This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on July 12, 2010). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.
Sometime between July 4th and July 12th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- Invincible Apple: 10 Lessons From the Coolest Company Anywhere: "Phil Schiller, Apple's longtime head of marketing, put [Mike] Evangelist on a team charged with coming up with ideas for a DVD-burning program that…would later become iDVD. 'We had about three weeks to prepare,' Evangelist says. He and another employee went to work creating beautiful mock-ups depicting the perfect interface for the new program. On the appointed day, Evangelist and the rest of the team gathered in the boardroom. They'd brought page after page of prototype screen shots showing the new program's various windows and menu options, along with paragraphs of documentation describing how the app would work. 'Then Steve comes in,' Evangelist recalls. 'He doesn't look at any of our work. He picks up a marker and goes over to the whiteboard. He draws a rectangle. 'Here's the new application,' he says. 'It's got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says burn. That's it. That's what we're going to make.' '"
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong: "The Seattle City Council is about to give the state permission to dig the world's largest deep-bore tunnel under downtown Seattle. Here's what the city council doesn't want you to know before they vote." I've thought the deep-bore tunnel was a disastrous idea from the get go, and this article just hammers home how right I was. Scary how committed some people are to pushing this through, no matter what.
- The Name of the Game: "'Soccer,' by the way, is not some Yankee neologism but a word of impeccably British origin. It owes its coinage to a domestic rival, rugby, whose proponents were fighting a losing battle over the football brand around the time that we were preoccupied with a more sanguinary civil war. Rugby's nickname was (and is) rugger, and its players are called ruggers–a bit of upper-class twittery, as in 'champers,' for champagne, or 'preggers,' for enceinte. 'Soccer' is rugger's equivalent in Oxbridge-speak. The 'soc' part is short for 'assoc,' which is short for 'association,' as in 'association football,' the rules of which were codified in 1863 by the all-powerful Football Association, or FA–the FA being to the U.K. what the NFL, the NBA, and MLB are to the U.S."
- Bookstore Embraces, Bucks Web: "On Monday, Once Sold Tales opened an old-fashioned walk-in bookstore, in the front of the company's main warehouse (the website business remains.) It's stocked with their orphaned books, the ones destined for the pulp factory. The price, for all books, is $1 a pound. No shipping costs, but you gotta get there in person. And by 'there,' I mean in the middle of warehouse nowhere — 22442 72nd Ave. S. in Kent."
- Mac SSD performance and TRIM in OSX: "As we've seen from previous coverage, TRIM support is vital to help SSDs maintain performance over extended periods of time — while Microsoft and the SSD manufacturers have publicized its inclusion in Windows 7, Apple has been silent on whether OS X will support it. bit-tech decided to see how SSD performance in OS X is affected by extended use — and the results, at least with the Macbook Air, are startling. The drive doesn't seem to suffer very much at all, even after huge amounts of data have been written to it."