The Indiana Jones Thing
Savage Minds: “I am genuinely shocked at how many anthropologists I know got into the business as a result of Indiana Jones.”
Archive | June, 2005
Whatdoesthatmean?
Whatdoesthatmean: “a free lexicon of English idioms, words, and catch phrases from around the world.” Wikipedia for slang? [Via Lifehacker]
Iron Chef
There are few TV shows I enjoy as much as Iron Chef. I used to watch it with friends (including a Japanese colleague) when I lived in DC, where it was somewhat of a novelty to have a Japanese show on TV. (And a hilarious one at that!)
Much to my surprise—and pleasure—the cable TV company in Panama carries Food Network in its lineup, so I get my Iron Chef fix. It seems even more alien and bizarre here—a Japanese show, with (incredibly tacky) English voiceovers, in a Spanish-speaking country. Signing off now—sea-bass sashimi on the menu tonight!
Disabling styles
The Web Developer extension is one of the most useful tools you can add to Firefox. Among many great time-saving features, this extension offers an easy way to turn page stylesheets off, selectively or whole-hog. This comes in very handy when printing out pages that have very fancy formats — especially those with narrow text columns and / or tiny text.
BBC icons for consuming digital audio
The BBC is offering free MP3s of the nine Beethoven symphonies. (Yay!) Because they also have audio streams and podcasts available, they’ve developed a set of icons to help users differentiate between the three types of links:
Although the icons for radio streaming and downloading are fairly understandable to non-techies, the podcast icon (orange button with the word “XML” in white) requires an understanding of the history of podcasting (via RSS feeds) in order to be understood. (I doubt, for example, that my mom would get it.) It can also be confusing, because this icon is already extensively used on the web for general RSS feeds.
This is odd, because given the iconic design of the iPod itself it should be easy to make a representative button. How about this:
I understand that they may be concerned with alienating owners of non-iPod MP3 players, but it is called podcasting.
