Hi o Drunken-Caffeinated One, big fan of your site here. Got a burning question which I'd like to pose.I've been reading about the history of OS X on kernelthread.org, and the more I study the architecture, the less I understand why the former NeXTies at Apple didn't just use BSD as the kernel, instead of doing the Mach + BSD thing with the increased complexity, funneling and message passing overhead and performance hindrances. Cocoa API retro-compatibility? Ego? NeXT heritage over common sense? SMP issues in BSD?
Thanks,
FZ
This comes up more than you'd think, and you can probably find find a more thorough answer to your question, as much as it can be known without being a fly on the wall at Apple, at these two links...
posted on July 31, 2005 at 11:11 PM
Every once in awhile, I'm just bored with what the hot topic de jour is at the moment. Judging by my inbox, and my constantly seeing it recycled via my feeds, right now the big buzz is about the rumored upcoming Apple Movie Store.
If you're fairly new to the site, you may be scratching your heads as it isn't as though I talk about the iPod all the time.
However, every once in awhile I do come down from the mountain carrying stone tablets, and I'd have to imagine that's why my inbox is a "Mac Movie Store and TiVO" clearing house right now. Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote C.K., and its Redux, which was an attempt to be a lazy kick in the head to a bunch of editorials and such I was seeing at the time.
It's hard to go back in the wayback machine and remember what was going on at the time, but it was all about Real Networks and their Harmony service, Apple opening their DRM, and the mythical iPod phone. Most of what was being said was so out of the bounds of reality, which can be confirmed that none of it has really been borne out.
Almost nothing has changed in my thinking since then, which is why I get bored with the iPod so easily, as everything I hear gets filtered through:
- Does it change the equation?
- Does it affirm the equation?
- Is it just more of the same until the end-sum of the equation?
If we skip back to the iTunes Music Store, the only real credible variable that's made my radar has been the addition of satellite radio to the mix, and podcasts, so we'll knock out Satellite Radio, Podcasts and the iTunes Movie Store in one swoop which will hopefully do us for another year...
I've seen your site linked on Macsurfer a bunch of times, but never clicked on it till the Matas/Delicious story broke... and proceeded to read that kickass interview of Wil for hours, and then re-read it and analyze why it kicked so much ass. And then I started methodically going over the rest of your site, clicking on links, reading back stories, watching screen grabs, digesting your knowledge with a subtle peppering of wit.I wonder if I'll ever leave my room again? Can the human body handle this much green tea? Do we really ever need to sleep?
And I suppose none of that really matters because you are an awesome writer and I'm now addicted to the Drunkenblog. Forever.
HOOYAAH!
thanx,
Scott
Well, yay for addictions. Structure in our lives is important, and addictions can be an easy, effective and efficient way of adding some. Every once in awhile I'll get a ping like this from someone where Macsurfer is mentioned, and it always makes me smile, as Macsurfer is on the "warm fuzzy" list.
Hey DB, Just wondering what the heck the deal is with Glenda on your Dock. Is there some kind of crazy Plan9 emulator for OSX? Is there a QuickTime skin for Ed Wood movies as Ankalon suggests? Does the Cow know about this? Is it jealous? Can I really reduce my cholesterol with a low-fat, high-fiber diet? Drunken minds want to know.
Lord, for something that's just shown up in screenshots from time to time, people have been obsessed about this little bunny in my dock, asking about it in the comments and a few emails. The guy above even hunted me down via IM, just because he had to know...
Awhile ago, I got the above card in my inbox (It's been hinted I'm a fan of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou as well as the soundtrack, which is recommended listening for the duration of this post), along with The Cow with a speedo, along with a note that our drunken mascot would be taken along on a scuba diving trip in Cozumel, Mexico.
With a little help from the self-service laminating desk at the nearest FedEx/Kinkos, I was able to take The Cow to about 80' below.Look at this as my little (slightly demented) way to say thank you to you. The blogosphere could use a lot more posters who put the thought, energy and reasoning that you do behind their posts before hitting the "blog it" button.
There is a very unique blend of absurdity and charm in this one... Yes, Jay actually laminated The Cow, then took him scuba diving (and other places) along with a camera. Fire up your Seu Jorge...
You know, it's a little f'ing embarrassing to just post about how a very specific issue has been fixed involving the display of an OpenGL app, and then a few hours later open up iTunes and there it is again. Jinx.
It's the stupidest bug, and I am sure it is indicative of the major changes Apple made to aspects of the display layer in 10.4, and I know there probably aren't a lot of others throwing down with Chess.app on a regular basis.
I can always just play a game of Lux, but aside from the audio balance issue, it was the only problem that was finally fixed in 10.4.2 out of the numerous issues I'm having (Text editing in cocoa fields, Spotlight, banking in Safari, memory leaks in Dashboard, Mail.app, etc. -- all of which I'll go into), and being able to say so kept the bile down a little before I lay into the others, the text editing being the most egregious to me personally.
This stupid Chess.app thing is becoming a symbol of all the bugginess I'm having to deal with in 10.4; it's driving me batty. With the 10.3.9 massive webcore/webkit changes that were jammed on developers, and now Tiger, the Mac OS is developing a singular ability to just piss me off. I expect to have to fiddle with Linux, and I expect to have to watch Windows like a hawk, but I expect the Mac to just work sanely.
I have no clue as to why or when this bug presents itself; I'll admit I'd stopped playing Chess.app for a few weeks because I was so annoyed, but had been playing it for hours before posting that it was gone and knew Apple had been fiddling with the video drivers for 10.4.2.
No clue why launching iTunes, or switching to and from iTunes, would trigger some redraw errors, nor why after I switched to Gyazmail and back it went completely screwy (Picture 04), nor why after changing the Desktop picture and switching between apps I couldn't get it to show up again. No clue as to whether or not Apple has my bug reports, or if they think they've fixed the problem, because Apple doesn't work that way.
And no, not everyone is seeing the same bugs I am, because bugs don't work that way. I'm sure many had a lot of things fixed in 10.4.1 and 10.4.2, and I know others are seeing things I can't reproduce -- I'm sure some people can bank online now that couldn't in Mac OS 10.3 -- but I know they're there just the same. Something has got to give here, or Mac OS 10.5 is going to be a complete nightmare.
Awhile ago, there were rumors going around that the 10.4.2 was supposed to fix "all known bugs" in 10.4, which, depending on who you asked was:
- An 'intentional leak' by Apple marketing to hopefully stave off the reputation for bugginess that Mac OS X is starting to get, with the idea being that if people have the impression it'll all be fixed soon they may hold onto some bitching. We'll call this The Great Bug Fix Hope™ theory.
- Something that was really going around Apple; That yes, there were some problems with 10.4 and 10.4.1, but 10.4.2 was going to be their big push towards something really working, in the vein that Microsoft's Service Pack 2 was their big push towards security.
You may have noticed that I haven't really talked about 10.4 a lot on the site, or as an email put it, I've been "noticeably quiet." The truth is, I was just having a terrible amount of problems with it, but wanted to have my ducks in a row, and I kept thinking they'd be ironed out in a point release...
Things have come to a bit of a head, and we're going to be talking about bugs here shortly. Frequently, because quality control -- or at the level Apple considers acceptable -- is becoming unacceptable. It probably became unacceptable awhile ago, but allowances are made because, well, it's Apple (I do this too) and stuff will happen... And one isolated incident does not a pervasive pattern make. However, incident after incident in release after release does a pervasive pattern make.
However, before I go lifting up the plate in the sink to expose the roaches to sunlight, in the interest of fairness, today we'll mention two things 10.4.2 did fix for me. Obviously there are more things, and I'm being somewhat arbitrary, but luckily there are 365 days in a year and I'm saving a good week for Spotlight.
For the record, I've been running 10.4 with a stock install, and without my beloved ShapeShifter to remove the pinstripes, because with an OS this buggy I just didn't want it in as a factor.
Every once in awhile, I stop and wonder just how advanced our computers will need to be to handle anything in a file name beyond an underscore or period safely. It's amazing to me how, in mid-2005, so much of my computing experience is governed by a bizarre awareness of beginning or trailing periods, spaces, slashes, underscores and colons in file names.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but I expected to be able to swear properly by now. And where the hell is my damn rocket pack.
I'm slowly but surely making it through the rest of the Pentium-switch questions that were sent in, and yes, I know this is taking forever but we'll get through them.
I basically threw them all into a .txt file separated by some line breaks (It's still about 24k in size), and just grab a few in between working on other things, so it's going to take awhile...
In that not too distant future, TrackBack is going to be leaving the site. This really sucks, because I like trackback, or rather what it adds to the site. A lot of bigger sites turn it off, either because:
- Sites don't actually want you to leave them, they'd much rather you click and go to a different page on their site. Pushes up page views, and advertising, etc.
- Depending on the content, they'd prefer you to just accept what they're saying rather than read it and then see it get torn apart with opposing view.
If you've followed the site, you'd know I actually like opposing views, and really like when people flesh things out that I've only hit on in a cursory way, or even better, correct me. People do this all the time in the comments, and I'll often correct spelling errors that are pointed out or errors in my back-of-the-napkin math, and then I'm sure to leave the comments right where they are after it's been corrected.
I even leave in the embarrassing ones, because while it may hurt my pundit status, its good for people to remember I'm only a God on Wednesdays and could well be wrong the rest of the week when I'm forced to peddle bibles. Trackback was a favorite of mine, which is why I didn't shunt it over to a side of the page or at the end, it's right there above the comments (more on this later), but it's going to go away from the site, and this is why...
If you search the site for 'spam', you'll find a whole bunch of references to it. I hate it. It's affects the site adversely, and it affects my time adversely.
It's a parasite that hasn't evolved in a gracious way, which means its in the category of stupid , because it quite literally is choking the host, harming its viability, and its own ability to live. (We'll talk about this more, because it is going to affect what is on the site soon)
Still, I was disgusted to hear a big Russian spammer was taken out of the world literally:
Vardan Kushnir, notorious for sending spam to each and every citizen of Russia who appeared to have an e-mail, was found dead in his Moscow apartment on Sunday, Interfax reported Monday. He died after suffering repeated blows to the head.
Spam has rounded the horn for me in a big way. I'm generally a pretty down to earth guy, but there have been days or evenings when its made me want to throw a punch or find where its coming from and put my molotov cocktail knowledge to use.
On average, spam costs me between 15 to 30 minutes of time a day in its various forms, whether it be email, comments or trackback. There have been times when I've been gone for a days, and come back and had to spend two hours going through and filtering out comments and the horrors of my inbox.
I don't know why this makes me laugh, it just does.
It's a bit of an odd question but I was just wondering about how you conduct your interviews; whilst interviews with regular media are conducted in person, was this the manner in which your one with Wil was held or did you conduct it via another means i.e. instant messenging, email, phone etc...Also, do you have any advice for a would-be interviewer?
Cheers,
ifelse
It's not that odd of a question, I get a few of these after every interview I birth out onto the web. Unfortunately, it's also one of those questions that is open ended, and is just a no-no to get me started on, yet fortunately its something I've talked about before in a few places.
You might have to hunt a bit through them, perhaps doing a type-ahead-find for the word interview, but the answers to your questions should be within these links:
That last one is an interview I gave awhile back on another site, and be warned I don't think a lot of people got the joke or correlation between the questions and the length, but I do thread through a lot about the interviews, or rather some advice and things I've picked up while doing them.
Aside from what is in those, where you are going to have to infer a bit in a few, and if you're really interested in what I have to say or how they're put together its all there, there are a few more I can chuck in that are good to keep in mind, or at least have helped me...
A little while ago, I was asked if I'd be willing to give a talk at the Apple Store in downtown Chicago, on either the third or fouth Wednesday in October. I meant to post this last night, because it's somewhat time-sensitive (I have to let them know by Monday), but unfortunately BSG and the Stargate* usurped my time.
I'm told they'd like me to talk about OSS, but I had the impression this was primarily just a suggestion to corral me so I wouldn't go into some long rant about how sexualized comic books are now, with half naked people running around yet leaving out the hard parts like pregnancy and STDs; You'd think Batman could at least mention off-hand he has a slot on the utility belt for contraceptives so he doesn't have to stop and ruin the moment by running out to the convenience store.
Anywho, this is cool in a way, as it may mean the old memo stating any guy calling himself drunkenbatman should escorted off the premises of any Apple retail establishment is more rumor than fact. And it would be really cool to meet some more readers and press the flesh (I know, I'm regretting using this phrase after the earlier paragraph now), and seeing The Cow projected on a screen inside an Apple Store would be amusing.
Unfortunately, I do have some concerns that are making me think twice about it, but am willing to make a deal...
A few days ago I heard that my interview in MacTech Magazine is out. I know, this was awhile ago, and it was supposed to be the 'next' one, but apparently they got a little behind, as their June 2005 issue didn't hit until past the middle of July. Apparently they got behind on their issues or something.
They said they'd send me a dozen copies or the other day, and yesterday I heard they'd come in (By the time I got there, there were two packages from them; looks like they sent them via speedy delivery, which was really cool of them) so I ran over and proceeded to tear them open like it was Christmas morning.
I snapped a few shots so you'd know what you were looking for when you hit Barnes and Nobles, if you're not a subscriber to the magazine, as it's the only retail place I'm aware of that carries it...
Now, of course you're going to want to pick it up, but after skimming it I do have a few notes. The good, the bad, and the neither...
Things may go a little wonky here for a bit. Unfortunately, the site is sort of being attacked right now, where someone is spawning and tying up hundreds of connections at some of the Maui X-Stream evidence and its causing some resource problems...
As you can tell by the scroll-bar, those go on for a long way, and the web server is just having some real issues while serving out the 'normal' content. Don't know who is doing it or why, and it's beyond uncool and I don't know what their deal is, but that's how it goes.
I'm sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why this is going on... Or at least I don't want to think about the unreasonable ones and will just have to keep firewalling and dealing with apache because, you know, I have nothing better to do. Anyways, trying to deal with it and should be able to, but that's why things are hiccuping and getting slow. And people wonder why I drink...
So, Microsoft announced that the next major version of Windows, what is code named Longhorn -- will be called Windows Vista and will ship in 2006. In short, I kinda really like the name, and think it is a great choice, and that their marketing department did a great job. In long...
It's been awhile since we've had a nice chewable interview on the site, and I'm pleased to offer up a special treat: Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, makers of Delicious Library. Mike Matas was going to sit in also (the couch comes with an ottoman), but as we'll get to, he has recently left the company for another opportunity.
If you've never heard of Wil, he has an interesting pedigree. He co-founded and helped lead The Omni Group for almost ten years, which originally developed software for the NeXTSTEP platform and now develops apps for Mac OS X. Omni Group is known for porting games, and apps like OmniWeb, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. After leaving Omni, he joined forces with another ex-Omni employee -- Mike Matas -- to start Delicious Monster.
Their first product, Delicious Library, billed itself as "The greatest media cataloging software in the world", and enjoyed an astonishing level of publicity and sales. It's features are too numerous to go into here, and are best seen via downloading the demo. If you don't have a Mac, the below screenshot should give you an idea...
Fair warning: This is a long interview, and it's all over the map, but there is another delicious treat waiting at the end...
I've joked lately about my lack of girly readers, but there are a few. One in Canada, who we'll just call CG due to stalking issues, apparently took my clarion call as an opportunity to actually make some white russians, and from what follows, I can only assume she'd consumed more than one before she set out to document her tribute.
I started to pick and choose, and then realized it was so much easier to just run them all through ThumbScrew (ThumbScrew isn't perfect yet, but Adobe's Creative Suite is just giving me no love under Mac OS 10.4, and it's been a lifesaver for these) and throw them online...
Just about caught up with my backlog of submitted stuff, and this time we have two gifts from California, one from Kansas, and one from New Hampshire. There are two that don't include The Cow, and while alcohol is also a mascot of the site, I can't knock their areas off the global list...
I mentioned that I'm just a lil backlogged on a bunch of the Cow stuff, and am trying to catch up a bit on them. Many that I've posted recently have been outside of the USA, but our favorite drunken bovine is still making the rounds in the backyard of the USA, notably with one of my endangered female readers, and this time on a road trip along Route 66. There's a clue as to which part in one of the images...
So, the guy who actually designed The Cow took a trip to Italy a little while ago, and took along:
- A digital camera.
- The Cow printed out on some card stock.
I had to do a double-take to see The Cow-that-isn't-a-cow in a few, but he's there in all of them... I also believe this is the first submission of The Cow that has incorporated nudity, but at least he was equal-opportunity about it.
Mmmm, Venus.
The other day I was watching the news while I ate dinner, and saw that they were doing that whole running-with-the-bulls thing in Spain. You know, where a bunch of people who have lost the will to live put themselves between a bunch of bulls running down narrow streets on their way to an arena. When I got back, I had to laugh out loud when I had this waiting for me:
There's no wifi for free or to buy in this entire damn country so i dont know when this will leave my outbox, but its wednesday the 13th @ 930pm. I figured I'd try and show my appreciation for the work you have done for your readers all 12 of us in a way I could.Had a print out of the cow, and Keith ran with it on his shirt and I put mine on the outside of my 'whacking' newspaper. gotta show my cow colors, represent yo.
Matt, of the washington in spain matts
Yeah, two guys traveling in Spain wore The Cow while they ran with the bulls, sent photographic evidence, and confused some French guy to boot. Oh, the irony. I'm still undecided as to whether these guys were or weren't doing America's image overseas any favors...
Do you think Apple will eventually move to AMD? They are by far more innovative than Intel, who is reacting to AMD and not leading the market. AMD is eating Intel's lunch! I could deal with moving from the PowerPC if they were using the best available, but Intel is the lowest denominator.
A lot of Mac users are really hung up on the Apple choosing Intel over AMD thing, but to really go into this we need a clearer picture of AMD's history in the microprocessor arena and their current role in the marketplace.
Right now, some of the antics you see going can and have really muddied the situation in enough people's heads that the way they view AMD is vastly different from the reality of their situation. Note I said clearer, as while AMD does have an interesting story, and we'll be going into some of the differences in their roadmaps and differences between their products and such, this isn't magnifying glass as this isn't titled 'Deconstructing AMD'.
Awhile ago, I posted this goofy MP3 Jesper had made of my goofier interview, spoken via the built-in voices on the Mac. Jesper used a perl script, along with the 'say' command. The say command is...
- A CLI tool included with Mac OS X which pumps your text through the old speech synthesis engine that's also included, which can be sent to your speakers or to an .AIFF file.
- Is a fantastic way to play a prank on someone via SSH, along with a bit of AppleScript to set the volume (Not going to give it to you, but think 'tell application "System Events" to set volume')
- The largest improvement to speech on the Mac since it was first introduced with the AV Macs almost 13 years ago that I'm aware of. I'm really not kidding, although it was ported to OS X.
It's one of those technologies where I don't know if it wasn't really used because it was a ahead of its time, the implementation sucks, or the whole ideal sucks in general, but it's one I keep in mind during every hype cycle.
Anyways, some of you thought it was kind of a clever idea, I certainly did, and Jesper threw together the script he calls "Interview to Speech" under the BSD license with some basic instructions here...
I was just listening to the audio version of the WWDC presentation by Will Shipley. Very cool, I would send you a link but it already has you finger prints on it - in the comments it says "drunkenbatman was here" :)Troy P.
Yeah, amusing that. I've been getting a steady trickle of these over the last ~2 weeks, which have to do with an audio file Will Shipley put up on his blog at the beginning of July.
If you hadn't seen it, Will gave a talk to a big group of students at WWDC 2005, and threw up some slides afterwards, and then decided he wanted to do a (in his words) 'podcast thingy' of the talk. If you go and get it, and throw it in something like iTunes, you'll see this...
Some time ago, I started getting PR releases via email, although you wouldn't know noticed this because it's not the kind of thing I generally throw up on the site.
This started as a very infrequent thing, but it's picked up over time and it's something I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with. I can still remember one of the first ones, as it ties into this a bit...
I made up the little present above for those contributing covercasts to my iPod, which you can see above, because they deserve something just for them in exchange for wading into my brain for a spell and the time they lost rubbing their skin raw in the shower afterwards.
Unfortunately, by whipping it up I'd introduced a small rounding error into the weirdness quotient of the last post, and figured I'd clean up the equation by leaving the regular readers something to nibble on too:
I'm pretty sure the weirdness quotient is summing up correctly now, and both full and widescreen versions are included:
And now for something completely different. Over time, I've gotten a trickle of mail asking me to do a podcast. Since Apple went big pimping on it, the frequency has picked up a little.
While I don't have anything against podcasts, I'm just not interested right now. However, I've been really interested in how the messenger affects the message, how what we bring to the table affects what we take in, and even how the medium affects the message.
So, instead of me reading my entries, what if a whole bunch of readers read one entry? Yes, the same entry. Yes, over and over, hence the dubbing of 'covercast'.
Besides being completely absurd, we might be able to learn something too. To that end, a whole slew of readers volunteered their microphones to the experiment, and we've ended up with All Apologies, which you can download below.
These are from readers from all over the world, spanning the USA to Britain to Germany to New Zealand to South Africa to Holland. One of the performers is even from Uruguay, and each time I build up another ten covercasts, I'll add another volume.
Each disc includes the audio tracks (Encoded as .m4a files), as well as cover art (Yes, cover art) and quick instructions on making and sending in your own for more discs.
One of the things I make myself do is browse through Apple's Knowledge Base articles, which isn't something I generally look forward to but it's good to keep up and one day there may be one with a fix for keeping audio in synch within iMovie.
Until that iMovie post, this new one is my current favorite and made me laugh tonight almost as hard as the little bit about "and other important acronyms" they had on one of their marketing pages awhile back.
Someone there deserves a pat on the back for eeking that through. Yay, swarm of bees!
As it turns out, the whole "do not drink in alcohol state parks" in Michigan is more of a suggestion than a real law, at least judging by the contents of the trash cans we passed, which empowered us to also treat it as a suggestion. I also learned how to skip rocks. Sort of.
Still, what's the point of going to a lake in the summer if you can't drink...
Unfortunately, I ended up having to cut my few days away short for personal reasons, and amusingly enough, on the way back we hit a deer. A great big deer, which has put a fun crimp in many things and made getting home an adventure, but luckily no one was seriously hurt.
I officially hate Michigan, have reaffirmed my hatred of cars, and am seriously thinking of taking up hunting.
I'll post the post I yanked tomorrow evening, I'm gone for a few days at a lake in Michigan (nice lakes, nice people, but you can't take alcohol to any public beach... which is... insane... and makes me want to never go to a lake house in Michigan ever, ever again... especially since it's 100 degrees F outside) and have limited access to the net till I'm home tomorrow.
Several days ago, I got this amusing letter from a reader, in relation to him running around a city in Israel with The Cow and a digital camera:
Going anywhere near an Israeli military base with a camera would probably get me arrested, if not shot, on sight, so this is about the coolest I could do.Next time I'm in Jerusalem I'll have to take The Cow and steal a friend's digital camera (again), and try to get a picture with some holy sites in the background. You can imagine the coolness factor.
Anyway, you can cross Israel off the list, if you haven't had the chance to already. Thanks for all of your great writing, and for putting all the hard work you do into the blog. Cheers!
Jon R. from Ra'anana, Israel
The Cow isn't in all of these, but it's in enough, and I like all the others. Click for larger...
A few of you may have noticed the last post got yanked after being up for ten minutes or so. A few minutes after posting it, a friend in London informed me that a bomb went off in a crowded bus in London, as well as several in the subways:
An explosion destroyed a double-decker bus in central London during rush hour Thursday, police said, and several blasts also went off on the London subway. There were reports of casualties.People covered in blood stumbled out of the subway, and a witness said the entire top deck of the bus was destroyed.
"I was on the bus in front and heard an incredible bang, I turned round and half the double decker bus was in the air," Belinda Seabrook told Press Association, the British news agency. She said the bus was packed with people.
The subway explosions may or may not have been bombs, as nobody really knows much yet as this just hit the wire a few minutes ago. They shut down the whole tube system of London, which is a pretty vital piece of infrastructure... From what I know, if the whole tube system is out, London is out. Maybe it'll end up being some freak thing that wasn't intentional, but it doesn't look good.
Every once in awhile I try to put together something different and usual, just to see what might happen, and every once in awhile I ask for volunteers from within the ranks of the readers to try to make them happen.
Last time, I asked for a chunk of mirror space, and got a whole lot of help; and it's not as though people with 300 megabytes of web hosting space are just lying around.
This time I'm asking for help from those of you with:
- A microphone.
- A sense of humor.
- Approximately 10 minutes of time, start to finish from when you get the email.
That's it. Your platform doesn't matter, nor your OS, nor the quality of your microphone, nor your technical skills, nor the quality of your English (although you should be able to read English in order to know what's going on here).
The mics built into most computers will work just fine, you just need to have one and a tiny slice of time to donate to something that will be unusual and may well round the horn to being cool. The more people helping, and the broader the spectrum, the higher the chances.
I'll spell out the details via email, so if it's something you think you could help with, please hit me up: wtfnow -at- drunkenblog -dot- com
Update: Please email to the above address on this one, as if you ping the comments I'm just going to ask you to email. Overnight we got over 40 70 responses, and more are welcome.
However, broadness does count here, and from what I can tell, only 2 of them were female. I know there are a few female readers out there, so surely we can do better than 5% 3%.
Every once in awhile I go through a comments binge, where I trawl through them all for the last while and send off little notes if they've left a way to reply. It wasn't such a big deal ages ago when I committed to it, but if you look closely at the screenshots below, it's starting to get a little over the top.
I'm not going to stop doing it, because even as I slip into legend it's just polite. If someone has gone through the effort to leave me their thoughts, it's not like their time isn't valuable and should be treated as such. Plus, it's good to leave the rarified air and slum with the common people a little, and it lets them know I'm actually really listening and appreciate their POV even if it doesn't necessarily match up with my own.
However, some things to keep in mind...
Awhile ago, I mentioned in an off-hand way that someone in the Canadian Air Force had embarked on a quest to get The Cow in places he should probably never ever be. Well, he pulled it off.
Unfortunately, he has to be very careful about details, so we're going to have to call him 'drunkensoldier'. Be sure to give this guy some love, as I'm still too dumbstruck to gush appropriately. Click for larger...
