http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown Life is like an exploded clown; it's really funny until you figure out what just happened. Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:06:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Obama is struggling to condense his economic policy into a sound bite. The long version: So I asked Obama whether he thought he had been able to tell an effective story about the economy during this campaign. Specifically, I wondered, did he think he had a message that compared with Reagan’s ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/08/27/sloganeering-for-obama Gruber point to an article that tracks down pundits who thought the iPhone would fail, and asks them what they think now. One guy was surprised by the success. Translation: everyone else wrote that the iPhone wasn't worth it, but fully expected it to succeed. This says something about their Jeremiah-like ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/07/11/iphone-naysayers-one-year-later Jeff Atwood thinks that iTunes is Anti-Web: Is it so unreasonable to expect links in your browser to resolve to, oh, I don't know, web pages containing information about the thing you just clicked on? Is there anything more anti-web than demanding users install custom software to display information that could ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/07/10/itunes-is-a-network-application Good Idea Setting up a family tree on Geni. It's like a little Facebook for your relatives. You click and add your siblings, your parents, their siblings, etc. Then you can post what's new, share photos, plan events, and all that fun stuff. Bad Idea Doing this when you're my coworker from Hungary, ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/07/07/good-idea-bad-idea I first met Mitchell in 1998 at my local AM PM. I'm not sure what brought me in that fateful day, but I know that I left with 52 ounces of Mountain Dew and a new companion. From the day forward, Mitchell and I would be inseparable. Here's a picture ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/06/30/ode-to-a-mug Other the past week I've been writing some code for work that has to happen periodically and then re-schedule itself so it can happen again. We never want two of this process running, and we want the process to automagically expand its time window if it takes longer than we ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/05/14/reinventing-the-wheel-how-to-average-numbers I'm a big fan of Trac, and I use it for project management when I'm given the choice. It has a few issues, but nothing a little plugin magic can't fix. On of my favorite plugins is TracRedirect, which allows me to make one page point to another and make ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/05/12/getting-tracredirect-to-work-with-trac-011rc1 The Get Out Clause is (apparently; I'd never heard of them before) a band in Manchester. They have no contract, and no money to put together a music video. But what they do have is time and a pretty good song. So they sung their song in front of lots ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/05/09/cctv-music-video There are already approximately seventeen million reviews of Matthew Yglesias' new book, Heads in the Sand, so I figured one more wouldn't hurt. Yglesias is one of my must-read bloggers; when I'm behind a few days, I'll plow through his feed first because he makes great points, ties it into the ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/05/06/heads-in-the-sand-review John Siracusa recently lamented the loss of one of his classic OS add-ons; the ability to center the current window onscreen via a global key combo. Well, the global key combo can be had in any number of ways, but here's an AppleScript that'll do it for you. It finds the ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/04/29/centering-a-window-via-applescript Daniel Jacob: My nephew, aged 5 days. Congratulations, Fred! http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/04/24/daniel-jacob [Inside, Lunchtime. Two men in their sixties in "San Juan Capistrano Police Volunteer" uniforms sit at a table covered in empty wrappers. Another man, just as old, stands nearby.] Non Volunteer Old Man: It's been nice talkin' to y'all. Say, who you voting for? Old Man 1: Not Hillary. Old Man 2 shakes ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/04/21/scenes-from-a-taco-bell-2 Senator Clinton's appearance felt a little strained, Senator Obama's appearance was kind o funny, but EdWørds was hands-down the best of the cameos. Better introduction, better content, and much, much funnier. It reminds me of Al Gore on SNL warning about attacking glaciers; surreal enough that you know they're in ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/04/21/democratic-caucus-on-the-colbert-report We recently cleaned out my parents' garage so that it could be torn down to make room for an intergalactic expressway a storm drain. Amongst the millions of childhood memorabilia was this book, which was the first taste I got of computer programming. It taught us Apple BASIC, and we used ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/03/31/lazy-decision-making [Two men, each about 50, sit at a table over burritos. One of them is wearing a t-shirt that says "If you don't like abortions, don't get one." He is listening as the other man speaks] Man #1: But the planes couldn't have brought down the towers. The physics don't work. ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/03/27/scenes-from-chipotle Apple put out a press release last week saying that iTunes is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart, for it's part, is making rublings: Wal-Mart stirs CD pricing pot with multi-tiered plan - Yahoo! News: Wal-Mart... has proposed a five-tiered pricing scheme that would ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/03/04/music-pricing Robert Reich's Blog: 2008 and 1968: Yet the striking thing about Obama, and the enthusiasm he has stirred up, has little to do with the specifics of the policies he advances. It is rather his almost pitch-perfect echo of the John F. Kennedy we heard in 1960 and the Robert Kennedy ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/02/28/the-realism-of-idealism ¡Viva Obama!: Personally, there are some things about silly season that I like. How is it that this is so awesome and this and this are so terrible? The lack of cheesy 90s graphics is a definite difference, but the music is the deciding factor. The Obama video is fast and happy and ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/02/22/supporter-videos Josh and I were talking almost a year ago about how awesome it would be if the next President declared Bush an enemy combatant specifically to make the point that the President should not have such a power. Today, I was thinking of other such actions to take. Issue a signing ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/02/15/the-roby-plan-for-america Listen to the crowds in these two speeches. You only have to get about 10 seconds in to each one. Obama: McCain: (Both Via Talking Points Memo.) Obama sounds like he is surrounded by hundreds of people who are attentive to his every word. He is. McCain sounds like he's in a little room ... http://www.trainedchimpanzeeband.com/explodedclown/2008/02/13/speeches