Someone’s gon’ have to conduct an intervention here. Can’t stop watching the Anna Kendrick music video, especially the part where she smiles at the end and walks out the door.

I was looking for something completely different, and clicked on this only because I saw Anna Kendrick’s name. (I really like her because she’s extremely smart and an underrated actress. And oh yeah, that infectious mirthful smile of hers doesn’t hurt.)

The song’s not great – though it’s growing on me — but the video is excellent. It’s fun, tells a story and has lots of Anna K. No way to go wrong there.

Go here for an HD version since idiotic YouTube doesn’t allow embedding it.

I’ve been using the browser Chrome at work a little, just to see if my bad impression of it was correct.

And it’s terrible.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fast if you do very little – which I guess is the use case for most people – but if you try to do anything intensive with it, it totally chokes.

In other words, it’s very much made for the “average user” who maybe has 2-3 tabs open and doesn’t do much in the way of real work or power use.

Sometimes in Firefox I have 2-5 windows open with 30-40 tabs in each one. And yes, I am using all of them and do need them all open and know what’s in each window and tab.

Just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean that I can’t. Don’t assume that my use case is yours.

And if you try opening 2-3 Chrome windows with 20-30 tabs in each one, that piece of shit is like using Windows 95 on a 386sx with 4MB of RAM way back when. It crawls so slowly it might be going backwards in time.

So, yes, Chrome is great browser if you need to do very little. Too bad Firefox is going the same direction.

This is a good example of why diversity matters; if there were more women in the tech industry, you can bet there’d be phones of appropriate size.

And for yet another reason, too – more and more children these days have smart phones, and they have small hands as well.

Increasingly, on the latest versions of the kinds of phones I want to use, I cannot type one-handed. I cannot take a picture one-handed. I can barely scroll one-handed—not very well, though. I can’t unlock my phone one-handed. I can’t even turn on my phone one-handed as my fingers cannot securely wrap around the phone while I push a button with a finger.

What’s odd is how companies are content to ignore such a large market. When someone tells me how efficient business is, I point to bullshit like this and say, “Yeah, you really believe that?”

But I think only think tank idiots who’ve never worked in a real corporation can subscribe to that fable of efficiency.

Studies consistently show that women make more purchasing decisions than men. And due to the sexist structure of our society, who do you think most often purchases phones for kids in addition to phones for themselves?

Hey, can someone give me $200 million? I’d rock this market. And that’s about how much I think it’d take to get something started.

One of the things that I really liked about Sony’s marketing stunt for Carrie is that it shows that when people should be running away really fast, they do not. Most of them take out their phones these days and start snapping photos or recording video.

This article covers the same territory about people’s true reactions.

I wonder if this is how people have always reacted, how much race and class matter, and if people now feel more “virtualized” due to not feeling it’s a real experience unless it is recorded?

I’ve posted this before, but not an HD version as I couldn’t find one at the time. This is just such a damn fun song and video. And the gothified Lisa Mitchell at the end of the video looks like a completely different person.

I can just imagine the record company exec’s response to this. “Ok, Lisa, we’d like you to make a nice, light and fun pop song we can play on the radio.”

And then the exec hearing this where the first line is, “Once again I leave my grave….”

But it is a nice, fun song. Just one about death and revenants and ravens eating your decaying corpse and shit.

I like Kate Miller-Heidke’s older, lighter stuff very much, but I really enjoy her newer, more cerebral material as well. Both are very good, but very different. She’s a smart woman, and it shows.

Not that I’m recommending people put themselves in situations like this on purpose, but you never feel so alive as when you’ve just cheated death.

The most effervescently alive I’ve ever felt is lying on a strange drop zone in the middle of the night after a jump, starry sky above me, parachute strewn in the grass behind me. It wasn’t even a hairy jump, that one. It was just a beautiful night and the plane ride had been a wild one.

Leaping out of the plane on a dark, cool night from the din and disquiet of a military aircraft into the utter dark silence of a drop zone is such a transition that it should be jarring – but it’s not. It’s like a rebirth.

As calm as it is, as still, the ground is still approaching. You have to get ready. Feet in the right place, let your rucksack go. Crash. Anything broken? Stars above, ground below. That night it felt like I was fizzing up into the universe, becoming a living Van Gogh.

I’ve lived my whole life doing things people told me I could not possibly do.

“What, him? Oh no, not Mike, he’s too geeky to date that woman.”

“Oh, not Mike, he’s too weak to join the Army. He’ll never make it.*”

“That guy, become a paratrooper? Yeah, right.”

And that’s only the first 20 years. You get the point.

I’ve always loved the Alanis Morrisette lyric, “I recommend biting off more than you can chew to anyone.”

Damn good advice.

If you aren’t biting off more than you can chew of life, why are you still living? What’s the damn point?

*My own father, by the way.

When I am by myself especially, I often tip quite large amounts. I don’t want to be seen as some sort of saint or for people to come groveling after me – I just know how crap service jobs are, and I just feel really fortunate that I can tip 40% on a haircut.

Another $10 is not much to me, but when you’re scraping bottom it’s a hell of a difference. I know. I remember.

And yeah, I did have a computer in my family as a kid. My dad was a mechanic, and traded labor for many things people didn’t want anymore. We ended up getting a lot of fairly decent if outdated items that way. In that, I was very lucky, even before my grandparents started to help us out and my life got much better. And it meant we almost always had transportation as my father, whatever his flaws, could fix damn near anything. I once watched him repair a lawnmower McGyver-style with a clothespin and a piece of water hose.

But I remember this being in the fridge and nothing else, for at least a week: two slices of white bread.

And I remember doing this: searching for change in the couch so that we could afford to get some gas to travel to town so that my grandmother could give us some groceries. (My mom was too proud to admit she had absolutely no money.)

And I remember my parents fighting all the time about money.

My mom was a waitress for a long time. I also remember her talking about her nice customers, the ones that gave her a big tip even though she’d a shitty day and might’ve taken it out on them a little. And how much difference that made.

I want to be that guy. I hope I am that guy. I will be that guy as long as I have more than I need.

Amanda Marcotte was one of the most fervent Obamacare supporters, and it’s no surprise that she’s denying something that even the most enthusiastic of ACA supporters acknowledged freely: that rates would go up for many people.

As usual, though, Digby tells it straight.

According to the hostile analyst, Obamacare will hike rates because of added regulations and mandates. According to the supporter, Obamacare will hike rates because it makes the system more fair and offers better coverage. It’s simply different interpretations of the same thing — you’ll notice that both agree that rates will be hiked.

So I went to the car dealership and I wanted to buy a Honda Civic. I really needed a car – couldn’t walk out without one. The salesperson says that they are all out of Honda Civics, but here’s this Aston Martin I can buy for the Aston Martin price.

I have no choice, so I sign on the dotted line even though I can’t afford it. That should somehow make me happy.

That’s what Marcotte’s dumbass thesis about Obamacare amounts to.

That said, I enjoy Amanda Marcotte’s writing and I read her often. However, of the commentators I read more than once a week she’s the one most beset with confirmation bias issues. But everyone has flaws. Such is life.

My parents and grandparents were this condescending to me. As well as my first-grade teacher.

Just the other day, Evangeline shocked me by picking up Louis Menand’s collection of essays “American Studies”—the actual book—and peering at its pages.

I was sure that this was some sort of pose, or a lark. It was impossible to imagine that she was actually reading it. But having picked it up, she then took the book outside and, as we put her brother in the car, stood with it open, in her hands, looking engrossed. She kept reading it in the car, until she finally put it down with a sigh.

I was reading National Geographic magazine in first grade. I constantly had to “prove” that I understood it to everyone, when in reality it was quite easy for me to understand. I think I typically understood more of it even then than the adults around me. Me reading “inappropriate” material in class was my first experience of getting into real trouble at school.

It was about that time that I realized school – at least for me – was a big batch of bullshit and stopped paying it any mind.

About the below, this comment is completely wrong.

Without fail, I am quicker at finding features and using software than any normal user even in software I’ve never used. And that’s because I’ve been doing it for over 30 years now and have seen just about every software context and interface there is.

At work, users often ask me about software they use every day and that I never use. Nine times out of 10, I am able to find what they need to in a few seconds in software that they’ve used for years and I have never even seen before.

My girlfriend can do the same thing, and it’s because she – like me – has been using computers since she was wee.

I really doubt whoever wrote that comment is truly experienced in IT or is a real power user. Probably one of those ersatz “power users” who thinks Windows 8 is the best thing since AOL and Microsoft Bob and who only learned to find his/her start menu a few months ago.

There’s a lot of them on sites like Ars, and many of them I suspect are paid Microsoft shills who show up whenever Windows 8 is mentioned, though that particular commenter is not actually a shill.

Microsoft, Canonical and Gnome are not alone in removing features that power users need to work from their OSes and interfaces. Apple is doing it, too.

It really has me worried about what people who actually know how to do things with their computers are going to manage in a few years. What will be left for them? I do a great deal of work on my computers, most of which simply cannot be done in a playtoy interface with all useful features relegated to the dust heap.

What sort of damn sense does it make to remove a feature from your desktop OS so that it can be like your tablet OS? That’s like tossing out your living room couch because it can’t fit in your car. It just makes no sense at all.

Nearly all content is created by people who actually know how to use their machines quite well and 100% need a powerful, configurable environment.

What are we supposed to do when everything of any use is taken away?

So many things that people do I just don’t understand. Things I can’t even imagine caring about, or even noticing. I read advice columns to try to understand humans because they are full of things like that.

So much of my life is me spent looking around with Marge Gunderson’s great closing bit from Fargo going through my head:

So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well. I just don’t understand it.

Except for me replace “money” with “nearly everything people do.”

The better you are at reasoning numerically, the more likely you are to let your political bias skew your quantitative reasoning.

I’m absolutely terrible at numerical reasoning — worse than many five-year-olds — so that must mean I am a frickin’ genius!

This might be part of the way to explaining or at least examining what I call engineeritis.

I don’t really appreciate how the article conflates numerical reasoning with intelligence, but that’s very common.

If you give me a numerical or strictly logic-based IQ test, I will score in the mildly mentally-retarded range, no matter how hard I try. If you give me a more word-based such test, I will score off the charts.

That’s why when I say that no amount or method of teaching me operational (rather than conceptual) math is likely to work.

And yet the quant types are always amazed when I can look at a huge mound of data, spend much less time doing anything with it, and get something out of it they never saw or ever could see.