I'm moving!

No longer shacked by Google or Blogger, I now have set up a new blog, hosted on my server. I've also imported all my Blogger posts, and am working on importing my way-old posts back when I rolled my own blog.

http://www.matthew-steele.com:8080/wordpress/

If you still use bookmarks, update 'em. If you've moved to RSS feeds, update 'em.

Lucky driver

Easter rabbit carrot cake

Poor bunny

Moblogging... The future is now!

Pulp Fiction as typography

This is cool:


But this is even cooler:

Facebook, you've just gotten cooler

So I just noticed that Facebook is on the RSS bandwagon, and you can pull up RSS feeds on pretty much everything that's out there. The cool one is syndicating all notes from your friends, which I kinda just added to Bloglines (my preferred RSS reader of choice).

This is awesome. It's so much more simple than trying find, person by person, blogs or Xangas or whatever and adding them individually. Anyone who friends me and then writes a note is automagically sent to Bloglines for my immediate consumption. It's almost an entire validation of social networking in my view.

Plus, Facebook's got a pretty slick looking API, so whenever I finally get around to designing a real website and getting off Blogger, I can put some freakin' sweet gadgets on my page.

Facebook++

I am the savior of the modern economy

You might have seen Slate's recent article on the current state of the trucking industry. Essentially, it's not doing all that fantastic. Shipments are down, road congestion is up, and tonnage volume is way down from a year before.

On the other hand, the stocks of railroad companies are soaring, and fast. Check it out:

But even as truckers encountered speed-checks, railroads closed the books on a record-breaking year. The fourth quarter was the occasion for particular chest-thumping from the big railroads. On Jan. 25, Union Pacific reported excellent fourth-quarter earnings: Operating income soared 52 percent from the 2005 fourth quarter, and metrics like car loads and average revenue per car were higher.

Slate's explanation is all of the usual suspects, like increased demand for ethanol and coal; commodities that railroads haul almost exclusively. But I think this explanation of why UP is doing so well recently misses one major factor:

Me.

Think about it. Since I started working for UP, its stock has risen almost 20%. Other metrics, like velocity, fuel efficiency, and car loads, have increased as well. And my participation in this summer's Corporate Cycling Challenge helped the company destroy its competition. Take that, Nebraska Med Center.

Do you think it's a "coincidence" that since I joined the company, disgraced Bush Administration officials have decided to rebuild their credibility by joining UP's board of directors?

The only conclusion I can draw from this overwhelming body of evidence is that I am the savior of not only the Union Pacific Railroad, but the modern economy as well. I await my call from Paul Wolfowitz and Ben Bernake and the other usual suspects. I'm pretty sure they have my phone number.

I hear consultation to ex-neocons pays pretty well, too.

Frickin' Frackin' Freezing

This is ridiculous:

Jack in a box

If you don't see a Youtube video, go to the original post here

Conversation

The Economist magazine recently published an article that questioned whether the art of conversation was dying. In their words:

American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called “Conversation: A History of a Declining Art”, in which he worried that “neither digital music players nor computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that effect.” A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it “striking” that past generations would “speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might speak of an evening spent browsing the internet”.

In college I was a student of the art of conversation. Sort of. As a debater, they taught you that effective communication and persuasion happened by talking as fast as you can, never looking at your audience, and calling your opponents racists and homophobes.

As you can see, I most definitely know what I'm talking about. So I can say without a doubt that conversation and effective communication aren't dead. I give you proof. What's that, you say? How can a comic about videogames save discourse?

To this, I say, stop asking dumb questions. Tycho's posts which run alongside each comic are the stuff conversation books are made of. He dabbles in metaphor the way my kitten dabbles with my foot, which is to say: he sinks his teeth into it with a force previously unimaginable. Take his description of using an MP3 player:

Most of my observations are the sort of thing anyone with a substantial portable player already knows, and they aren't unique to the Zune. Access to that much audio without being tethered to a computing mothership is decadent. It's decadent like eating gold. Seriously, like if you ate some gold and weren't even that hungry to begin with - just hunched over a yawning treasure chest, chowing on doubloons for no reason.

If you read the previous paragraph and your faith in human discourse was not renewed, then you not only are wrong, but are alien to me.