Category ArchivePersonal
Personal 30 Sep 2008 11:59 am
THIS SITE IS NO LONGER BEING UPDATED…
The Gong Show is dead. Long live The Gong Show. In short, I got bored with WordPress, so I’m moving my blog to Tumblr.
Part of the reasoning behind my decision was the Google seems to really dislike my blog. It used to rank #1 for all kinds of vanity searches. Now, it’s still in the index, but Google drives almost zero traffic. I think I got blacklisted somewhere along the way. So, I’m not bringing my domain with me (thought I could, because Tumblr’s domain mapping rocks).
Speaking of Tumblr rocking: This admin interface is beautiful. And I love the template scripting language. It took just a dash of CSS to make my template feel very ME-ish… much easier than messing around with WordPress templates.
Also, I completely purged my Tumblr account because I wanted to start fresh. I had imported 1000s of posts via RSS in my old Tumblr account that I didn’t want in this new version of The Gong Show. So, if you think you’re currently following me on Tumblr, you’re not. Re-follow me if you want the latest on what I’m up to.
And, if you’re viewing this through the web (not RSS), then learn more about the piping plover in my background. Best beach bird ever.
Personal 02 Sep 2008 02:39 pm
London Meetings
Personal 02 Sep 2008 02:33 pm
Google Chrome
Google launched a browser: Chrome. I downloaded and it and took it for a spin this afternoon. Here are my first impressions.
HolyCrapItIsFast! Seriously, it starts up fast, tabs open and close fast, browsing is snappier and more responsive. I wish I had some solid way to quantify what I am experiencing, rather than just qualitative anecdotal evidence… But, simply put, if you want to browse the internet faster than I recommend you try Chrome.
They put the tabs and the address bar in the correct order. Hooray! It’s a small detail, but I have always been irked by the inconsistent layout of tabs being below the address bar, instead of above the address bar where they belong. Why are tabs supposed to be above the address bar? Because moving to a new tab changes the contents of the address bar. So, when you change a tab, everything affected by the change should reside below the tabs. Laying it out in this order makes tabs more consistent with the real-world metaphor of folder tabs after which tabs in GUIs are modeled.
I do have a few nits to pick:
- The keyboard shortcut ctrl-tab does not go to the last tab you were on. Instead, it goes to the next tab in the list. This is silly. ctrl-tab should behave the same way that alt-tab behaves in OS environment. Firefox also makes this mistake, but since Firefox has a add-on architecture, a kind hacker fixed this problem by creating the Last Tab add-on. That brings me to my next nitpick.
- There is no add-on architecture on day one. This is a no-brainer feature that I’m sure the Chrome team will add quickly, but until they build an add-on architecture, they are missing out on a huge opportunity to leverage talented developers’ desires to scratch their personal itches and extend the browser for all users. Due to Chrome’s missing add-on architecture, Firefox’s library of add-ons will be a significant advantage for Firefox in the near-term.
- Adding new search engines is too hard. To add a search engine in Firefox, all I have to do is right click on the search box I want to add and then click the “add a keyword for this search…” menu item and fill out the dialog that pops up. By contrast, to add a search engine in Chrome, I have to go to “options” -> click “manage” under “default search” -> then click “add”. Not only is it more clicks, but it’s a significantly higher cognitive load on the user. There must be an easier way to add search engines… if not, then I’m sure the Chrome team will fix this issue quickly.
Overall grade: A-
Thanksgiving used to be known as the holiday then you go home and install Firefox on your parents’ PC. Now Thanksgiving will be known as the holiday when you go home and install Chrome on your parents’ PC.
Personal 27 Aug 2008 06:37 am
Snow Crash in Wood

At my high school one of the requirements to graduate was that you had to carve a 12″ x 12″ x 1″ wood panel that is displayed in the hallways of the school after you graduated. (Yes, I attended one of those private schools you see in movies, like Dead Poets Society).
I recently discovered that my high school has gone digital and has now archived pictures of all the students’ panels online.
Now, I’m the first to admit that I have an obsession with Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash that borders on unhealthy. So, I carved the cover of the book into my wood panel, as pictured in the top of this post. The picture is a little blurry; if I ever go back to the campus, I’ll have to take a better one myself.
Here’s the original cover for Snow Crash that was the basis for my panel.

Personal 11 Aug 2008 07:32 pm
Ripped From Today’s Headlines
Georgia accused Russia of a coordinated CYBER-TERRORISM attack today… little did Georgia know, Gmail was down for all countries, not just them.
Ba-dum Ching!
Personal 22 Jul 2008 07:42 am
Decision Making
There is an over-emphasis on the individual when it comes to responsibility and rationality in decision making. I rarely agree with David Brooks, but I found this paragraph in his op-ed today to hit the nail on the head:
Decision-making — whether it’s taking out a loan or deciding whom to marry — isn’t a coldly rational, self-conscious act. Instead, decision-making is a long chain of processes, most of which happen beneath the level of awareness. We absorb a way of perceiving the world from parents and neighbors. We mimic the behavior around us. Only at the end of the process is there self-conscious oversight.
To be clear, I think David Brooks is correct in his assessment on how we, the general public, make decisions, but that doesn’t mean I like it. I wish the opposite were true; the world would be a better place if decision making were a more rational, logical exercise that happened in higher levels of consciousness. But, using nothing more than my own subjective observations as evidence, it’s not.
Personal 20 Jul 2008 08:01 pm
The Watchmen
When I have a point of view about something in pop culture that can easily be summed up in 140 characters, I like searching for it on search.twitter.com to see how original or unoriginal my point of view is relative to other internet geeks.
For example, after watching The Watchmen trailer today, I was really worried that the movie could suck… it looks like I’m not alone.
However, sometimes these searches fail. For example, I thought The Watchmen was far more funny than either serious or dramatic. I don’t want to spoil any part of the story for anyone that has not read it, but I found myself actually bursting out in laughter in parts, particularly the ending… It’s a humor where I’m laughing WITH the author, not AT the author. Sure, it’s DARK humor, but it’s humor nonetheless. However, a search for “Watchmen funny” or “Watchmen humor” does not unearth any like-minded readers. Am I alone on this one?
Personal 15 Jul 2008 03:22 pm
App Store is a Solution to The Penny Gap
Greg Yardley recently published the following breakdown of Apple’s iPhone App Store applications listed at various pricing tiers. His insight was that “free” was no longer the most popular application price. Instead, $0.99 was the most popular application price. See below:
Many of the companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio offer their services for free to end-users and find other ways to monetize usage. A significant part of the reason for this pricing decision is that any price (even one penny) is a significantly greater hurdle to jump when converting a visiting into an active user than giving away a service for free. Josh Koppelman best articulated this hurdle in his post on The Penny Gap.
I’ve talked about The Penny Gap on this blog before, and to summarize my thoughts: The Penny Gap is not an problem of economics, it’s an internet usability problem. The act of paying for something online (regardless of the cost) requires collecting so much more information (CC#, Paypal Acct, Exp Date, etc) which is subject to data entry errors and form fatigue… If paying $0.01 for a service had the same barriers to entry as paying nothing for a service, then I think The Penny Gap would almost completely vanish.
Returning to Yardley’s finding that “free” is no longer the most popular application price, the cause of this observation is that Apple has significantly improved the usability of paying for an application. Apple has made it drop dead simple for developers to charge for applications and for consumers to purchase applications. For developers, there’s no need to build a billing system, register for a payment processor, deal with chargebacks, etc; Apple makes charging for an application as easy as deciding on a price. For consumers, there’s no need to find your wallet, enter your CC#, create an account, etc when purchasing an app on the app store; all that info is stored in your Apple Account after your first purchase. That’s why “free” is no longer the most popular price on the App Store, because Apple has solved many of the usability problems that previous caused the friction which created The Penny Gap.
Personal 25 Jun 2008 10:35 am
Best-Worst Movies
The terrible reviews across the board for The Love Guru made me wonder where it ranks on the list of the worst rated movies of all time. I decided to use Metacritic to find out.
Here’s a list of the all-time low scores for movies on Metacritic. The Love Guru is in a tie with a bunch of other movies as the 184th worst movie of all time. Granted, Metacritic doesn’t go that far back in time (the oldest movie on the list is from 1983), but it’s still fun to see how bad The Love Guru is relative to other movies over the last few decades. Also, note that Metacritic only takes into account professional critics opinions. Consumer reviews are not incorporated into the ratings on this list.
Once I found the all-time low scores list on Metacritic, I made up a simple game: find the worst rated movie that I can genuinely say I think is fantastic. I ended up choosing Billy Madison in a tie for 66th place as the most critically-panned movie that I genuinely love. What would you choose?

