Acts of Volition

A song, movie, and TV show you should enjoy:  •  song:  •  Westray by Weeping Tile (now of Sarah Harmer fame)  •  movie:  •  The Truman Show. Watch it again, for the first time.  •  show:  •  The episode of Northern Exposure where Chris Stevens, the host of KBHR builds a giant catapault to fling a …

The local telephone company defines happiness on their bill envelopes. View a larger image of the envelope »

I think the logic goes something like this:  •  “  •  Premise #1:  •  1995 was better than 1985  •  Premise #2:  •  T2 was better than Terminator  •  Conclusion:  •  The higher the number, the better.  •  ”  •  While I worry that much of what is happening in the world is powered by such logic, my …

The following email was sent from Network Solutions in regards to a domain name update request. I was aware that robots were sending emails, but I had thought we were still a few years away from the robots actually writing the emails themselves.  •  At least the robot was polite enough to wish us …

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is not a regulatory board as you might think, but an association of internet advertisers making recommendations for themselves. Their latest recommendation: make banner ads bigger.

For the seasoned weblog readers, this is be second hand old news, but I couldn't help but post it.  •  Apparently a mathematician stumbled across (suspicious, I know) a prime number (seen below) that when written in hexadecimal format forms a Zip file that contains the DeCSS information (the now …

It happened quite innocently. I think someone mentioned an author's name, or said something that sounded like W.P. Kinsella as we got into my car. Naturally (or so it seemed at the time), this caused my three tone-deaf friends and I (also tone-deaf) to try to impress each other with our knowledge …

Have you ever pushed on a pull door? Have you ever stood waiting for an automatic sliding door to open, only to find out it's a window? Are you sick of the blinking 12:00 on your VCR? Rise up against the tyranny of bad design!  •  I recently finished reading Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday …

For those of you interested in technology news the options are many but most are seriously deficient. One hand, you have sites whose news consists mostly of cut and pasted press releases and those who kiss the feet of Microsoft. On the other hand, you have the whining anti-everything …

Earlier this week I asked for some feedback on the phenomenon of using TV to relax and the moral repercussions (seeing as your TV watching time is being resold). The good levelheaded readers of aov have responded and each response is very much appreciated.  •  The consensus (how many people to do …

Steve Jobs used to play the part of the passionate visionary quite well. Watch the made-for-tv movie Pirates of Silicon Valley for an interesting and apparently accurate summary of the Steve Jobs / Bill Gates stories (beware of VERY bad dialog).  •  Now, watching Steve Jobs at the latest MacWorld …

TV is a drug. I realize that this is not a groundbreaking statement, but let me elaborate.  •  I have criticized my friends in the past for relying on television to help them relax at the end of the day. Some can't even sleep until they've watched their half-hour of TV (it usually doesn't matter …

I've seen personalized spam before, but this was the most impressive I've ever received.  •  Today, an email promoting a search engine registration service arrived in my inbox, complete with little animated people being ‘magnetically attracted’ to an actual screenshot of actsofvolition.com …

Apparently Bill Gates' house isn't big enough. According to News.com:  •  “  •  “...some changes are needed to make it more livable. Gates representatives said the home was designed for a bachelor and the family has found that it ‘isn't fitting as they expected it to’...”  •  ”  •  It's a classic …