And since the Internet is lorded over by a bunch of geeks, it’s no surprise that the holiday of pranks and humor is embraced the world over by the Internet. On April 1st (and, this year, today), many a great and wonderous thing happens:
Just a few thoughts I’ve had recently or that have come my way…
Via Sašo:
In Terry Prattchet’s Discworld there was a nice sentence like “and then he was surprised like a man is surprised by something which he previously thought only happens to other people”.
The Internet is important for me, because, just as with other forms of publishing technology before it, the burden of remembering things is placed on the network, rather than the individual.
In my informal testing at work, between Firefox, Flock and Safari, Safari (with the Sogudi extension) wins in terms of just consumer satisfaction and comfort (for me anyway). The only thing I miss from Firefox and Flock are the “Type to search” feature (and, to a lesser extent, the live, incremental search via page indexing).
Lucid dreaming might just gain me an extra 6 hours or so of productivity a day. I think that’s worth running into walls for.
Flash is weird. Period.
Open source developers might just be good at copying the innovations of others, but at least they’re really good at it. [RealPlayer video]
It’s not important to take over the world — just leave a positive mark on it.
If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?
I was surfing around, when I remembered something I once heard… The Amish use cellphones. Is that true? Did I dream that up? Naturally, I decided to consult Wikipedia on the matter. At the bottom of the article was a link to a Wired article from January 1999 about the adoption of technology in Amish society. I won’t go into all the details, since you can easily read it yourself, but I must say, even as the tech-friendly, internet-loving guy I am, I think they actually have some really good ideas. There is a deliberation that goes into the Amish exploration of technology that often doesn’t happen here. In Amish society, there is so much weight given to long-term effects — as the article mentions, they’re not necessarily trying to stop the halt of technology, just “slow it down”.
So Dylan writes in to tell me that this post which mentions this site was not a moment of zen from Google, but rather a link on his own home page. So, rather than thanking Google, allow me to give credit where credit is due…