monitors Conversations, Offers Helpful Advice

    A new type of Bluetooth headset hits the market today that offers a unique service for busy travelers on the go. Listening in on your conversations, the Concierge by Sony Ericsson offers helpful tips when it senses hesitation or pause in the dialog.

    Let’s say you’re talking to your date about a good place to go for Chinese and have come up short after a run down of the usual spots. Concierge will softly suggest a few places nearby based on geo-location data made available from your GPS-enabled phone.

    Having a debate with your landlord about a drafty window that needs fixing? Concierge to the rescue again with a list of reasonably-priced contractors convenient to your home address.

    Once you get used to that voice in your head, you’ll never want to take it off. Concierge will sing softly to you when it’s time to go to sleep and bark your active to-dos first thing in the morning when you’re brushing your teeth.

  • First Annual Day of Awesomeness

    In celebration of the International Day of Awesomeness