Fun Size Bytes

Bumper Stickers Make Me Stabby

I was pulling out of a parking lot today and the car in front of me had a bumper sticker on it which read:

“How is that Hope and Change working out for you so far?”

The “Hope” was Obama’s logo from the campaign.

My first response was “Well, it’s a hell of a lot better than the fear and war of the previous eight years…”

When you consider that by this point in W’s presidency we had already suffered the worst terrorist attack on our soil in American history, despite having intelligence that Bin Laden was determined to strike on American soil, I think Obama’s administration has been great.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized: “What this person is really saying is: ‘Boy, the country is pretty fucked right now, huh?’” which made me want to go up to her window and say, “You do realize it was YOUR GUY who drove us into the iceberg, right? And the fact that Obama hasn’t been able to bail us out in 10 months (as of today) doesn’t make him a failure.”

Of course these people aren’t interested in facts or debate. Because really, what’s the argument against hope and change? “More of the Same in 2012”? “Back to the Good Ol’ Days of Republican Rule”?

It’s amazing to me that they can completely ignore the fact that it was ON THEIR GUY’S WATCH that we were attacked, on our own soil, and that he dragged us into an unending war which has financially fucked us, and that (largely) Republican ideals for managing the free market have fucked us through the banks, and that the (Republican) plan to get us out of it has continued to reward the wrong people— and turn around and say “Wow, things are really a mess in this country. I thought your guy was going to change everything.”

Then I noticed on the other side of her car was another bumper sticker: “It’s a girl! Palin 2012”

The bumper sticker was, ironically, already faded, like any chance Palin might have had at the presidency.

At her best, what would Palin have to offer? She’s positioned herself as an outsider, a non-Washington politician. She’s rogue… she’s…

…Change.

I mean, I don’t believe that for one second, I think she’s just the same old Republican politics as usual, but if you buy into her “sales pitch” we are supposed to believe that she isn’t “politics as usual.”

Change.

Did I have higher hopes for Obama? Sure. Have I been disappointed with some things? Sure. Do I think the health care bill is going to bring meaningful change? No. Sounds like it might be worse, from what I’ve heard so far.

But boy howdy am I still convinced we’re better off than we would have been with McCain/Palin at the helm.

Ringtone Remix

Dance Version Remix

I have not tried to see if this will work on the iPhone. I’ve tried it, and it works.

Fission tells me it needs to be 40 seconds or less, but AT&T voicemail seems to pickup after about 30 seconds. FWIW.

Oh for God's sake

monkeyfrog:

Life is hard enough without being bitchy about a bunch of adults being goofy together.

If you want to correct the grammar of strangers, call people names for being happy, or bitch every time you think something isn’t funny, maybe you should STFU.

How’s that for original?

I think what Monkeyfrog is trying to say, is: eat a bag of dicks, you shitburgling cockbuckets.

Big bag of hurt

Dan Wineman (below), on all of the things that Tumblr got wrong with the iPhone app (Hint: just about everything). More from me after the break:

dwineman:

Yes, reblogging is still as broken as it used to be, if not more so: there now seems to be no way to cancel a reblog without quitting the app. The Cancel button is inexplicably missing, there’s no Back button anywhere in the interface, and clicking on the Tumblr logo opens the desktop Dashboard in a pop-up.

As far as I can tell, all the things that were awful about the 1.0 Tumblr app are still awful in the 1.1 Tumblr app, except that now it doesn’t reload your dashboard at page one every time you breathe on it. So that’s nice, at least.

But by far the worst misfeature is the way it displays photo posts. The iPhone OS provides a perfect solution: the two-finger pinch/stretch gesture, which dynamically zooms in and out of images; plus, you can double-tap to make any image instantly resize to fit the screen. It’s precisely this feature that makes web browsing on an iPhone more comfortable than on any other mobile device.

Yet the iPhone Dashboard intentionally disables this great feature, instead providing just two choices of image size: thumbnail (way way too small) and 100% (way way too big, so you have to pan around to see the whole image). In other words, the OS has a fit-to-screen feature built in, and Tumblr’s developers actually wrote extra code to disable it. What a tragic, boneheaded mistake. The workaround used to be turning off the iPhone Dashboard, but that option’s gone now.

(Tumblr actually isn’t alone in making this mistake. The iPhone version of Flickr Mobile does the same stupid thing, but at least Flickr provides an app that’s actually usable.)

I say this with love: it’s time for Tumblr to grow up. Fix the bugs. Hire usability experts. Build a rich API and test, test, test. Get your stuff working so well—make your user experience so utterly painless—that you can do silly things like Sharks vs. Cats and Dashboard marriage proposals from time to time without looking like college kids drunk on venture capital.

(tj:)

But hey! Video uploads! Because everyone watches those, and few people ever want to look at pictures which are posted on Tumblr.

Yeah, TypePad Micro looks like a knock-off of Tumblr, but you know what? I’m betting that in 6 months, TypePad is doing this stuff better than Tumblr.

Remember, Twitter wasn’t first either.