Alice Marwick’s ROFLcon Talk on Internet Fame

One day I want to be cool and know what cons to go to before I just hear about it after the fact. I knew about ROFLcon long long ago and mostly wrote it off. I was clearly greatly mistaken and now the “golden years” are most likely over and next year will suck (I have yet to go to a con where “last year was better” isn’t the number one thing people say). I’m so bitter I should move to Pennsylvania.

What was I posting about? Oh yeah this talk about Internet Fame is an awesome critique of internet culture as a whole as well as how celebrity has changed over the years. I love that it’s all in a .txt file.

"I want to create a new taxonomy of modern internet fame. This is important because otherwise we end up lumping gothic fetish models and Michael Arrington in the same bucket. Which is gross."

NYTimes.com hand-codes its HTML

NYTimes.com hand-codes its HTML. Why in the world is this so news worthy? I hear the Times also pays writers for stories and the sky is blue.

My best guess is that this might be the crossover moment for non web organizations. To date when most people think of web designers they think of dreamweaver. Perhaps now companies will start demanding hand coding designers. But who knows.

testing the new Ubuntu on a beginner

A great if albeit sexist named article about testing the new Ubuntu on a beginner. I would say it mirrors my over all feeling that for the most part the OS works great but it’s biggest problem seems to be the programs and how the OS interacts with them. Finding linux programs needs to be easier, Installing needs to be easier and help with where the program went after installing could be better as well.

Switching to Ubuntu

at the very least I would like to. Ubuntu 8 is pretty hot and seems to have a lot polish that makes it feel really complete and solid. The fact that I can install it on windows as an app is just amazing.

so far these are the things that are keeping me from switching completely:

  • Photoshop
  • all the music players suck... I still don't love winamp but it does the job the best for me.
  • FireFox also still displays ass on linux.
  • I wish Wine worked better.

But hopefully these things will be able to be fixed in the next couple years and I can make the full jump over.