Monkinetic Weblog

>Read this aloud and your inner ear, by itself, will be carrying out at least the equivalent of a billion floating-point operations per second, about the workload of a typical game console. The inner ear together with the brain can distinguish sounds that have intensities ranging over 120 decibels, from the roar of a jet engine to the rustle of a leaf, and it can pick out one conversation from among dozens in a crowded room. It is a feat no artificial system comes close to matching.

Three great things happen today! iPhone, Ratatouille, and my birthday! Yay!

DBSTalk posted an overview of a recent customer chat with Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen. One cool nugget: USB Storage support may finally come to Dish's DVR:

While checking out the site for Rands' new book, I ran across a year-old post (which I had read before) from Rands about the importance of The Cave to nerds (and men in general).

Since we're working on another adoption that will involve some very expensive travel, we had decided to start looking into deals that would help us rack up some mileage. So, Jodi found out that Dish offers some sort of mileage deal when you sign up. Cool, huh? Well, yes and no.

So yesterday, Jodi and I decided that we had had enough of being stuck in our Cox bundle, which - while being a pretty good deal - locks us into services we don't want and, after adding the HD services we want, pushes us into a price range that I'm just not comfortable paying.

cheesezombie2

Originally uploaded by redmonk

Shailesh snapped a picture of me this weekend in full cheese zombie mode. I don't know, I see a big pot of queso and I lose the capacity for rational thought.

I want to fire Cox Communications.

Dave Winer has an idea for a conference session:

John Gruber on YouTube on the iPhone

Yesterday on the Surfin' Safari blog, it was announced that the webkit nightlies have a new web inspector. This new inspector is vastly improved over the previous web inspector and is actually approaching Firefox's Firebug extension in usefulness.

Quick observation: it's funny how our early years in a community shape our views. For example: In my brain, Dave Winer is the default "Dave" on the internet. Wes Felter is the only "Wes" on the internet, and Jim Roepcke is the default "Jim". Any time I see any of these names in isolation online, these are the guys my brain puts up on the viewscreen.

I'm currently beta-testing two new Mac apps that I love and at least one is approaching "can't live without" status.

I've moved some of my longer, article-style content over to Wordpress from my Drupal site. All this stuff is also linked in the "More Monkinetic" sidebar, and points to the new locations:

Jodi and I and the kiddo went to a sneak peak showing of Ratatouille Saturday night, and I cannot encourage everyone enough to go see it. It was FANTASTIC - easily the best movie I've seen in ages. The writing is excellent, the story is both conceptually simple yet complex in its depth. Jason Kottke captures a lot of my reaction to the film in his review of Ratatouille (my apologies for the large-scale quoting, but I want to preserve these bits):

1. It's called Bajooter. How cool is that name?
2. He has fingerprints in his logo. Fingerprints FTW!
3. He's a young, indie web developer, and is writing about how to make a small web development shop work.
4. He's also writing to educate clients, which is something we web developers generally suck at.
5. He's a musician with a really cool band name.
6. He's educating me about SEO, without shoving that stupid acronym/term down my throat.
7. Fingerprints yay!