Only Adele's voice is husky

I wish we would stop hearing comments about Adele's weight. 

A) she's far prettier than Gaga, who you realize, if you can avoid being distracted by her crazy outfits, looks a bit like a bridge troll, and 

B) they are both talented young women, even if I don't always like their music (I do like some)--why don't we focus on that? Are John Lennon, Paul Simon, or Bob Dylan nice to look at? I don't hear anyone saying "Yeah, Cee-Lo is great, but he sure is a fat bastard"….

-My brother, the excellent Kris Maloy

Announcing BlakeyTV

I meant to do this a while ago:

I wanted to build my own web app as a learning exercise, and it's certainly been that. I also wanted to build something that I'd really find useful. 

That became the beginning of BlakeyTV, a not-very-creatively-named video player that will let me keep up with everything I want to watch on YouTube. I just enter a list of YouTube user names that I want to follow (similar to your YouTube subscriber list, just manually entered), and every 24 hours that person's newest videos are added to the front of a never-ending queue of videos that will play back-to-back with no ads.

Here's a list of people currently in the rotation:
Theshadowloo (Street Fighter IV)
bigirpall (Battlefield 3 trolling)
XboxAhoy (In-depth Call of Duty analysis)
Bungie (Makers of Halo)
Mega64 (Gaming comedy)
Day9 (Pro StarCraft II)
TeamSpooky (Street Fighter IV, MVC3, Tekken X Street Fighter)
Freddie Wong (Mostly gaming-related comedy)

It brings to YouTube what it's missing as it tries to get taken seriously as a media delivery service: a completely passive option that requires no user action.

For all of you, people who are not me, I hope there are two possibilities:

1) With time and suggestions, it becomes a generally well-curated site with consistently good videos that lots of people like
2) I keep working on it and create the ability for people to create their own channels

I think those two aren't mutually exclusive. If you're a programmer who can handle Python, Django and Heroku, please let me know! I'd love a little advice in building up the backbone necessary for new features.

Fruit Theory

Dudes pursuing girls have a number of theories that purport to explain all the mysteries of women and give men the upper hand in the chase.

My personal favorite is Ladder Theory, which greatly (and effectively!) simplifies the differences between the ways each sex perceives the other. In this context, you might also consider the whole pickup artist thing as another theory.

Today I offer the world a new way to look at things: Fruit Theory.

Fruit Theory proposes that the availability of women in a certain area will match the availability of produce - fruits and veggies - in the same area. 

To kick things off, I propose three areas where I've lived recently that conform to the theory very well:

California: Abundant and awesome in every shape, size and color
Texas: All about outer appearance, no taste
Tokyo: Shaped differently, high-quality, but very expensive

Gentlemen of the world, how does your city stack up? Please let me know - this theory needs to be tested.

Chicago!

Chicago was a great success - and, naturally, very windy.

What you’ll see here includes:
A gourmet charcuterie shop that had been open one week and was already overrun by hipsters to the point of standing room only
The Bean, the outdoor theater, the Marilyn Monroe statue, and other awesome touristy landmarks
The Hughes brothers, childhood friends since age 4, separated from me for 15 years and reunited by Facebook
A Lego store!
The wonderful Jeff and Abby (henceforth Jabby ), who kindly hosted me for the latter half of the trip and showed me their awesome city neighborhood
A truly bizarre picture owned by Jabby
A black paper crane on the anniversary of 3/11

What you won’t see here:
Food porn, despite eating wonderfully well (thanks to Jon Hughes’ mastery of all things culinary!)
The Hughes brothers’ parents or girlfriends, all of whom were wonderful. The parents, especially, were great to catch up with as someone verging on grown-up
The rest of the Mexican clothing shop Jeff and I walked through: though that denim blazer thing is unique, there were also tactical vests and a belt buckle with a weed leaf and ‘SINALOA’ in giant lettering (hint: drug cartel reference)

Tablet Friendly

The iPad chipped away at me and now I want one. That's how I've felt about it since it was introduced. The value prop just got gradually better, little by little, and I would necessarily go past some tipping point. Here we are thanks to the new hardware and software.

I think the initial proposal was that Apple would sell you everything you wanted: books, magazines, newspapers, TV shows, and maybe the occasional Angry Bird. But it looks like what emerged instead is a fractured ecosystem in which content makers privatized and decentralized whatever it is they offer. The downside is that I have to have separate apps to read, watch, or otherwise consume the stuff I want to. The New York Times and The Economist, two of my regulars, live in separate apps. But on the plus side, apps for Netflix and Hulu hold a lot of video. I can get live Japanese TV from NHK World. And with a web browser and an RSS reader I can follow all my usual websites. And once I can get a decent TV, for $100 I can start beaming all my stuff everywhere thanks to AirPlay. And best of all, I can do all of those things all over the world. 

What's more, iPhoto for iPad is a big deal. It's a fully-featured desktop app with a wholly replaced interface. It's the Minority Report interface we've dreamed about. We're now really getting stuff done with gestures and touch. It's Direct Manipulation taken to its logical extreme. I think it's a sign of very good things to come. 

One thing I love is the Photo Journals feature, where your photos fill up the page along with contextual maps, calendars, and blocks of text:

Why am I not publishing a website that looks more like that? Why aren't there images strewn about in every which direction? Why aren't there big quote boxes setting off my best lines? Some high-readership websites are beginning to take their cues from print magazine layouts, but why isn't that in my blog software? I think Apple has quietly pushed the envelope here for web design. 

I'm so swept up in the mood that I've changed this blog's design yet again, this time to something a little better suited to tablet reading. Images will be prominent, when they're there, and text columns are much wider for much less wasted space. Colors are very e-reader-ish, too. 

I think everyone will eventually hit the tablet tipping point, if they haven't already. This is just the time where I'm convinced I need one.