Author: Justin

Obama Diggs You – Followup

Here’s my original post on the Digg-like Q&A page on the change.gov site.
There’s an update page now, with answers for some of the top questions:

Last week, our Open for Questions feature was particularly well-received: more than 20,000 people cast nearly 1,000,000 votes on questions posed by the community. Overall, just over 10,000 questions were voted up or down and ranked by visitors to the site.
Below are some of the top questions, and the answers that our transition team members have put together as part of the Open for Questions feature.

Go read the responses.

What makes a good teacher – followup

Malcolm Gladwell has posted a followup on his blog. Reading the comments there might be highly entertaining after a box of chardonnay but are merely dreary in the pre-coffee morning hours.
I think Gladwell has missed one of the most important differences between teachers and quarterbacks: Good ball handling skills may be ultimately detrimental to one but is definitely beneficial to the other*.
My original post on his original article is here.
*Sorry, I had to take out my Facebook frustrations somewhere.

facebook conundrum

I have a lot of n00b friends on Facebook, and I fully contend that Facebook is for n00bs and sissies. However, if I want to see photos and happenings of said friends, this is apparently the only way.
So.
I guess I’ll join and rejoice in e-props and friending the crap out of virtual pet avatars.
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Why do I hate Facebook, hi-5, and all the other socnets with such a passion? Because of little gems like this:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

– From Facebook’s TOS
So will you friend me already, or what?
UPDATE: OMG! Of all people, my brother was already a member! What a frickin’ n00b!
ANOTHER UPDATE: It appears that the great majority of Facebook users are almost as annoying as Youtube commenters.
kthxbai!!
LAST(??) UPDATE: Oh for fuck’s sake. Lawyers to serve notices on Facebook, Australian court serves documents via Facebook. If a goddamn federal justice system is using it in an official capacity, you know it’s gotta be fucked.

Foreign tw@ts at Tsukiji

Earlier this year I wrote about how foreign tourists are no longer really welcome at Tsukiji fish market. To better understand why this situation came about, I present this video sent by KTY:

At first I was going to title this post French and English tw@ts at Tsukiji, but really it’s just dumb luck that the video happened not to feature douchebag Americans. I would have paid money to have the old man slap the shit out of Pierre at the end, though, right after he claimed to not speak Japanese:
WELL THEN DO YOU SPEAK FOOTINYOASS, BIIIIOTCH?

Sweet cryer o’ mine

Some children have more annoying cries than others; that’s just the way it is. I wonder, however, if the parents of children with really annoying cries find their own children’s cries less annoying than the cries of others. It would be only natural I suppose, but it’s kind of impossible to gauge in the real world:

“Hey, you know how your kid’s crying is, subjectively, really quite annoying, right? Yeah, well do you personally find it less annoying than the sound of other, less subjectively annoying crying? Yeah? I thought that might be the case… Oh. What? You think it’s because he’s massively intelligent and superior to all other babies in the vicinity? Sure, that must be it; it couldn’t just be that he has an annoying cry… Dumbass.“

This is what happens when I overdose on baby head smell in the mornings.