Thursday, May 8th, 2008

ATTN Torelites

It is time to finally bid Tor Hates the Internet a fond farewell.

But, fear not, I’m not done hating the internet. Please update your bookmarks and muscle memory that you may enjoy losefail.org/blog

Thursday, May 1st, 2008

Uh oh – uh oh! Eww … not on the carpet. Bad electronics industry! Bad!

This is so full of suck that I’m gonna put it in bold.

Bridgestone has developed a broadsheet-sized e-paper display.

Via the inemitable Yelvington, we get news of this abomination.

Maybe in Japan where people read the hell out of the Asahi Shinbum – a paper that’s wider than most driveways on the ol’ sun island.

For my reaction, I’d like to take the equally inemitable Mindy McAdams out of context from one of her life-affirming  “Oh crap, journalists are dinosaurs” posts.

… one journalist stood up and asked when we will see the E Ink screens or display devices replicate the size and shape of a broadsheet newspaper.

I was stunned. I know my jaw fell open.

I had been sitting there thinking that what I want to see in the displays (now only black and white) is color. The journalist was thinking about imitating a dead format that most people find awkward and inconvenient.

Broadsheet has been useless crap since dad stopped smoking his pipe and reading the paper while mom planned a day of cleaning, cooking and watching commercials where Fred Flintstone smokes Winstons.

But, comrades, there is a spectre haunting the eventual evolution of the newspaper industry: eReaders.

Hell. I don’t think any sort of eReader will ever catch on. Why buy another device when you can access most of the web thanks to the death of the mobile web. Battery life? Most of us are used to charging our cell phones. Better contrast? Protip: Nobody cares. Portability? Unless the world is populated by douchebags who wear cell phone holsters, this will not enter into anyone’s calculus.

Then again, I’d somewhat like to see an eReader come out quickly. Another poorly handled device (Hi there, Amazon Kindle) could do this ruddy idea in.

Oh. Also, that display I talked about at the beginning? It takes 15 seconds to load a page.If you haven’t watched the included video, do that at once.

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

As the time to retire Tor Hates the Internet draws near, Tor prepares his goggles and top hat

Cryface.

So I’m getting my new home all cozied up and I had to mess with my LinkedIn profile a bit for the SocialHomes plugin (neat, by the way) to like it.

What’s the ad on my public profile? Something about vintage zeppelin airmail envelopes. Score! Not only do people see my mini-resume, they also see that I’m apparently totally steampunk.

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

All points be advised, explanation of the word “swashbuckling” is no longer clever

Most people wake up in the morning and think about what they’re going to do with their day.

Me, I roll out of bed and get pissed off about how many times I’ve had to hear or read the origin of the word swashbuckling and that I’m pretty sure everybody knows about it, already.

Also, it’s a terrible word, and all who employ it should be keel-hauled. (Y’aar.)

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Perhaps only in Pullman: That which sounds like horse police

It’s 1:30 a.m. in Pullman, Washington and the usual calm of Maiden Ln. on a Thursday morning is punctuated by a staccato of “clops.”

Clop clop clop clop clop clop clop clop.

I push the curtain aside and look down the street. I’ve only seen mounted cops in the Park Blocks and Seattle WTO protest videos.

It’s not a mounted law enforcement officer at all. It’s a tiny girl (probably 5′2″, 110 pounds soaking wet), wearing a skirt that would barely register as a belt, sprinting down the street in heels.

‘Great,’ I think. ‘There’s nary a good reason for a girl to be running in heels. No matter how comically cloppy.’

She stops, spins around in a flurry of hair and exhalation (it’s 36 out), and sprints back down the street.

I die a bit, wondering if she’s just doing drunken windsprints.

Clop clop clop clop.

She returns thirty seconds later (clop clop) with a guy two feet taller than her in tow. And they set off down the street, she runs (clop clop clop) and he walks in a slow measured pace. The sound fades into something like firecrackers as they round the bend onto Opal.

Off in the distance, someone yells, “Whoo!” And I know the world is alright.

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

The staff anarchist takes on the taser-industrial complex … man

There are words like dumpster, kleenex, pilates and heroin. Words we use every day. When our editorial adviser mentioned that we should have capitalized Dumpster in a story, I launched into a tirade about genericized trademarks that quickly got me branded as the staff anarchist.

John McIntyre of The Sun (light for all) finds himself at the dead-center of a user-generated imbroglio about what to call what a taser does. Also, there’s some Swiftiness

Mercifully, Tom and the others fired only to disable, and not to kill the red pygmies. Wounded in the arms or legs, the little savages would be incapable of fighting, and this plan was followed. But so fierce were they that some, who were wounded twice, still kept up the attack.

Project Gutenberg e-text Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle.

That said, I know we’ve had quite the discussion at the paper about how to use “taser” in its various forms. Here are the schools of thought … as far as I can tell:

TASER - Technically correct. The taser was developed by a NASA researcher as Thomas A. Swift’s Electric Rifle. A passage from the book Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle wherein the dashing boy-genius inventor wherein he saves some missionaries from a tribe of savages (after killing a bunch of elephants) leads this post. Yeah, the whole book is pretty much racist. The Spokesman-Review uses this style (all caps, not racism), as far as I remember.

Taser – Wrong, in my opinion. Since TASER Int’l sets their product name in all caps, this is incorrect imitation of a product name. The Evergreen uses this style.

taser - My preferred reference. Taser has rapidly become a genericized trademark because there’s nothing else that does what a taser does. TASER Int’l’s ad agency should be busily buying itself drinks for the fact that their brand has preempted the market without having to lift a finger. Although chances are, they’re just producing ugly ads for law enforcement industry publications.

That said: What should be proper style for a verb describing use of a taser against a person? If you’re a purist, the answer is a resounding mu because the question is based on what I presume to be a false assumption: Namely that you can verb an acronym.

However, if you’re an ardent genericized trademark anarchist like me, you take it as an agent noun. Just like an editor edits, a refrigerator refrigerates and a driver drives, the taser tases.

In this case, the proper form would be tase, tased, tasing.

Naturally, I fall in this camp – but it might just be because I hear it used in this fashion. And, frankly, believe that “tasered” will sound foreign to most people. Example: “The officer threatened to taser the subject.” sounds worse than “The officer threatened to use a TASER on the subject,” which reads more awkwardly than “The officer threatened to tase the subject.”

Of course, if you’re a fumbly-foo typer, you might wind up having an officer threaten to taste a subject.

But, here’s the rub: There are two modes (and two different levels o’pain) when tasing someone. There’s the ballistic shot (firing barbs from the CO2 cartridge and ejecting AFID tags) and the drive stun (removing the cartridge and jabbing the subject with the weapon’s prongs). The former creates a larger contact area – apply Ohm’s law (dry skin resistance is roughly 500kΩ, about 100kΩ if moist) to draw your own conclusions about that one – and the latter works much like a normal stun gun.

Should those be differentiated? A good police officer will carefully note down what methods he employed. If he’s worried about excessive force complaints, he might use the drive stun and, as taser use increases, it may become important to differentiate the two in copy – or at least to know the difference.

For bonus points, the good reporter will know that newer tasers keep internal logs that can probably be pulled through a public records request. Some are also equipped with an onboard camera.

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Nerdy existentialism: The Hover which can be hovered is not the true Hover.

From our website’s stylesheet

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Monday, April 21st, 2008

Today I did laundry, completed a project and committed some journalism. Too bad it’s 5:30 a.m.

Here’s a timeline of my accidental all-nighter.

• 2:00 a.m.: Laundry’s done and it looks like I’ll have my project wrapped up within a half hour.
• 2:05 a.m.: My phone rings. Usually when someone calls at this hour, they just want to talk (usually they’re drunk), someone has died or something’s on fire. It’s Christina, so I assume it’s not the former.
• 2:06 a.m.: Turns out something’s on fire.
• 2:15 a.m.: After a breathless journey up the hill where I almost run afoul of the Whitman County Sheriff’s office – who would think that they would slow down for a man wearing a black hooded sweatshirt sprinting through a deserted neighborhood at 2 a.m. – I make it to the office and plunk down in front of the scanner.
• 2:17 a.m.: I ponder my unfinished work and a laundry bag that’s full of polo shirts that are wrinkling as we speak.
• 2:19 a.m.: I begin to doodle in my notebook and author a short screed about the unique difficulties of setting type in Chinese. Summary: It’s monospaced and very dense, so I think you need to force some whitespace.
• 2:21 a.m.: I got this thing pretty much on lock. I think I’ll produce a changqing ribao (ever-green daily paper) while I’m waiting. I ponder the humor of a changchangqing ribao (often green daily paper). I decide that Oftengreen will be a town neighboring the fictional hamlet of White Hills.
• 2:32 a.m.: My theory complete, I ponder looking for jobs on the Shenzhen Craigslist.
• 2:35 a.m.: Hey. That place is totally empty.
• 2:45 a.m.: I draw a White Russian with the subtitle: “There’s a beverage here … man?!”
• 3:05 a.m.: Bored, I call Christina and tell her there is nothing on the scanner and proceed down to Stephenson to at least salvage some “been there, done that,” cred out of this experience.
• 3:06 a.m.: Tyler is there and I resolve to drink some Thunderbird and play Battlefield 2 – especially if it kills me.
• 3:20 a.m.: The fire department spokesman finally starts talking. I take notes and pretend to be useful.
• 3:45 a.m.: I return to the office and let Christina do whatever while I play Boxhead. The developer spelled “mortar” wrong.
• 4:11 a.m.: Story edited and published. Time to head home.
• 4:20 a.m.: Heh. Anti-420. I set to work realizing that I probably need those tonal diaresis on my project.
• 4:22 a.m.: Crap. How does the Super Unicodefeartime keyboard layout work again.
• 4:50 a.m.: I can’t embed the font I used, which means that I can’t make a PDF. I should’ve taken Japanese, at least they have fonts that come in different weights. Thank God for JPEG export.
• 5:10 a.m.: Realize that I’ve got a laundy bag full of polo shirts that are completely wrinkled.
• 5:13 a.m.: Oh hey. It’s garbage day. This, combined with the light seeping through my window and the cheery birds bidding the world good morning will make sleeping easy.
• 5:30 a.m.: Start blogging about my evening and pondering the other major homework I have due Tuesday ugh … tomorrow.
• 5:45 a.m.: Cuss.

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

Ah crap. BBC gets a chubby for Twitter

Just when I was hoping the hype was somehow dying down around Twitter, the Beeb declares it the hottest trend of the year … a year too late.

So they described some of Gordon Brown’s recent Tweets during his trip. Boring stuff like having breakfast with Ben Bernanke. Running late for something else equally boring. (Take that, Bernanke!). But here’s what I imagine it was really like.

7:30 a.m.: OH CRAP! WE’RE DRIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE ROAD. j/k lol
8:00 a.m.: No idea where we’re going. Signs are still in miles.
9:45 a.m.: We hit up Starbucks. Vanilla chai ftw!
10:30 a.m.: Governor of Pensylvania? Rick Roll’d.
10:35 a.m.: He just showed me that video with the girls and a cup. Like a trainwreck.
2:00 p.m.: wtf, Gamestop sucks.
3:08 p.m.: OMG! Stephen Hadley just showed me Tom Ridge’s tumblr.

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

I don’t play enough TF2

Valve is re-releasing Team Fortress 2 as a standalone product. I love the game’s campy ’60s espionage theme and Pixar-esque visual style. It’s full of frantic team-based gameplay with various character classes that each fit specific roles. The scout here runs fast to capture flags.

There were a couple “Meet the …” trailers for each of the game’s classes, and while the drunken demolition man one is my favorite, but this scout one has some great animation. It’s indicative of the excellent characterization of the game. And, damn, it’s just great animation.