mockriot: Archive

FarmVille

Over 38 million people play FarmVille on Facebook every month. Imagine if each of those 38 million people didn’t just farm virtually, but also made a point to buy as much of their food as they can directly from local farmers (via Farmer’s Markets, farm stands, and CSAs), and grew as much of their own food as space allowed. Wouldn’t that be great? I think so.

Sep 11th

Where should I live? Help me decide

So, Kate and I are planning to move somewhere when she finishes student teaching. We want to get out and explore a different part of the US. Our criteria are simple. We want a place that satisfies most or all of these conditions: Job opportunities for Kate (i.e., high schools - preferably public, inner-city ones) A moderately sized city (i.e., 150,000 to 1,000,000 people), preferably with...

Jul 10th

Watch

Dave Matthews GPS.

Jun 5th

On Ruby and Porn

Matt What’s-his-name who did the now infamous “CouchDB/pr0n” presentation at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference? Idiot (it was unprofessional and lame). The brouhaha since? Bordering on annoying (it was unprofessional and lame - get over it). The worst part? People keep spelling “porn” with a 0 and a misplaced r. Seriously, people, it’s spelled porn....

Apr 29th

Apr 16th

Apr 4th

Want to buy a blog?

So, last November, I started a blog about netbooks… mostly, because I wanted to buy a netbook and wanted to do more research into them and create a place where I could go for all the latest netbook news. Unfortunately, from the start I didn’t have enough time for it. So I hired a friend to do the actual blogging. And he’s done an absolutely amazing job (especially considering...

Mar 26th

SXSWi Notes: Can Social Media End Racism?

By far the most interesting panel I attended at SXSWi this week was one called, “Can Social Media End Racism?” It featured Kety Esquivel of the National Council of La Raza, Phil Yu of Angry Asian Man, Jay Smooth of Ill Doctrine, and was moderated by Latoya Peterson of Racialicious.com. I haven’t had time to really think about everything I heard and come up with something to...

Mar 17th

Mar 4th

New job

So, today I am starting a new job. I may still blog from time to time at various places around the web (I am a writer at heart, after all), but blogging is no longer my full-time gig. As of today, I am officially the Community Manager and Product Evangelist at DandyID, an identity management startup based in my hometown of Providence, RI. It’s surreal to have a job with a real office...

Feb 16th

Some sort of stir fry sauce

I came up with this sauce for a stir fry the other day using what I had in the house. It was quite tasty, so I thought I’d share. Just mix together the following: 1/4 cup soy sauce 2 tsp. brown sugar 1/4 tsp. ground ginger 1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes 1/2 tsp. sesame oil 1/4 tsp. lemon juice 1 tbsp. corn starch 1/4 tsp. salt pinch black pepper You can use this sauce over whatever...

Dec 18th

Watch

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan, armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck, snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced John to do an interview. This was in the midst of Lennon’s “bed-in” phase, during which John and Yoko were staying in hotel beds in an effort to promote peace. 38 years later, Jerry has produced a film about it. Via.

Dec 9th

Creamy Wild Rice and Barley Stew

I made up this recipe tonight for dinner, and it came out well, so I thought I’d share. Feel free to let me know how it went to suggest any changes. 1 medium onion, diced 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 cup pearl barley 1 cup long grain and wild rice 4 cups vegetable or chicken broth 2 cups water 1 vegetable or chicken bullion cube 1 can cream of mushroom soup 1 tbsp. dried parsley 1 tsp. dried...

Nov 24th

Man tries to pay bill with spider drawing →

If you like funny things, then read this. It’s probably funny, and definitely a thing.

Nov 22nd

Don't sneeze. Smallest. Sculptures. Ever. →

Nov 19th

TigerLaunch is cool

A few days ago I posted about my experiences with my new(ish) Mac. I wrote a long list of things I really dig about it, and things I am not so keen on. One of the things I was less than thrilled about is that there is no easy way to access all of your applications. Browsing the Apps folder is clumsy, and the Dock quickly gets overcrowded. (I especially don’t want launch icons cluttering...

Nov 17th

Nov 14th

1 note

Nov 14th

My Mac

I’m hesitant to call myself a “Mac convert” — I used Macs when I was film school at Ithaca College and was the “support guy” in the Mac lab at the Unversity of Rhode Island, plus I have not developed any sort of fanboyism or brand loyalty to Apple. I did, however, recently purchase my first Mac. I early September I bought a Macbook (a plain vanilla white one...

Nov 10th

1 note

Nov 5th

Oct 30th

“By losing the ability to speak, I have increased my ability to communicate.”

– Roger Ebert

Oct 24th

Sharpie basement... →

This is really, really cool — via @marshallk

Sep 26th

I have had a lot of respect for Techcrunch and ReadWriteWeb, but their new second-string authors aren’t anywhere as smart as the people who got them to their current level of success. - Tim O’Reilly That was Tim O’Reilly talking about a recent Bernard Lunn post over at ReadWriteWeb. Since I was the first full-time writer for RWW other than Richard, let’s just pretend...

Sep 25th

Sep 18th

So, the Parallels Transporter refuses to work (there’s 12 hours of my life I’ll never get back). I guess now I’ll just install XP Pro and transfer over the stuff I need manually. Good thing I bought that 8gb thumb drive the other day. :)

Sep 7th

So I think I’m finally starting to recover from my 43 hour journey to Melbourne, Australia… and I leave in 2 days. D’oh.

Aug 25th

The Olympics is Ruining Baseball

Bad enough that this might be the final year for my favorite sport in the Olympics, but they’re also playing with the sanctity of the game itself. Apparently, the IBAF is so concerned by long games that they’re changing the rules for extra innings. Each team’s at-bat in the 11th inning and beyond will begin with runners on first and second bases. Teams may start the 11th at any...

Aug 6th

Where did our attention spans go?

Is the Internet making Attention Deficit Disorder the norm? It would certainly seem that way. Our attention spans are eroding and the web may be to blame. With services like Twitter and 12seconds.tv it’s no wonder — the new crop of microcontent applications appear to made specifically for a populace with an attention span of zero. I talk about the disappearing attention span in a...

Jul 25th

Eww, seriously... →

Yelp just lost one respect point.

Jul 14th

Here we go...

Time to announce where I’m going to be doing my blogging post-ReadWriteWeb. The answer? SitePoint. SitePoint is a huge web development community, and I’ve been brought on board as Lead Blogger to push out a new focus on their blogs toward web tech news and analysis (the same sort of stuff I’ve been writing for the past year over at RWW). I’ve been a regular on...

Jul 10th

Watch

Children don’t want universal healthcare

Jul 1st

This is a terrible idea. If it goes through I forsee the number of spam email addresses I have to blacklist at my forum going up 2 trillion fold.

Jun 26th

It's official

Richard MacManus just put up the official farewell post, so it’s now official: I’m leaving ReadWriteWeb. I’ll still be blogging, just for another outfit. I’ll talk more about my future plans here soon (though enough people know them that it won’t be surprising if it leaks out). :)

Jun 20th

Just a little ahead of his time... →

Jun 18th

We can all see into the future, apparently →

Jun 2nd

Michael Chricton on death of newspaper industry... →

May 30th

Last night while writing this, Jurassic Park decided to relocate to my living room. I’m talking about a bug. No, wait, not a bug. A prehistoric arthropod is more like what I went to battle with at 2am. We’re talking 1.5 inches long, had about 50 legs, and moved really, really fast. I broke my girlfriend’s shoe in my epic fight with this beastie. (I won, the thing is now...

May 24th

Now with comments... maybe

I added comments to my Tumblr blog today via Disqus. First impressions were very good. Adding the comments was a breeze, even for a not-super-technical person like myself. It took literally 3 minutes from sign up to deployment. Everything seemed to be working fine, but now a mysterious issue has cropped up: comments are disappearing from the site. The comments still exist (see here for...

May 22nd

I wonder why the World Wide Telescope site is using Flash for video. Did Microsoft forget they created Silverlight?

May 14th

Bioshock Movie

This could be the first video game to movie tansition that actually works. Bioshock has a cool story and has a great atmosphere. Plus, Gore Verbinski did a pretty good job turning a theme park ride into an entertaining summer blockbuster — and he has more to work with for this. Also, the writer of The Aviator is in talks to pen the screenplay… very cool.

May 9th

Irony. →

Apr 29th

10 inch EEE PC coming →

Ok, we started at 7 inches, then 9 inches… now 10. Isn’t the point of a subnotebook to be smaller than a regular notebook? Asus, you have to stop making it bigger.

Apr 21st

Apr 19th

The term “bitchmeme” is as obnoxious (or maybe even more) than the things themselves.

Apr 19th

Seriously, Alexa… you just figured out in the last couple of months that ranking data based solely on a toolbar that has long since been replaced by Google’s as the most popular browser toolbar has rendered your stats grossly inaccurate? (And I mean more so than every other public analytics data provider — all of which are inaccurate in their own ways.) Really? Because...

Apr 17th

Watch

Foam. Lots and lots of foam.

Apr 16th

One thing this blog has taught me so far: I use the word “pretty” waaay to much.

Apr 15th