muddylemon

Online Audio Is A Poor Format For Learning Code

Saw a link to a "radio show" about Advanced OO Patterns. I thought that was an odd format for a topic like that. Online audio presentations are great for ideas that live mostly inside your head, but code you usually need to write down. I clicked the…

Two Player Game

When I was a kid my dad bought us a video game system for Christmas. This was in the early eighties -- the height of the Atari era. We got a Coleco-vision. It came with Donkey Kong. We were lucky that it came with a game because there weren't any…

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder. No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow. This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo but he's…

Lying At The Barbershop

The guy that usually cuts my hair wasn't in today. I always wait for him when I go in. Not because he's a particularly skillful barber, but because of an awkward moment that happened the first time I went to that barbershop. I had gone in for a…

The Once A Year Card

Are you the sort of person that never remembers to buy cards? Birthdays, Christmas, Get Well.... it just doesn't occur to you. It's not that you don't love the people in your life, you're just not the sort to express it by buying stationery. Here's…

For You Mamasita

Corpo de Mujer Cuerpo de mujer, blancas colinas, muslos blancos, te pareces al mundo en tu actitud de entrega. Mi cuerpo de labriego salvaje te socava y hace saltar el hijo del fondo de la tierra. Fui solo como un túnel. De mí huían los pájaros y en…

Christopher Hitchens Lived

I always knew there was a risk in the bohemian lifestyle... I decided to take it because it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored — it stopped other people being boring. It would make me want to prolong the conversation and enhance the…

Scale and Perspective

“It takes these very simple-minded instructions—’Go fetch a number, add it to this number, put the result there, perceive if it’s greater than this other number’––but executes them at a rate of, let’s say, 1,000,000 per second. At 1,000,000 per…

PHP Gravatar Class

I was recently working on a small side project when I ran across a need for a php implementation of a class that would produce Gravatar urls. Generating Gravatar urls is not a complicated affair. In fact, it's not out of the question to write a…

Occupy The Future

We need a course correction. The world is changing and technology is introducing new ways of distributing power and ideas. In some ways a correction is inevitable. Then only question is what direction we're going to pick. In times of great…

falling back

I like daylight savings time because it reminds me that my perception of time is a completely arbitrary abstraction based on the base 60 / 12 number system of a dead civilization which I have to translate into base 10 numerals in my head because my…

Why Start Up In Saint Louis?

Traditionally, St. Louis has made its fortune on the rivers. It's easy to see why. Sitting at the confluence of the two largest rivers in North America, during the height of the river trade, St. Louis attracted immigrants from all over, new…

Débrouillard

Débrouillard is what every plongeur wants to be called. A débrouillard is a man who, even when he is told to do the impossible, will se débrouiller \--- get it done somehow. \--- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London

How To Stand Out

[caption id="attachment_489" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Adam Lisagor as Photographed by Noe Montes"][/caption] "At each creative decision, ask whether you're doing it a certain way because that's the way you've seen it done before. If…

How To Find New Customers Online

How do you get your product or pitch in front of potential customers online? It comes down to "Where are your users?" and for each answer to that question "Can I afford to reach out to them here?" Most people who know the gist of online marketing,…

Explanations are a UX Smell

Have you ever added someone as a "Contact" on Flickr? It's a confusing experience. The core of the problem is the word "contact." When I call someone a "contact" I assume that I'm going to... well, "contact" them at some point. That's not at all…

Regarding our current economic policies...

If thou seest the oppression of the poor, and violent perverting of judgment and justice in a province, marvel not at the matter; for he that is higher than the highest regardeth, and there are higher than they. Moreover the profit of the earth is…

CSS, Forms, Borders and Biographies

This is just a bit of internet mix tape of interesting things I've read recently: Little CSS Stuff Newcomers Get Confused About If you're a pro, it's easy to forget the confusion you felt when you just started learning CSS. Just for fun, let's try…

Accumulated Links

HTML5Pattern \- A list of patterns that can be applied to many common form inputs To celebrate the 12th birthday of metafilter @mathowie bought the domain of the first site ever submitted: cat-scan.com Very long but good article about…