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.

Merry Christmas.

Person of the Year

You may have heard that Time Magazine decided to name me as Person of the Year. That's right, me. Well, I guess you're Person of the Year too, but it's mainly me. See, Time put a little mirror on the magazine cover, so whoever looks at it obtains the honor. I've been going to every Borders in Omaha and turning the magazine around to make sure no one else can become Person of the Year.

You might have also heard that there's been a lot of controversy regarding their decision. See, I was selected as Person of the Year because of my contributions to society through the revolution that is known as Web 2.0. But some people think that rounded corners, light blue fonts, and mirrored images aren't as important to the news as other stuff, like North Korea testing the bomb, or whatever else is going on over there.

Well, I think they made the right decision. As Person of the Year, I have the intelligence and expertise to make this judgement. And I'm already taking advantage of the position for all it's worth. I've updated my resume, and am using my newfound title as a doctor would. Matthew Steele, PotY just rolls off the tongue.

And in the tradition of other award recipients, I have already engaged in illicit physical activity with the 1988 Planet of the Year recipient, Earth. And don't even ask what I did to the 1982 Person of the Year. Let's just say my computer's input slot will never be the same.

But I do have one problem with the award. I don't think it's the first time I've seen this...

Wiiiii.....

So, I bought a Wii.

I decided that lines are for suckers, and standing in lines is for suckers with big coats and hoods. Granted this was after 3 Sundays in a row where I stood outside a Target or Best Buy to get one, but failed for one reason or another. But my point still stands. Suckers.

I decided to set up an overly elaborate and unnecessarily complicated system on the Internets wherein I would be alerted any time an Interweb retailer updated their Wii stocks, so I could be one of the people to buy it. One of the problems is that there's a lot of nerds on the Intertubes who had the same idea as me, so stocks of the Wii were snatched up faster than a kid near the Neverland ranch.

Eventually I beat those nerds at their own game, and bought one through Circuit City. It was great; I got an extra Wiimote and Nunchuck in order to break two televisions with it. And shipping was free through FedEx. Sweet, thought I.

Well, no one told me the free shipping was through FedEx's "SmartPost" system. Apparently the requirement to Post Smart is to be as dumb as humanly possible. Check out the route my package has gone so far:
And it started in Oklahoma.

:-(