Month: May 2008

Great essay about understanding and wrangling your pet nerd by Rands In Repose:

A majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong.

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

While I really wouldn’t want this to all be true about me, there’s definitely a lot of plain facts layed out. Great read if you are or know some serious nerds (with a bent towards tech pros/programmers specifically).

(via. Lindsay, photo from Mental Floss)

(hit the banner to see their site, which tries to explain RSS for normal people)

RSS is what happens to the web after we stop wasting our time and get down to business. It’s like if we all got our news on differently shaped cue cards and someone offered us a magazine instead. At first you’d think “oh, but I like the colors on the cue cards” and “this paper is boring, it all looks the same”, but pretty quickly you’d realize how much more convenient it is to carry the magazine, and how much more time you can spend reading the stories in it rather than organizing your cue cards.

Info-junkies of the world REJOICE, today is RSS Day!

(I like NetNewsWire as an RSS reader for Mac, but I hear even the online Google one works really well. )