My daughter’s school is in the middle of its annual fundraiser. I’d like to encourage you to support funding public education at a level where this is no longer necessary or to make a donation or purchase through the site yourself: [URL for fundraising site]
Respectfully,
Nick Bergus
Merry Christmas! Thank you for the annual snack. It was refreshing.
I hope you have a great day. Remember to be kind to everyone, particularly your dad, who gets grumpy but means well.
[signed]
S. Claus
Brian Lam does technology writing differently at The Wirecutter. Instead of writing about every single dodad and gizmo, he writes “a list of great technology,” aiming to only tell readers what the best thing in a category is. Of course he wrote about the new iPhone:
These things are always the same. But better in small but meaningful ways. That’s all I remember from today’s news, really.
It’s also pretty much the same thing Apple says on their website and on the website of every other publication that writes about this stuff. It’s also pretty much what I wrote for the 4s and the 4 and the 3gs and the 3g, too. I feel despair when I am forced to write words that provide no service or additional value, but there’s a balancing act between saying what I think is useful and saying what people want to hear, so here we are.
Should you get one? If you want, sure.
His post is short, to the point, and not breathless, all of which is, sadly, refreshing in the world on online-gadget writing.
For a long time, because these are the kinds of things I think and worry about, I’ve wondered what would be enshrined at a hall of fame for sandwiches. And, on a long drive back from vacation following the consumption of several cheese steaks, I had some time to nail it down.
First, the criteria for candidacy:
The inductee must be a sandwich. It must involve bread with a filling. This seems obvious, but with the growth of paleo, gluten-free diets, sandwich shops selling wraps, and other trends, it’s important to be explicit. Sandwiches that use rolls or other forms of bread instead of sliced bread and open-faced sandwiches that use a single slice of bread will be considered for inclusion. “Flat bread,” the term some restaurants seem to be adopting because they don’t want to say they serve pizza, is not a sandwich.
The inductee must be an all-time-great. No second-tier, or fad sandwiches will be inducted. When looking down the list of inductees, you should see a list of sandwiches that are a who’s who of the world’s sandwiches.
The inductee should have cultural significance. While we consider the sandwich’s taste, we’re not interested in amazing-tasting sandwiches that no one has ever heard of or eaten. Regional specialties are eligible (and, often, strong candidates).
The inductee must be a canonical version of the sandwich, though some variations are acceptable. While many sandwiches are so good that they’ve spawned their own variations, the considered sandwich must be a canonical version, not a entire class of sandwiches. This, perhaps, the hardest part to lay out, but generally means that the composition of the sandwich should be understood by its name. So while hoagies or po’ boys might be mighty fine sandwiches, they are, in the end, platforms that require some explanation; you can’t simply walk into a sandwich shop, order “a hoagie” and know what exactly you’ll get. A cheeseburger, while there exist infinite variations, is understood to be a bun, a beef patty and melted cheese. This is similar how the martini might be inducted into a cocktail hall of fame. Leaving aside the gin verses vodka debate, the drink would be inducted as a whole, and a martini garnished with a twist would not be inducted separately from a martini garnished with olive. The hall is not interested in defining the One True Version of a sandwich, but, rather, the acceptable parameters for a sandwich with a specific name.
And now, the inaugural class of the International Sandwich Hall of Fame:
Reuben: rye bread, corned beef, sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, thousand island or Russian dressing
Cheese steak: Italian roll; thinly sliced beef; white American, provolone or Cheez Whiz; fried onions are optional, though encouraged
BLT: bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise
Peanut Butter and Jelly: smooth or crunchy peanut butter, strawberry or grape jelly, white or wheat sandwich bread
Cheeseburger: bun; beef patty; Cheddar or American cheese; ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, tomato, onion and pickle are optional
What would you add?
Ken Segall on Apple’s new Mac ads that have been panned by Apple loyalists:
The idea of creating a “character” from an Apple employee is… well…. damn, I can’t even say this without feeling awful… it feels like something Best Buy would do. Maybe even Dell.
I think this is the problem. When I first saw them, I thought they could easily be Microsoft ads.
Even if the ads appeal to “people who’ve never bought a Mac but are thinking about buying their first,” which John Gruber says should be the test, there are ways to appeal to that segment and to current users that don’t stoop to the normally low comedic standards of the advertising industry.
I’m not a Mac owner, though if I bought a new computer today, it would most likely be a Mac. For what it’s worth, I think the ads are dumb, but they wouldn’t make a difference to me one way or the other. I asked my wife, also not a Mac owner and less likely than I to be one, what she thought when “Mayday” came on during a break in the Olympics last night. Her response: “I thought it was dumb that a guy felt he could make up for forgetting an anniversary making a video that didn’t take any work.”
Yesterday, Twitter cut Instagram’s API access that had allowed Instagram users to easily connect to the people they followed on Twitter on the photography network. Dan Frommer suggests it was payback for Instagram’s soon-to-be owner Facebook for blocking Twitter’s ability to let its users look up their Facebook friend on Twitter.
Users’ social graphs are valuable to social networks. Allowing users to find their friends on other services benefits the users, but it also benefits social networks by making them somewhat of a canonical list of your Internet friends. But when one network grows large enough to challenge another network, the interest changes to preventing users from moving easily to the new service.
Now here’s where I make a wild speculation there might not be evidence for: do these moves actually cede power to Apple? Maybe Apple, which has shown its social-network ineptitude, doesn’t care. But Apple’s iOS 6 (and, I believe, a future OS X Mountain Lion update) integrates Facebook, Twitter and contacts, making it, perhaps the way millions of iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and Mac users move between and integrate the two services.
Marco Arment on the acquisition of a couple software companies, and his own ability to keep Instapaper independent:
If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it’s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.
The companies he mentions both sold paid Mac and iOS apps (Pulp, Wallet and Sparrow). The problem users face in this space strikes me as similar to the another point Arment made about advertisers outbidding users for their own attention.
I don’t know what Sparrow’s expected, but they knew they were competing with free when they built a paid Gmail client. Users bought the software. Development was still killed. How can users compete with that?
Update:
Rian van der Merwe writes a similar thing, more eloquently than I:
But… that’s what I did. I paid full price for every version of the Sparrow app I could find. I told everyone who would listen to buy it. I couldn’t have given them more money even if I wanted to. So, as a customer, what more could I have done to keep them running independently?
This is the core of the disappointment that many of us feel with the Sparrow acquisition. It’s not about the $15 or less we spent on the apps. It’s not about the team’s well-deserved payout. It’s about the loss of faith in a philosophy that we thought was a sustainable way to ensure a healthy future for independent software development, where most innovation happens.
While Gawker itself is guilty of abusing many of these, it’s right on about the annoying overuse of these “blog-media clichs.”
Following my Facebook sex lube incident, I’ve become the posterboy for, first, a giant tub of lube, then the future of advertising, then for Facebook’s attempts to make money with its data and then for people who sued Facebook and sorta-but-not-really won $10 million in a settlement.
I wrote in my post “Of course Facebook is happily selling me out to advertisers. That’s its business. That’s what you sign up for when make an account.”
Some people disagreed. Here’s one:
I’d totally disagree, you don’t sign up for that. Surely the lawsuit proves this, users do NOT sign up to sell adverts.
First, it’s pretty clear that Facebook’s terms of service say that you sign up for exactly that.
10. About Advertisements and Other Commercial Content Served or Enhanced by Facebook
Our goal is to deliver ads and commercial content that are valuable to our users and advertisers. In order to help us do that, you agree to the following:
1. You can use your privacy settings to limit how your name and profile picture may be associated with commercial, sponsored, or related content (such as a brand you like) served or enhanced by us. You give us permission to use your name and profile picture in connection with that content, subject to the limits you place.
2. We do not give your content or information to advertisers without your consent.
3. You understand that we may not always identify paid services and communications as such.
That’s part of the problem. Facebook’s lawyers write the terms, and users only have the choice to not use the service if they don’t agree to them.
Second, the lawsuit, and its settlement don’t prove that you don’t sign up for that, either. In fact, the lawsuit proves nothing except that Facebook is willing to settle lawsuits.
It was an settlement in which, I’m sure, Facebook admits no wrongdoing. Companies settle for a multitude of reasons, including to avoid admitting wrong doing, to avoid a bad image from public trials, and to avoid setting legal precedents. It’s possible that a trial would have found that Facebook’s sponsored stories violate some right or law, but by settling, Facebook has avoided letting that become established; it’s still, I believe, an open question.
This isn’t to say that I don’t agree with the writer’s conclusion. Facebook is a “hungry information monster that wants nothing more than to take all your details, package them up and sell them on.” Users need to be aware of that and act accordingly. I don’t think users have to just grin and bear it. I wrote, long before the sex lube incident, that Facebook isn’t free.
Update: Today, The New York Times reported in a story by Somini Sengupta, the reporter who put me on A1:
Facebook has agreed to make it clear to users that when they click to like a product on Facebook, their names and photos can be used to plug the product. They will also be given a chance to decline the opportunity to be unpaid endorsers.
So, Facebook still has the right to use your content as ads, it’s just required to tell be slightly more upfront about it.
I can’t easily express how culturally significant I think Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” is, but I think it says a lot that the song, which is now No. 1 on Billboard’s chart, has a video in which Jepsen’s crush turns out to be gay, and no one seems to be throwing a fit about it.