Month: May 2009

The Blade Runner gun

The oth­er day I was mus­ing to the wife about how ridicu­lous it would be to spend stu­pid mon­ey, just because I had stu­pid mon­ey to spend. I mean, if I was a bil­lion­aire, I said, I could not imag­ine spend­ing $150,000 on a car, no mat­ter how elec­tric or cool it was. It is one of these tru­isms I’ve always held to. Lots of mon­ey would nev­er over­come com­mon sense.

And then I heard that Har­ri­son Ford’s gun from Blade Run­ner was up for auc­tion. Here let me show it to you:

Harrison Ford's gun from Blade Runner
Har­ri­son Ford’s gun from Blade Run­ner
Anoth­er view

It was expect­ed to fetch $150,000, and instead went for $270,000.

And yes, if I was a bil­lion­aire, I would prob­a­bly buy this.

Guided Selections in the iTunes Music Store

Neat how the iTunes music store lets you — This is fas­ci­nat­ing. Guid­ed selec­tions for artists or gen­res in the iTunes Music Store. That is, they present you with (some­one’s opin­ion of) the basic songs for the artist or genre, next steps, and deep cuts. It’s a lit­tle hard to find in iTunes, but if you click on any of the “iTunes Essen­tials” links, you get this inter­face. Quite frankly, awe­some.

New and Improved [WordPress] Plugins Directory Search

New and Improved [Word­Press] Plu­g­ins Direc­to­ry Search — I’ve been search­ing the WP plu­g­ins direc­to­ry a lot late­ly, and I do appre­ci­ate this improve­ment, but that said, can we have some basic func­tion­al­i­ty, too? Maybe an indi­ca­tion of the sort order of the results? Is it by Author mid­dle ini­tial? Or, per­haps even the abil­i­ty to sort the results our­selves, by, I don’t know, pop­u­lar­i­ty? Num­ber of down­loads? Name? Word­Press ver­sion com­pat­i­bil­i­ty? Upload date? Any­thing? Let me put it this way, plu­g­in search (and frankly, any search on WordPress.org), is so abysmal­ly hor­ri­ble that this one improve­ment hard­ly makes it worth­while. Baby steps, I guess.

    Saw Star Trek, and liked it quite a bit, Jim

    We went to see Star Trek ($22) with our friends Doug and Sarah this past week­end, leav­ing the kids with a babysit­ter ($50), and then going to din­ner ($35). And we had a good time. The movie is clear­ly worth it, espe­cial­ly if you are rationing your the­ater-going. It is big and ram­bunc­tious and fun and noisy and all the things a sum­mer flick should be. Rec­om­mend­ed.

    Two things of note from my view­ing:

    • I’ve seen Star Trek is its var­i­ous incar­na­tions, and I have to say, I have nev­er real­ly liked Kirk. Shat­ner nev­er seemed sexy enough to be who Kirk is sup­posed to be, and while I like the twin­kle in his eye, I nev­er did buy that he was seri­ous enough, smart enough, or… hero­ic enough to be this guy.  I blath­er, but enough to say that Chris Pine made me a believ­er in Kirk.
    • The Star Trek phas­er pis­tol has always been ridicu­lous, espe­cial­ly when com­pared to icons like Han’s blaster or Deckard’s pis­tol (go Har­ri­son Ford!) but the eas­i­ly-missed flip between stun and kill on Kirk’s pis­tol was pret­ty damn cool.

    Go see it if you have enough mon­ey. Us? We’re start­ing a spe­cial fund for movie nights.  We should have enough saved up by next month to go see anoth­er one.

    If you last saw a movie in the the­ater in 2008: [xrr rating=4/5 max_stars=5]

    If you hate Star Trek, sci­ence fic­tion, or fun: [xrr rating=3/5 max_stars=5] (it’s that loud)

    The problem with Google

    I do love me Google. A lot. I use it exclu­sive­ly, and when­ev­er I present to the hoi pol­loi on “Search­ing teh Intar­webs” I use Google to do it. But there is one thing they need to fix, between adding more one box­es and putting lit­tle arrows at the end of my cus­tomized search results. They need a decent time­line selec­tor.

    Often, and more often late­ly, when I search for some­thing, I want to know what Google has found for this in the last day, or two days, or week, or not this week, but last week, but not as long ago as last month. And there is no easy way to do this.

    Sure, there’s the Advanced Search, with its lim­it­ed selec­tion of dates. Or I can use the News fil­ter, or the Blogs fil­ter, but none of that would be as easy to use, or as accu­rate, as a handy slid­er. Google has many exam­ples in their own prod­ucts of tem­po­ral selec­tors, from the stocks charts in Finance to the cal­en­dar pick­ers in Ana­lyt­ics. It is time to bring one of those to the moth­er­ship, Big G.