Month: March 2008

Flashback to the VHS Web

Lately, I’ve started collecting old VHS tapes about the Internet from the early- to mid-1990s. While most of these are pretty corny — think Gabe and Max’s Internet Thing — they also inadvertently captured pieces of the web that don’t exist anywhere else. The Internet Archive’s earliest snapshots were in late 1996, so anything before that is extremely sparse. The videos, silly as they are, still represent valuable documentation of the early web.

so awesome.

The Right Stuff

The Last Psychiatrist: How To Take Ritalin Correctly is a great little essay on how to use Ritalin for studying. It is great not because of any particular advice, but because it demonstrates how we ought to approach the use of cognition enhancers. Just swallowing them and expecting mental perfection will not work; like all drugs there is an interaction between set and setting, in particular what task we are doing. This means we need to know what enhancers work for what kind of activity, and perhaps tailor the activity to the enhancer slightly. In a culture where enhancers are routinely used this kind of advice would be normal studying technique advice. As for the exact advice, it seems sound from my reading, although I can’t claim to understand the attention metaphors very well.

advice on the use of cognition enhancers

IE Apologists

98% of the world will install IE8 and say, “It has bugs and I can’t see my sites.” They don’t give a flicking flick about your stupid religious enthusiasm for making web browsers which conform to some mythical, platonic “standard” that is not actually implemented anywhere. They don’t want to hear your stories about messy hacks. They want web browsers that work with actual web sites

spolsky is such a moron. it never fails to amaze how many people listen to a guy selling bug trackers.

Chinese Censors

So why were they unable to show any film of Chinese violence against the “peaceful” monks? Tibet is brimming with Canadians and San Franciscans; no doubt they would have captured any such violence.The lack of actual evidence doesn’t stop the western media from making allegations, though.

as usual, joshua digs deeper. we are clearly not hearing the whole story about tibet