- Senior City-zens: The World’s 10 Oldest Still-Inhabited Cities – “I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.” Maybe Eddie Izzard should have gone with “I was born in the middle east, where the really old history comes from.”
- Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – If you can’t actually avoid meetings, then at least try to schedule them so you can maximise your productivity. Rings true…
- There’s a pretty significant problem in the new… – I’m starting to expect Graham Chapman to burst in at any second and announce that this is getting far too silly. Apparently any iPhone app that allows “unfiltered internet access,” everything from web browsers to Twitter clients to, presumably, delicious.com clients, now requires a 17+ rating.
- The giant Apollo 11 post – The best of the web on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
- Year two – Nice analysis of where the App Store need to change in order to keep both customers and developers happy.
- Let’s all take a deep breath and get some perspective – “[Google are] starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business.”
- Evolution Test – I just don’t get it. Is evolution really that hard? How can you misunderstand it so badly that you can come up with this list of questions and think it proves… well, anything? (Part of me hates to single out this site as there are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar ones.)
- Crash Could Free Up Wall Street’s Grip on Bright Young Minds – “But the big paychecks came with what economists call opportunity costs. Instead of spending their days searching for exotic trades, some of these Wall Street wizards could’ve been creating drugs, imagining software, or solving energy problems.”
- The Norway Lesson: The Benefits of Good Financial Behavior – “Norway made it a point to budget, to save, and to protect against unnecessary risk. Then, it went on to buy when everyone else was selling.” Any other country would have spent all earnings from oil on tax cuts (that’s what happened with North Sea Gas in the UK), but Norway did the smart thing.
Despite Californian voters failing to reject Prop 8, the graffiti in Los Angeles shows that not everyone agrees: Post No Bills Prop.
In stark contrast to pretty much everything else, Time Lords in the US are clearly smaller than their British equivalent.
- Battle between ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro to be BBC4 comedy drama – This looks like it could be fun. I especially like some of the comments after the article. The Spectrum vs. Commode 64 [sic] debate still rages to this day…
- Materials: The HTC Hero’s Teflon Coating Makes the iPhone Feel Like Junk – iPhone 3G – One thing that’s holding me back from getting a 3GS is the plastic back. I much prefer the aluminium from the first gen model.
- The blue and the green – “Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed.” A very neat optical illusion.
One thing that I wasn’t really expecting to see in Southern California were a series of wind farms. With their quiet grace and purpose against the desert backdrop they are oddly beautiful.
- Apple iPhone Developers Mostly Don’t Make Much Money – “Martin surveyed 100 development teams, received 85 usable responses, and found that 52% of the developers had earned less than $15,000 for their efforts and 33% earned less than $250.” Missed this one when it was first published. Bizarre to think that I’m doing better than a third of other iPhone developers!
- Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple – “When the relationship’s power is so lopsided, the only sensible reason to stay in it is trust. If we can reasonably trust Apple to use its power reasonably and fairly, we can sustain the imbalance.”
- Don’t call what happened in Iran last week an election – Christopher Hitchens’ take on the recent events in Iran.
In the weakest possible sense of the word, these two images can be considered to be my tribute to Ansel Adams’ work in the Sierra Nevada.
While he had to lug huge cameras around and work with large format film I merely had to carry around my 50D1 and play around in Photoshop Elements.
I find it a little odd that the thing that drew me to both of these pictures were the colours2 yet there is still enough texture and shape to make them work in black and white.
What can you say about Yosemite that hasn’t already been said? And what can you photograph that there aren’t already ten copies of on Flickr? (Don’t even get me started on some of those people that used film rather than CMOS sensors.)
Having said that, it didn’t stop me trying. There is no two ways about it: Yosemite is an absolutely stunning location. Everywhere you look there is more beautiful scenery, forests, water falls.