“It’s not the premier of Ontario’s job — especially Kathleen Wynne — to tell parents what’s age-appropriate for their children.” —Monte McNaughton “What is it that especially disqualifies me for the job that I’m doing? Is it that I’m a woman? Is it that I’m a mother? Is it that I have a master’s of …
Author Archives: paulschreiber
On Feedback
Jobs’s taste for merciless criticism was notorious; Ive recalled that, years ago, after seeing colleagues crushed, he protested. Jobs replied, “Why would you be vague?,” arguing that ambiguity was a form of selfishness: “You don’t care about how they feel! You’re being vain, you want them to like you.” Ive was furious, but came to …
Ain’t no party like a no-party party
Sometimes indepenence isn’t enough. Want to make sure folks know you’re not a member of a political party? Here are 74 ways people have done this: Do not wish to specify dont have one Dont have one. dont know dont no DONT NO YET Dont want to say I am not affiliated with a party …
Declaring independence … from the dictionary
Be careful when you give people a freeform text field. They’ll get creative. Here are 28 — yes, 28 — ways people spelled “independent”: endapendent IDEPENDENT Ind. Indenpent indepant Indepdendent Indepedent indepenant Independance Independanr Independence Independent independiant independient independnt Indepenent indepent Indepentant indepented Indepentent Indepependent Indipendant indipendent indopenit indpendant Indpendent Indpndt undependent
Fido’s data plans are stuck in the last decade
Not only are they suggesting MySpace as something you might use: …but $10 gets you a whopping 100 MB.
Joe Flacco has a very good day
https://s.yimg.com/re/loop/media/clips/465995473/d091a577-2e13-4251-973a-fb9259741035.mp4
Thirty-one ways to leave your lover
If you run any sort of text messaging service, you’ll have to process unsubscribe requests. The standard such messages is “STOP.” To make things easier for customers, in addition to “stop”, I wrote code that also looked for “unsubscribe”, “quit”, “cancel”, “end”, “delete” and anything beginning with the word “fuck.” (Messages merely containing the word fuck often wanted something …
Book publishers, infused with aggrieved privilege
Clay Shirky’s essay on Amazon and the book industry is so full of great lines, it’s hard to pick just one. The fact that any bookseller ever “runs out” of a book is now ridiculous. In the twenty-first century, not being able to correctly stock or distribute a product whose main ingredient is information suggests …
Continue reading “Book publishers, infused with aggrieved privilege ”
NYC 311 service request status bookmarklet
Easily check the status of your service request without going through the clunky website or fighting a CAPTCHA: NYC 311. This works best with a plugin like JSONView.
Bruce Schneier briefed congress on the NSA
I suggested that we hold this meeting in a SCIF, because they wanted me to talk about top secret documents that had not been made public. The problem is that I, as someone without a clearance, would not be allowed into the SCIF. So we had to have the meeting in a regular room. This …
Continue reading “Bruce Schneier briefed congress on the NSA”