"Yes, he’s a replicant. He was always a replicant."

Ah, the genmon Twitter stream. Worth every iota of attention, esp. when it produces gems like this: "Oh, gtd is finite state machines. What other computing paradigms can become life org methodologies".

All the great stuff is always in the comments (umm, irony? --ed.), as evidenced by this one from Hudsong on the Gizmodo post which embedded the iPhone update video featuring our favorite guy in the black shirt.

I think that guy is a robot.

I'm spending the week in Tokyo (hosted by the charming and brilliant team at Six Apart Japan), and will have an opportunity to visit Kiddy Land this afternoon. Really looking forward to it. "KIDDY LAND helps keep your mind, body and soul youthful, now & forever."

There's no way Major League Baseball could say anything else but this about Vote 756. This from Hall of Fame president Dale Petroskey:

"This ball wouldn't be coming to Cooperstown if Marc hadn't bought it from the fan who caught it and then let the fans have their say," Petroskey told The Associated Press. "We're delighted to have the ball. It's a historic piece of baseball history."

I'm sure you've read this already, but Joel Spolksy's piece explaining the Excel bug is worth linking to just to accrete an infintessimal amount of incremental PageRank to joelonsoftware.com.

Q: Shouldn't they be testing for these kinds of things?

A: I'll bet that most of the numeric testing done on the Excel team is done automatically with VBA code. Cells containing this value display as 100,000, but from VBA, they're going to look like 65,535 (since the number would be passed into the Basic runtime in binary, before the display formatting.) I'm sure there's plenty of code to test display formatting, but with a bug like this that only happens on 12 out of 18446744073709551616 possible floating point binary numbers, it's unlikely that any set of black-box tests would cover this case.

And if you make it all the way through to the end, his parting shot is good for the laugh, but perhaps a bit over the top.

The current #1 track on Amazon's music store is 1234 from Feist. You probably know this as the soundtrack to the new iPod nano ad.

Chuck Close in a New York Magazine interview: "I don't work with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work." (Via Mike.)

Kevin Kelly on sell-side advertising. Worth quoting at length and reading in full.

The simple idea is that you can craft a publication, or a reading/viewing experience, primarily by choosing and sequencing ads. Selecting the right cool ads -- not merely cool content -- is the attraction. Not just tiny adsense text ad boxes, but full page ads, or even commercials inside widgets. When I was part of the team making Wired magazine a decade ago, half the battle at launch was landing the right cool ads. We had to convince the advertisers to join (and pay) us. But what if we could just choose the cool ads we wanted, without having to ask permission? What if we could simply harvest the the best ads (measured by any metric we choose) and were paid for the ones we ran according to the traffic we brought to them?

NBC's Jeff Gaspin on how shows that fans download from their new online service will self-destruct:

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. "Kind of like 'Mission: Impossible,' only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke," Mr. Gaspin said.

« August 2007   October 2007 »

(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.