Joel Housman

Front-end Web Developer, iOS Developer, Man About Internet

Posts from the “geek culture” Category

Comments Still Off

Posted on January 4th, 2012

MG Siegler, writing on his blog ParisLemon: Here’s the thing: while some try to paint comments as a form of democracy, that’s bullshit. 99.9% of comments are bile. I’ve heard the counter arguments about how you need to curate and manage your comments — okay, I’m doing that by not allowing any. MG’s post is very short and therefore I do not want to quote the entire post here, verbatim, but the last paragraph is also important. He basically makes the same point that I’ve made here before. If you wish to comment on a post you see here, do so via Twitter, or your own blog, or your LiveJournal site…whatever, I don’t care. The vast majority of people do not read blog comments…

The Greatest Paper Map of the United States You’ll Ever See

Posted on January 3rd, 2012

Seth Stevenson, writing for Slate: American mapmaking’s most prestigious honor is the “Best of Show” award at the annual competition of the Cartography and Geographic Information Society. The five most recent winners were all maps designed by large, well-known institutions: National Geographic (three times), the Central Intelligence Agency Cartography Center, and the U.S. Census Bureau. But earlier this year, the 38th annual Best of Show award went to a map created by Imus Geographics—which is basically one dude named David Imus working in a farmhouse outside Eugene, Ore. Here is an example of part of the map, the state of Pennsylvania. Please avoid buying one of these for about 10 more minutes (just long enough for me to order my copy before they sell…

an update

Posted on December 28th, 2011

I missed this yesterday because I was visiting with friends back home until late last night and then spent most of today on the interstate driving back from southern Virginia. Mike Krahulik (Gabe), has posted an update to the Ocean Marketing saga over at Penny Arcade: I just wanted to post an update with some of the stuff that has happened over on my end with regards to all this Ocean Marketing stuff. Around midnight last night Paul sent me a mail saying that I could expect to hear from their attorneys. As of right now that still has not happened and honestly I don’t expect it will. Our attorneys (who are real people with an office and everything) are ready should it get…

Another Statement From Louis C.K. (December 21, 2011)

Posted on December 22nd, 2011

Louis C.K, writing on his website: hi. So it’s been about 12 days since the thing started and yesterday we hit the crazy number. One million dollars. That’s a lot of money. Really too much money. I’ve never had a million dollars all of a sudden. and since we’re all sharing this experience and since it’s really your money, I wanted to let you know what I’m doing with it. People are paying attention to what’s going on with this thing. So I guess I want to set an example of what you can do if you all of a sudden have a million dollars that people just gave to you directly because you told jokes. So I’m breaking the million into four pieces.…

A Statement From Louis C.K. (December 13, 2011)

Posted on December 13th, 2011

Louis C.K., writing on his website: It’s been 4 days. A lot of people are asking me how it’s going. I’ve been hesitant to share the actual figures, because there’s power in exclusive ownership of information. What I didn’t expect when I started this was that people would not only take part in this experiment, they would be invested in it and it would be important to them. It’s been amazing to see people in large numbers advocating this idea. So I think it’s only fair that you get to know the results. Also, it’s just really cool and fun and I’m dying to tell everybody. I told my Mom, I told three friends, and that wasn’t nearly enough. So here it is. Spoiler…

Nest: Initial Impressions

Posted on November 21st, 2011

Brett Terpstra, writing on his blog: Once the Nest is wired up, you just tap it and setup begins. The longest part of the installation was entering my wifi password using the dial, and even that was under a minute. It asks you a few questions about your system (gas or electric, forced air or non, etc.) and boom, it’s ready to go. I so want one of these.