Here are the rest of the CS3 icons. They’re pretty, but will using letters confuse some people?

We’ll have to wait for Minnesota to chime in.

(via Daring Fireball)

Can Timbaland make a beat that I won’t fall victim to? Is Timberlake really this good, or is there some sort of parasite in my spinal fluid? What’s with all these Timber names anyway?

Why oh why am I cursed with loving all this music that makes beautiful women want desperately to dance, in spite of my own lack of moves?

Currently listening (round 19): My Love

Update: (round 46)

Last week I was in San Francisco, ranting about what’s wrong with Saturday Night Live. One of my complaints is that they don’t utilize the musical guests in any of the skits:

Thanks Niall.

Well that was fun.

Less than a month go, a freak post-Thanksgiving snowstorm turned my new neighborhood into an automotive skate rink. Sliding my car during the California rainy season apparently prepared me for getting to work, only to turn around and work from home.

Now flash forward to Thursday afternoon. The rain was falling hard and a high wind advisory was in effect until Friday morning. Wyatt and I got in the car to get groceries from the Trader Joe’s less than three miles from our apartment. On the way to TJ’s we saw I think three cars with their owners sitting on their roofs, trapped in flooded bits of road.

After getting our food and sloshing through traffic, we were two hours deeper into the storm and the wind was picking up. While we ate dinner and watched some tv the power started to stutter a few seconds at a time, at which point I unplugged non-critical electronics (read: the Wii and Mac Pro).

The wind started to wail loud enough to raise our heart rates, and so we geared up to go outside. Wyatt threw on his foul weather gear, while I put on a shirt, tie, and suit jacket and grabbed my camera. We walked down to Juanita Beach, pausing to lean forward on our toes and have the wind hold us upright.

We sprinted down the path past the beach to avoid getting our faces sandblasted. With the waves crashing over the retaining wall I had Wyatt man the camera while I did my best to report the weather. On our way back we passed a pre-teen on a razor scooter whose parents must have already blown away.

Getting back into our apartment, I quickly determined that the weather report we shot wasn’t what the broadcast professionals would call ‘visible’ or ‘audible’, and continued to veg out. Shortly after Wyatt went to bed, around 01:00 on Friday morning, the whole room went black and stayed that way. I took a quick shower and got in bed, only to wake up to my alarm clock six hours later to an utter lack of electricity.

I got my car and headed to work, driving gingerly past blacked-out traffic lights and generally moving slowly in order to appreciate the damage. Everywhere I looked there was debris and various pieces of trees, from piles of branches blocking sidewalks to entire 40 foot pines fallen against the sides of houses. My commute to the office took about an hour (which is only about 15 minutes longer than the average and yet another demerit for this area), only to find my entire building was out of commission.

I went on a search for petrol that ultimately proved fruitless, getting home around noon. I unplugged all of our gear and then set about all the energy-free tasks I have a bad habit of putting off. I cleaned the entire kitchen and prepped laundry and mail shredding.

After Wyatt got home I rewired our entertainment equipment while he assembled all our candles. Once the sun went down and the clock reached about 18:00, we geared up to head across the lake in my thirsty car. Seattle thankfully had power and was otherwise just clogged with traffic. I got gas, dropped him off to meet Marlo, and went to get sushi with Mr. Drenning. We did some cafe relaxing and then returned to the House of Goza, where it became clear I would be staying.

Wyatt and I drove back to our place yesterday afternoon to find a freezing-but-lit apartment. I slammed the heaters into overdrive, taking advantage of the 72 hour deficit in our energy bills. Everything seems back to normal now, though January’s only a couple weeks away :P

“If you did something terrible like take a disk interrupt that took five milliseconds to process, you will hear an ear-rending glitch in the output audio…you can drop an entire 17ms frame in 60fps video and it’s usually pretty hard to notice.”

“An item one year in the past is visually lighter than an item posted today. That same item will be even lighter in two years and lighter still in five.”

“…the RS4 can blast sideways with such force that you will swear you are piloting violence.”

“The CEO (and later chief software architect) brought every ounce of his ruthless, superior intellect to the job, and he didn’t suffer fools. Tallying the number of times Gates shook his head and said “fuck” became the standard metric for failure…”

I had a great conversation at work on Friday. Rory Blyth is a Channel 9 person, as he puts it, and he’s been at Microsoft for some time longer than I have. He’s also joyously verbose, which is just my brand of gin, and so our conversation was easily one of the best I’ve had since beginning this segment of my life.

We talked mostly about my frustrations with the Microsoft experience, in an attempt on my part to reconcile my Apple-fied cortex with my relatively earnest desire to appreciate Windows. I gave him some of my chief complaints in Windows Mobile (the complexity of the user experience and the apparent lack of simplicity as a design priority). I also drew out my Vista installation gripe, something I’ve pitched to just about anyone who will listen.

The brilliant thing Rory was able to do was to interpret my issues clearly and explain the thinking behind them. While I ultimately don’t agree with the motives behind why Windows Mobile or the Vista installer are built the way they are, what was more important was how Rory made me feel about it.

Previously the people I’ve spoken to at Microsoft about my issues have left me with the sense that I either didn’t ‘get it’ or that I was at the nonexistent mercy of Microsoft’s intertia. Instead, Rory explained the logic behind the design decisions and, in spite of my disagreement, I was able to see the logic for the first time.

Thanks Rory…air knuckles ;)

You have to see the movie to get the joke, even if you get the joke.