Maybe you’ve made the connection, but there are an awful lot of odd products sold at Amazon. Take, for instance, this can of Uranium Ore. The reviewers say it all:

I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.

Or the classic:

Picked this up for use in one of my kid’s ‘diversity’ projects in school (Great Success!), and stuck the leftovers in the cabinet next to the baking soda. Ran out of toothpaste, and remembered how you’re supposed to be able to use baking soda to clean your teeth, so of course, I accidentally used this instead, and Wow! all I can say is, my teeth have never been cleaner! They sparkle, they tingle, and for some reason, they STAY clean now, no matter what. Highly recommended!

However, when I ran out of that fire-ant killer powder stuff, I figured I would try some for that too. Big mistake! Boy, it sure did not kill those ants! Fortunately, those suckers get slower as they get bigger, so I have been able to use a shovel to take care of most of them, one at a time though, the sneaky devils. And the darn trash man refuses to take them away..

I would have given this product 5 stars for the teeth and the project on embracing diversity, but I deducted one star because of the giant mutant ants.

Nice to know that Amazon would have completely changed the plot to Back To The Future, my favorite movie when I was 12. We wouldn’t need the gigawatts of lightening strikes at all if Marty could just hand Doc Brown a can of uranium to drop in the tank. Damn you, Amazon!

What cracks me up even more is that customers who viewed this item also viewed whole milk in one-gallon containers, a testicle self-exam kit, wolf urine, UFO detectors, and some report on the outlook for wood toilet seats. Party at Bob’s house Friday night!

Oh, and if that isn’t enough, Amazon likes these “buy this and get this other thing” deals. You’d think it’d be bundled with a Geiger counter, right? You’d be wrong. How about canned unicorn meat.

Some things you just can’t make up.

I’ve talked about my early days of creativity, how I started around age 10 creating baseball board games, trying to simulate authenticity out of dice and baseball cards. And when I was 13 I got my first computer — an Apple IIc — and taught myself to program.

But my formal computer science education didn’t start until I was 15. We had just moved to South Florida and I was enrolled at a magnet school in central Broward County, just outside of Ft. Lauderdale. The only computer class at my old school was typing, or at least I didn’t know of any others.

After my freshman year of high school, a time when I was making lots of new friends and for the first time feeling comfortable with myself, I was uprooted to this foreign land. I was in culture shock, frankly. I moved from a town where having a car was a big deal to a place where driving a brand new Mercedes was nothing special. To make matters worse, most of the kids in my class had been going to school together since Kindergarten. And I was shy, making connections with the others very difficult.

Luckily, my parents had the foresight to enroll me in a programming class. I remember showing up on the first day. There were lots of students split between two rooms. Somehow we were segregated by experience and I was shipped off to the other classroom with the more experienced kids.

This is when I met Mr. Hinshaw. He was a kindly older man (at least to my 15 year old eyes), a calm persona (and boy would he need it in that class), and seemed to know what he was doing. That first year we worked on Apple IIe computers in BASIC. I did well enough that I was asked to join the advanced class the next year — we had Macintoshes and wrote in Pascal by then — and take AP Computer Science my senior year, all the time being in Mr. Hinshaw’s class.

That was one of my best experiences about moving to South Florida, an opportunity I would have never had if we’d stayed in Ohio. Mr. Hinshaw was instrumental in nurturing my love for programming. There were plenty of times I skipped class to go work on the Macs and Mr. Hinshaw never batted an eye. In my senior year he even gave me an award as the most outstanding CS student in my class.

While I haven’t talked about it here, I think about Mr. Hinshaw often and realize that if it wasn’t for him, I might not be running Infinity Softworks today. Thanks, Mr. Hinshaw, for creating the kind of environment where an awkward 15-year old could feel comfortable and let his talents show.

I was 13 when I got my first computer, 25 years ago, and bought my second computer when I was 20. (Between 13 and 20 I either used my Apple IIc or the school’s Macintosh computers.) I bought a Mac that year (1994) but switched to Windows in early 1996. It was a Gateway desktop system, followed by a few Dell laptops and Sony desktop systems before switching back to Mac in 2007. Since then I’ve been all Mac. Outside of the original Apple IIc, I have never owned a system that didn’t use a mouse or worked via touch. In fact, I refused to use Windows until Windows 95 as Windows 3.1 was a joke.

I tell you all this for a reason: I’ve spent 25 years using computers and 18 years using mice in graphical interfaces. In that time, most of my processes for getting stuff done in this very awkward world have been baked. And frankly, I don’t want to change. My processes work.

This is why I am a little concerned about all the changes Apple and Microsoft are making to OS X and Windows. In a time when I have far more important things to do then figure out new processes within the way Apple and Microsoft want us to do things, both companies are undergoing massive changes in their operating systems.

Windows 8, of course, moves us to a hybrid model of computing, partly with the style formerly-known-as-Metro and partly with the “classic” Windows style. Apple’s new operating system OS X Mountain Lion coupled with changes made in the previous revision known as Lion, also are attempting to change us from a file structure to an app orientation. In short, to launch files, go to the app, find your file and work on it. No need to save anymore as Apple does it automatically.

I understand the benefits: it is easier for new users and matches up with a uniform computing approach across mobile and desktop systems. But it sure is hard to swallow all the changes for us old timers who have built processes based on the computing structure we have all known for 30 years. I have files everywhere and rarely launch apps. Instead, I usually find the file I want to work on and launch the app by double-clicking on it.

The rate of change is escalating. Apple’s releasing a new OS every year and my guess is Microsoft will soon do the same. I am having a hard time keeping up with all the changes. I can only imagine how hard it is for my less technical family members and friends.

I am always awed by The Olympics. Yes, it has become over-commercialized and over-sensationalized, same as most sporting events, but all the same seeing athletes from all over the world come and compete in events that we don’t normally see (at least here in the US) is so much fun. My favorites are the swimming and diving competitions, but I also enjoy the sprinters and gymnastics. We don’t have cable any more so our evenings, starting at 8pm, were tuned to NBC.

The Olympics are fun, I love to learn, I love history and I love technology. So when I find something that melds all these pieces together, I just have to share. The New York Times produced three amazing visualizations focusing on different areas of The Olympics. These are well worth the 5 minutes per to watch:

1. Usain Bolt is fast, but how much faster is he than every other 100 meter sprinter in history?
2. How does this year’s gold medal 100 meter freestyle swimmer match up to every medalist that came before?
3. Is athleticism helping medalists fly farther in the long jump?

—

(via The Verge)

Making a living at this development game is hard. The political process sucks and problems aren’t being resolved. I can’t even distract myself with sports as the Indians are struggling this summer (although the Olympics are awesome).

But sometimes things are right. What a great four minute video to demonstrate that maybe, just maybe, we aren’t born evil after all:

(via Daring Fireball)