12 Oct 2009
Note to academics. Just read an article that uses the word “situatedness” without any good reason. Stop inventing words when you don’t need to. Especially if you’re in a scarcely established field that already struggles to justify its existence as a unique discipline. Inventing words doesn’t aid your cause – if anything, your weak attempts at establishing a jargon for yourselves serves only to highlight your tenuous existence outside the parameters of established fields. Praxis is where this all falls apart on you, so stop making up words and go do some real research to back up your mediocre methodologies. When you’re beaten to the punch by both commercial / non-profit utilities in developing not only methodologies but also tools for the same analyses you’re flogging as your own, it’s time to go and fold back into the disciplines from whence you came and stop pretending to be something new.
*ahem*
Well, that feels better. But I still need to write about it :(
23 Sep 2009
Sydney’s covered in a dust storm this morning and everyone’s talking about it. It’s pretty funky coloured and unprecedented in recorded history. Tori says Thank God in her new blog (at least, that’s the blog’s focus :)) – others say more amusing things. Here’s a sample.
“”UFO?” – my brother, “no, dust storm” – me. He looked upset.”
“[name] proudly welcomes you to Sydney Ranga Day. You can’t see us, but you know we’re out there.”
“[name] would hate to be holding a climate change deniers press conference in Sydney today.”
“Apparently you shouldnt go outside if u have asthma” [sic] – stating the obvious award
“[name] wonders if, due to global warming, jesus will return on a cloud of orange dust?”
“[name] is wondering how he got inside a sepia photo?!”
“[name] wants it to rain so she can make a mud pie on her car”
“Hey guys i had this big bag of red dust that i left outside, but how [sic] can’t find it. Would anyone know where it is?”
16 Sep 2009
I periodically freak out when reviewing emails that I’ve sent, particularly to printers, using Gmail’s (hosted apps) webmail interface. It has this habit of converting CMYK JPGs to RGB thumbnails really badly – but without apparent corruption.
The blue in the image above is actually a deep red!
Accordingly, while the colours are totally out of whack, there are no other artifacts in the image. Normally this just looks weird – sometimes, in the case of logo variants, it looks plausible but utterly incorrect! My guess is they’re using an older version of PIL (we all know how much Google loves Python) prior to this March 2009 patch. Sounds like the same phenomenon.
Still, those people emailing CMYK JPGs has to be a little bit niche, so I’m not heaps hopeful of this getting fixed too soon! The main reason I care is because web interfaces are so much faster than retrieving large attachments from IMAP stores.
15 Sep 2009
So at last a xkcd book is out. Signed copy costs $10USD more than an unsigned one — my guess is Randall’s gonna make more off that than the books! *does maths* Signing 6 books/minute is $3600/hour… not bad for a dude with a pen & a blag.
It’s only going to run for 24 hours, so realistically that particular activity would max out at $86,400 – but that’s pure profit, because there’s already a profit built into book sales. That’s assuming relatively modest sales of 8640 units — for a website with a reach peaking at just over 0.1% of the Internet’s daily users, I’m not sure if this is realistic or not. Still, Alexa reckons it’s the 1735th most popular website on the planet, so that’s got to count for something.
Oh, and remember it’s independantly published with royalties split between Munroe and the philanthropic backer – so, guessing it’s ~200 pages, and an initial run of 10,000, even an unCorporation like breadpig ought to be able to make, if you’ll pardon the pun, some dough (groan) from the $18 list price.
At any rate, Munroe stands to make dramatically more from the mundane activity of book signing than possibly any other cartoonist in history. The moral of the story is do something you love, so long as it’s got tremendous merchandising potential ;-)
08 Sep 2009
I wish this weren’t just Vista being special!