No Maps for These Territories

Hey East Coast peeps-

I’m heading out to the East Coast with Rusty, to help him move to Maryland for good. We’re leaving Tucson right after Christmas, and we’ll be arriving in Silver Spring around the 30th.

I’m thinking about hanging around town for a few days, maybe till the 4th or so, going down to DC, seeing the sights, riding the metro, eating east coast food, seeing old friends, that sort of thing.

If you’re in that area, and you want to get dinner or lunch, or show me something cool, or get a beer, drop me an email or comment on this post. I’d love to see people, it feels like I hardly ever come out east anymore. I’ll have a rental car, so I don’t need to be hauled around, either.

Let me know!

Dear Every UI designer in the English speaking world:

Use a fucking QWERTY keyboard.

Just use it. Please.

In the last week, I’ve been subjected to keyboards where the keys are in order from A-Z on the following: my Tivo, my Wii (Mario and Sonic Olympic Games), the jukebox at Fibbar’s, and my GPS.

Serious, I don’t understand. Everyone knows where the keys are on QWERTY. We’re 100x faster. It’s really hard to type on a weird keyboard where they keys are alphabetical, our brains don’t know where to look for them.

Please. Always use a QWERTY keyboard. Or I will hunt you down and gut you like an animal.

So, for no apparent reason, Youtube decided to kill its “Gadgets and Games” section of videos, even though it was always full of really great reviews, demos of gadgets, and a pretty thriving culture of geeks. You know, geeks, who make lots of videos and money, and are a really valuable core demographic.

Yeah. Gone. Of course, that’s where Noobtoob lived, up until this week. Now we’re in Entertainment, a much scarier wasteland of pirated asian TV shows, gay dudes watching gross movies and narrating them, people gossiping about celebrities and crying about Britney Spears.. Not really a place that we would stand out.

But the loyal fans are rating us highly, and we’re up at #11 top rated for the day. Considering that means we’re the #11 top rated in all of Entertainment instead of back in Gadgets and Games (where we were hitting #1 on the days we posted), it’s not too bad. I love the Noobtoob army!

Maybe we’ll even get more people who surf the top rated page and decide to try a couple dudes talking, instead of the screenshots of naked women that usually pepper the central frame of attention grabbing Youtube vids. Or maybe not. Hell, this is the internet. Boobies win every time.

We had quite a shake tonight.

5.8, centered just about damn near on my house. I’ve never seen a quake right under my feet before.

We were hanging out, I was playing Guitar Hero 3, and it felt like someone started tugging the rug out from under me. You could see the walls shaking, toilet lids falling, the TV swaying. Nothing broke, though.

They ran for the doorway, and eventually I put down the guitar and went over there as well. It certainly wasn’t a quick one, the shaking continued for 20-30 seconds.

I’m not sure they really believed me when I claimed that if the ceiling had fallen in, I would have deflected it with the power of my rock.

I can’t believe how awesome this is.

If you load up jailbreakme.com on your iPhone or iTouch, you can hack it, without a PC, over the air. It hacks the phone, and drops on installer.App, which allows you to download literally anything else you want on your phone.

Keep in mind that people didn’t think we’d be able to hack 1.1.1 at all, or as of just a week ago, the steps to do so involved a full page of painful instructions. These guys did a hell of a hacking job, so much so that I immediately gave them a Paypal donation, and up to this point, I’d never done a micropayment donation before.

Think about what this means to the hacking movement. Someone expresses interest in your hacked iPhone, but they don’t want to do it to their own, because they’re scared of “bricking” it, or they think it’s too hard.

You just send them to that website, and boom, it’s unlocked and ready to go. No pairing to the right machine with iTunes, no bricking, nothing. It’s the kind of hack that gives me goosebumps as an engineer.

I’m sure Apple will close this TIFF flaw in the next firmware update, but then the hackers will figure out something else. And so on. And what’s really funny is that they’re nice enough to fix the TIFF loophole when they hack your phone, so it actually ends up MORE secure than when you started. That’s hilarious.

Anyway, enjoy. I certainly have.

I’ll be damned, it’s been years since I’ve seen Die Hard 2, and I’m watching it tonight, and the bad guy is freaking Haywood from Shawshank Redemption (the greatest movie in the history of all time) He’s the stuttering, illiterate, numbnuts that talks the fat guy into crying that first night.

“Uh, it’s the Count of Monte Crisco.. by Alexandree Dumb-ass”.

Course, he starts this movie buck naked doing karate in a hotel room, and he looks a little tougher, but still. Freakin Haywood.

EDIT: Jeez, the guy who runs the airport tower is Senator Fred Thompson. You know, the guy who is running for president in 2008. That Fred Thompson.

This is quite the all star film.

EDIT2: Last edit, I promise. We’ve also got Chief O’Brien from Star Trek as the pilot of a plane that I don’t think is long for this world, and the evil Terminator from Terminator 2 as a bad guy. Oh wait no, John McClane just fucking killed him using a ventilation grate. John. Goddamn. McClane. For president.

God I love Die Hard movies.

We’ve got a pretty great skit this week centering around Portal, the new game by Valve.

BTW, if you haven’t played Portal, you need to. Right freaking now.

All you need to understand for the skit is that you’ve got a gun that shoots portals that let you move from one place to another in zero time, like stepping through a door. Enjoy!

Oktoberfest was freaking sweet. 1 liter beers, lots of kraut and brat and debauchery.

The crew lifts their enormous beers in toast:

 

Bruce and myself getting saucy.

 

Bates REALLY liked the desserts.

 

Lord almighty that’s a lot of people.

 

I’ve learned that next year I’m bringing my own enormous mug. All the cool people were doing it.

The whole album is here, plenty more fun pics.

I highly recommend attending next year. I’ll be there. I might even get a hotel in the city, catching a cab out of the marina was a bitch.

This is an amazing stop motion video someone did with drawing on wall with charcoal. What’s really cool is that he incorporated existing features like papers stuck on the walls, or pieces of wood, right into the movie.

It reminds me of Tool videos, which were some of the more amazing stop motion to come out of the 90′s.

Well, I guess fall has officially started. My heater kicked on tonight for the first time. The neighborhood smells great, all the houses up and down the street are having fires in their fireplaces.

When I moved in, the inspector said I shouldn’t have a fire until I got the chimney inspected. Fast forward two years and it’s never had a single blaze. I should really do that, fires are wonderful.

Also, I’m 30 now. Weird. Back when I was 22, and money grew on trees, and I was working somewhere that the “Network was the computer”, I was fully convinced that I’d be able to retire by 30. Turns out, not so much.

I used to keep a spreadsheet where I had my magic “fuck you money” number (thanks, Cryptonomicon), and I’d have it tell me my retirement date. After the dot com bust, I got sick of it telling me things like “You’ll retire in 2115″. I guess now that I’m doing better, I should dig it out and plug in some numbers. Course, it will probably say 2050.