Category Archives: cyberculture

Google Wave as explained by Samuel L Jackson

Wired comes to the rescue and explains Google Wave. Hilarious. Thank you, Samer, for tweeting this just when I needed a laugh.

Sometimes you need someone else to say something provocative you don’t dare so that you can just nod and shrug and let someone else take the heat. With that in mind — and only coincidentally marking my receipt of a Google Wave invitation today — I happily steal re-print this explanation of the invite-only collaborative environment from our cousins at wired.co.uk:

Google Wave is confusing, especially for those of us who are yet to receive invitations. Even here at Wired UK, we only get to meet Eric Schmidt every now and again, and some of us are yet to receive the email we so yearn for.

Yes, we know Wave is a unique combination of chat, wiki, email and hyperbole. But what would we actually use it for? Our friends at Wired US have suggested it as a tool for parenting: to facilitate show and tell or brainstorm bedtime stories. Lifehacker suggests it for all sorts of pie-in-the-sky applications, such as controlling air traffic or spreading the H1N1 vaccine. TechCrunch calls it a form of “passive aggressive communication”, but they mean that in a nice way.

It’s all a bit airy-fairy – what’s needed here is someone with the balls to get to the bottom of Google Wave and explain its features and uses in no uncertain terms.

And who better than Samuel L Jackson, with a little help from John Travolta, Kim Jong-il and Macaulay Culkin. Be warned: in case it’s been a while since you saw Tarantino’s classic, you’re in for one colourfully-worded wave.

(There are some relevant links in the original post but the flu is still kicking my ass and I don’t have the energy to relink. sorry.)

cautious optimism

I’d just about reached the point where I thought the idea of finding the missing chunks of blog archives was merely a delusion when I opened a folder on an old harddrive and found the title page from the ill-fated ezine spinoff of this site. (It’s just a screencapture, no active links).

The next file I opened appears to contain a few hundred heretofore lost blog posts. Not all of them are worth the time to repost, but I’ll get as many of them as I can restored at some point. They’re sitting on my macbook’s desktop now so I can’t forget. I may not get to it anytime soon, but I won’t forget where I put them. Again.

My qi is blocked

I manage my inbox to zero. If I don’t, the unfinished business nags at me. My Macbook Pro downloaded a bunch of software updates a few days ago and for reasons I don’t understand my mailbox marked all of my old mail as “unread.” This is what I see every time I open my mail:

27654

You can imagine how irritable this has been making me.

Happy 10th, Metafilter

It’s hard to believe, but MetaFilter is 10 years old.

Today’s the DC Meetup, but I’m not attending. Not only would trying to wedge one more thing into this weekend make me spontaneously combust, but I’ve always read it but I was never really an active participant on metafilter. I can’t even remember my login (Skarlet?).

On a related note, we got to see Rick and Sarah last night at our old haunt, Atomic Billiards. (They’re in town to go to the mefi shindig). If you visit their site, you can read about how I inadvertently played matchmaker for them at a blogger meetup at Atomic in 2002. (Yes there were blogger gatherings way back then in the dark ages).

No time to post pics from last night. Dr. Birdcage is on her way over and we have Artomatic responsibilities to attend to. Being a grown-up is very boring sometimes. Hey, there’s a matrimonial theme here – I wrote Dr. Birdcage’s wedding.

Life’s just wacky that way.