UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Daring Fireball tipped me off to an interesting new site, Hunch.

Hunch is a site to help you make decisions. Naturally the first question I tried out with it was one of Gruber’s suggestions: Should I buy an Apple iPhone or a Palm Pre?

It became pretty clear to me as I answered the dispassionate, objective questions, what the answer was going to be. And I was right:

However, the reality is that I own an iPhone, and have scarcely even considered looking at a Pre, even for the sake of simple curiosity. So while the questions Hunch asked seemed dispassionate and objective, and let’s for the moment assume that they are, the experience leads me to a few questions of my own:

1. Who wrote the questions? And how did they verify the accuracy of their answers?
2. What criteria led them to choose the questions they did? Were there any other suitable questions that were omitted? Do the questions asked reasonably cover the scope of factors that may go into the decision?
3. How are the questions weighted? Assuming they are not weighted at all, should they be? And should the weight of the questions be left to the user, rather than the author?

These are just a few of the many questions not answered by the Hunch experience.

I’m not at all suggesting that the site is a bad idea, or that it’s necessarily poorly implemented. This is just some food for thought on the merits of taking someone else’s advice when making a personal decision. It also reminds us to be wary of fully placing our trust in the All-Powerful Oz Internet. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

My loyal reader(s) may have noticed that this blog now has a new name: Underdog of Perfection.

For years I’ve referred to my rambling blog on a scattered assortment of topics as “Blather,” which seemed (and still is) a perfectly suitable name. However, in recent months I’ve branched out and created two new, completely separate, and much more conceptually focused blogs: 52 Coffees and Hall of Prog.

In light of this development, it seemed appropriate that I should come up with a name that gives my original, primary blog a stronger identity. The name I have chosen, as mentioned above, is “Underdog of Perfection.”

So, what does “Underdog of Perfection” mean? I’m not totally sure myself. But I’m a recovering perfectionist (yes, it’s like an addiction), and I almost always root for the underdog, so it all just seemed to fit. The blog has a new subtitle as well: “A blog on technology and geek culture by room34.” And so the transition from the all-too-common meatspace moniker of Scott Anderson to my self-applied online pseudonym room34 is complete.

Future posts on this blog will mostly cover the same territory I’ve been pacing around in for the past seven years: technology (with an emphasis on Apple), video games (with an emphasis on Atari and Nintendo), ’80s nostalgia, and a liberal sprinkling of… uh… liberal politics. Enjoy!

Here we have a message from someone who is, quite possibly, the world’s biggest douchebag:

And just for what it’s worth, I’ve stolen this image the right way: I downloaded it and am serving it from my own site.

I know a bit about bandwidth theft myself, as more than once someone has decided to link directly to either the image, the audio, or both, from my Christmas with Chewbacca page. I’ve since taken actions to prevent direct linking to content from my site, and I encourage other site owners to do the same.

(Credit where credit is due: the trail of the above image led from here to here to here via here.)

Update: After a bit of research, it seems to me that this may be a hoax or an old meme that’s been circulating for years, or both. But regardless, there obviously are people who think this way, even if they may not be so brazen as to threaten legal action, because bandwidth theft is a pretty common occurrence.

I’ve never really watched Venture Bros. on Adult Swim, although I’ve long suspected that I might like it if I gave it a chance.

That suspicion was heightened tonight as I perused the DVDs at Target. To any average person, this cover design may fall somewhere between inexplicably weird and just generally poor. But to me, and to many other 30-somethings like me, it grabs you by the eyeballs and drags you over to pick it up. So authentic! Did they carry it over on the ba– oh holy crap, they did! Fake ’80s video game screenshot and all!

Yes, the package design for the Venture Bros. Season 3 DVD set is a faithful — no, absolutely dead on — reference to the classic package designs of late ’70s/early ’80s box designs for games from the Atari 2600. Or, to speak more accurately to the time period of the designs, the Atari Video Computer System. The solid, garish box color; the font; the overall layout; the watercolor collage art. It’s all vintage ’70s, vintage Atari, 100% perfect. They even faithfully reproduced (graphically, not physically) the fact that the boxes were always already smashed when you bought them at the store.

If you’re not familiar with those box designs, here are a few reference points for you (from AtariAge):

(And yes, since you’re wondering, I did go out of my way to pick six of the lamest Atari games I could think of.)

Facebook on the iPhone is a profoundly dissatisfying experience. The Facebook iPhone app is no good (at least it’s free), the iPhone-optimized Facebook website (http://iphone.facebook.com) is no good, and using the regular Facebook site on the iPhone is not exactly optimal either. Come to think of it, the regular site has its problems even when you’re viewing it on a computer.

But I’ve found a solution. There is, of course, one more way to access Facebook: the “standard” mobile version that gets served up to the mobile browsers in more feeble cellphones than the iPhone. Turns out you can access the mobile site from an iPhone, and it offers a lot of features that the iPhone-optimized site lacks. I suspect Facebook has abandoned further development on the iPhone-optimized site given that they’re also developing a full-fledged iPhone app, but since the app sucks, it’s a lose-lose situation for iPhone users.

As I said, you can access the regular mobile version from your iPhone, but if you just go to its main URL — http://m.facebook.com — from an iPhone, it automatically redirects you to http://iphone.facebook.com. So you have to trick it, which isn’t hard. Here’s the magic URL you’ll want to bookmark in Mobile Safari (and maybe on your computer as well):

Enjoy.