I just got an XBOX 360, and the first game I bought for it, as I had planned for at least a year (believing I would, eventually, get the console) was The Orange Box, a set of 5 games, including one of the most intriguing game concepts I’ve ever seen: Portal.

It’s as cool as I expected.

But… it’s set up like a first-person shooter. And as is often the case with first-person shooters, I’ve discovered to my chagrin that it makes me nauseous. Damn it! Maybe in the future I should remember not to play it at 7 AM, but right now I am just trying to settle my stomach.

Amazon.com (as if you don’t have it bookmarked) is (probably, still) the undisputed king of the mountain of e-commerce. Even though many of Amazon’s former brick-and-mortar partners, like Target, have since gone off and launched their own (usually better) individual e-commerce sites, Amazon is still at the heart of it all and is the go-to choice for buying… well… just about anything online. These days, as I’ve noted before, I use it mostly to buy MP3 downloads, which despite my usual criticism of Amazon in general (wait for it!), offers a great selection, better prices, and higher quality than iTunes… and no DRM.

But that’s not my point today. My point today is to address that one usual criticism I have of Amazon: their design sucks. And I am talking about both the surface-level graphic design and layout of their pages, and also much of their application flow as well. There are two main ways in which I think their design fails: there’s too much of everything, everywhere, all the time on their site, and (consequently, perhaps) many options that I think should be prominent and visible are instead hidden in microscopic type at the bottom of the page.

Case in point, from the Amazon MP3 realm: as a web developer, I’m constantly tinkering with web pages in ways ordinary users do not, and as a result I am frequently clearing my cache and my cookies. Now I could be careful and just delete the cookies from the sites I’m working on, but I’m usually in the middle of something and therefore in too much of a hurry, so I just delete them all. (And, yes, waste a lot more time in the long run retyping all of my usernames and passwords for the sites I visit… but at least that helps me remember my passwords!) As a result, I lose the cookie that tells Amazon that yes, dammit, I did already download and install your MP3 Downloader app so I don’t need to download it again! The first couple of times this happened, I was dumbfounded, and frustrated, and I re-downloaded and reinstalled the application, even though I knew I already had it. Finally I scrolled down and discovered a sentence in 8-point type telling me that if I already have the downloader app, I should “click here” to activate it in this browser.

Yeah, thanks.

Which brings me finally to my point. Read more »

…then the Sexy People blog is here to help settle the question for you.

It’s somewhat rude, I suppose, to laugh at the poor fashions, hairstyles, glasses and mustaches of days gone by, but it’s only because we’ve all been there. So let’s all cringe together.

I never would have expected it myself, going into this, but now that I take a cold hard look, I actually think the ’90s fashions are the worst!

Get your stuff, right here!

I am selling some things on eBay over the next few weeks to help pay for a new Fender Jaguar Bass.

Currently I have up for bids a Yamaha DTXpress electronic drum kit, an iBook G4 with some hardware issues, and a vintage Smith Miller toy semi truck from the 1950s in pristine condition.

You can check my current auctions page for anything else new that may show up over the next few weeks.

Well, maybe not quite, since Comic Book Guy is a cartoon character. But when I saw a picture of Mario Batali today on The Daily Beast, it suddenly — and I’m sad to say it took so long — occurred to me that he bears a striking resemblance to Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. Clearly, and as usual, I am not the first to notice:

While it’s disappointing to be reminded once again that I never have an original thought, it was great to discover yet another way to waste a ridiculous amount of time online.

I’m surprised at some of the comments on this comparison, though I suspect people may be channeling their inner overweight, ponytailed, comic-book-obsessed cynic. One comment, though, captured my thoughts exactly:

Facially they don’t look the same (it would be REALLY unfortunate for someone to actually look just like a Matt Groening character…) but between the ponytail, scraggly facial hair and the fact that they both break a sweat when they fart, I think this one is spot on.

The Shawshank Redemption is one of my favorite movies. I’m also a big fan of ’80s movies, but the appeal is completely different. Shawshank is a suspenseful, thought-provoking drama. ’80s movies elevate cheez to (nearly) an art form.

So, what would have happened if Shawshank had been filmed a decade earlier? It would have been shorter, for one thing. And it would have had a montage set to some fist-pounding rock music.

Now, the geniuses at FunnyOrDie.com make the dream a reality.

I’ve been examining maps on my own and also reading commentary on voting patterns in the southern United States this year, most of which reaffirmed some not-too-surprising facts:

• African-Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Barack Obama
• White voters voted substantially less for Obama than did African-American voters
• Racism played a role in some voters’ decision, at least to the extent that some white McCain voters would not support Obama due to his race

As a result of these and other facts, some correlated, some not, some distinctive maps of voting patterns have emerged. One I found interesting (which I will add to this page if I can locate it) showed that while almost the entire country voted more Democratic than in 2004, there was a band through the Middle South stretching from West Virginia to Oklahoma that moved towards the Republicans.

But within the mostly “red” region of the South, there also was a smaller “Blue” band that went for Obama. And here we’re referring to actual percentages, not changes with respect to 2004 voting patterns.

Again, not a terribly big surprise. Population distribution of African-Americans is not even throughout the South; blacks tend to live predominantly in areas where cotton plantations existed during the pre-Civil War era. So, looking back into history a few hundred years, we can see that patterns of plantation distribution and the profoundly regrettable history of slavery contributed directly to the distribution of voting patterns in the 2008 election.

But it goes back a lot farther than that. Why were plantations distributed as they were? Well, that comes back to the soil — a “fertile crescent” of deep black soil through that region. And why does that soil exist as it does, in that particular configuration? This question takes us all the way back to the location of the Atlantic coastline during the Cretaceous Period, 85 million years ago. For a deeper explanation, read on.