Several tips in Hit the Road, Mac (April 4, 2005; May 2005 issue, pp. 54–61)
Joe Kissell
Nose to the Grindstone
Although I never intended to update this blog as frequently as Interesting Thing of the Day, it’s looking like the next few months will be an especially lean time. I’m working on several new ebooks and articles that have quite challenging deadlines, and my free time is unbelievably limited. I currently anticipate that around June 1 my schedule will become significantly more relaxed, but until then, expect very few new posts here.
Frackin': My new favorite word
OK, I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve gotten sucked into the new Battlestar Galactica series. I had to watch at first just to see what the SciFi Channel had done to the series I knew and loved as a kid. (A female Starbuck?! What in the gods’ names could they be thinking?) I’ve been genuinely impressed with almost every aspect of the show—the amazingly realistic visual effects, the interesting story lines, the clever twists. But most of all, I’ve enjoyed hearing the characters cuss.
Rather than simply sanitizing the scripts of all four-letter words, the writers wisely chose to assume that, this being a different time and place, different vocabulary could be considered profane. Hence: frack. In every episode, you’ll hear things like “No frackin’ way!” and “Oh man, we’re really fracked!” and “What the frack are you doing?” And because these lines are delivered without the slightest irony or humor, we buy them as real swearing. Improbably, it works extremely well.
Thus, I’m giving up “flippin'” for “frackin'”—at least for the time being. Oh, you think that’s silly? Go frack yourself.
Goodbye, Jef Raskin
I just read the sad news that Jef Raskin passed away on Saturday, apparently after a long illness. Jef led the team that developed the original Macintosh, though he left Apple long before the product shipped. He also wrote The Humane Interface, which I read about a year ago. Although Jef’s ideas had become rather odd of late, he has for years been one of my heroes for championing sensible computer interfaces. Along with folks like Don Norman, Jef was one of those people who helped to remind the computer industry that actual human beings—not just geeks—need to use their products.
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