I never knew

Put in an order with amazon.ca and went a bit overboard with the non-fiction. Memefull box, late in the game on most of them but I hate paying the extra for hardcover. Finally had to resign myself.

• Freakonomics
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Blink
• A Short History of Progress
• The Medici Effect

Safety of War

Wow. m-c’s podcast is an Odeo featured podcast this week right along Salon, The Today Show with Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, the Republicans, Democrats and BBC Business. Last month she was in Spin. Well done.

(In case she’s not there next week or by the time you read it. I was a bit teteux and put a screenshot here

Here’s a post about some blog readership statistics that fit much more closely what I’ve seen in the “real world”, i.e. not my circle of friends which includes too many bloggers to be realistic. According to that study, only 6% of internet users read blogs regularly and 50% know what a blog is. Also:

That means that almost 2/3 of blog readers don’t realize they are reading a blog. It is a fairly common theory amongst folks analyzing the blogosphere that blog readership is underreported in surveys – but Charlie’s team found a way to quantify that with staggering results.

Which is good. It could mean that we’ve gone from “having a home page” to “having a blog” to blogs becoming publishing tools that are used for a variety of sites before the majority of people even realized what blogs are. Their use could be widespread enough that we won’t be explaining what basic blogs are, just publishing content to the web using tools that happen to have evolved from blogs.

Denis Cybercodeur se joint aux Mackeux et se promet déjà de ne plus jamais retourner du côté sombre (et buggé). Bienvenue. Je sais que parfois mon opinion de zèlé du Mac perd un peu de valeur because “cultisme” mais sérieux, parmis les gens de web autour de moi c’est très coloré argent. Du Powerbook partout, les designers, les gens d’interface (lire: html, css, standards, usability) sont déjà convertis et certains “vrais programmeurs” s’y mettent ou ramasse les sous pour le faire. Faire du ouèbe ca va mieux sur un Mac. Point.

Kristian Gravenor proposes some pretty easy steps to counter the encroaching visual crappiness in Montréal. Some very good points in there. I’m especially discusted with all the litter everywhere, I think there are fewer trash cans than in years passed but come on, you can’t carry your f*ing coffe cup or goddamn Metro paper hafl a block further?? It should be legal to hit people when you see them dumping something ;)

(via montréal blog)

Très très excellente nouvelle aujourd’hui. Pas directement moi-related (avant que vous commenciez à spéculer) mais super le fun comme news.

Very cool new project coming up for PBS’ Cringely with NerdTV. He gives some details in his column. It’s a new techy show, distributed on the web under a Creative Commons licence so you can reuse it for non-commercial purposes. It will also be available in a couple of different versions and in audio only formats. Looking forward to it.

NerdTV is pretty much as I described it back in 2002: a downloadable video show that features long-form interviews with notable nerds. I was definitely ahead of the curve with that download feature. What has changed about the show is just the episode length, which is now about an hour up from 20 or so minutes, and the bandwidth required, now 183 kilobits-per-second up from 128. Pilot after pilot showed that 20 minutes simply wasn’t enough time while an hour feels about right. And the extra bandwidth was always needed for the 320-by-240 video window, only now it is finally cheap enough that I can afford it.

But NerdTV isn’t really podcasting, is it? Well, we’ll be doing that, too. It requires almost no effort at all to offer audio-only feeds of NerdTV shows, so we’ll be doing those in AAC, MP3, and ogg vorbis formats, again starting September 6th.

I ment to post about this when I got them but forgot. Anyway, this guy ordered a shirt from Veer, it shrunk and he reviews his support emails for us (nice domain name). It matches my experience with them. Superb.

First, I browsed through the site, chose 2 and started completing the order when I was informed one of tshirts wasn’t in stock. Since I didn’t want to pay for the shipping on only one shirt I gave up and closed the browser tab. 2 days later I got an email from them (I was logged in when browsing the site) saying the missing shirt was in stock and including a link back to the shopping cart. Sweeeeet.

I completed the order on a sunday night (US company) and got both tshirts the following Wednesday (in Canada). Sweeet again. They were packed in a cool bag and included a nice envelope and well designed catalog. Great job. I’m not a big fan of American Apparel Ts but I’m still super happy with these two.

Just caught part of a documentary about the Oka crisis, some interesting stuff in there and kind of incredible how far 1990 already is. Man do does SQ cars look old! Anyway, just looked it up in Wipedia and, of course, there’s an article about the whole thing that even mentions the movie I saw. Surprise surprise, it’s not on Britannica.