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Guía de Chamberí

President Obama's N.C.A.A. tournament selections were rooted in basketball knowledge, rather than trying to curry favor with key political states.

I’ve just returned from SXSW Interactive 2010, and perhaps the best talk I saw was Andy Baio’s “Gaming the Crowd, Turning Work Into Play”. He hasn’t yet posted slides or notes, but you can get the gist of the talk from this blog post and these notes. The main thesis addresses bringing game mechanics into non-game contexts to encourage desired behavior (and how that can sometimes go terribly awry, as in the case of the very evil Swoopo.)

Game mechanics even pervaded talks on other subjects. On the otherwise tepid “City As A Platform” panel, Dustin Haisler rocked my world with his presentation of Manor Labs, which attempts to bring social media tools to community and government engagement. Among the elements of Manor Labs are game mechanics that reward participation.

Jane McGonigal, who spoke at UX Week 2008, just had her TED talk “Gaming can make a better world” posted.

Bobby Gonzalez’s Seton Hall team won 19 games this season, the most in his four years at the school.

The dingo was one of the breeds studied to determine where dogs were first domesticated from wolves.

DAKAR, Senegal — The acting president of Nigeria dissolved his cabinet in an assertion yet of his authority over a country where his rule has been challenged.

A majority of bishops and dioceses have approved the election of the church’s second openly gay bishop.

ABC and Christiane Amanpour are close to a deal that would install her as host of "This Week."

En un post anterior, les platiqué de mis eternos problemas para insertar snippets de código en este humilde blog. En aquella ocasión había llegado a la conclusión que Gist era la herramienta perfecta pero la verdad es que tiene un defecto: el código no se ve en el feed.

A platform called Google TV will bring the Web into the living room through televisions and set-top boxes.

Агонизирующий говнокомсомол не знает, за что бы зацепиться на пути в свой ад. Движение "Наши", которое по стилю, поведению, риторике и набору цитат явно должно называться движением "Фаши", бросило на передовую своего выпердыша.

Знакомьтесь - http://boris-yakemenko.livejournal.com/65750.html. Это пишет один из лидеров движения "Фаши". Ой, простите, "Наши". За сутки его пост собирает целых два камента, что отражает реальную популярность движения. Герр Якеменко, прикрываясь словами о защите светлого праздника, догматизирую историю, лишая оппонентов права непредвзято анализировать события прошлого, блещет цитатами их фашистских листовок, а также приводит куплеты из фашистской песни. Сразу видно - движение "Наци" послало одного из лучших своих представителей защищать идеалы нашизма.

На их совершенно гестаповском по стилю сайте так и написано "Третьим будешь?" Разумеется, речь идет о рейхе.

Chris Ziegler:

Microsoft just mentioned in a Q&A session here at MIX10 in no uncertain terms that clipboard operations won’t be supported on Windows Phone 7 Series.

Catching up is hard. And based on what I’m hearing about iPhone OS 4.0, it seems likely that Windows Phone 7 is going to fall further behind before it even gets a chance to ship.

I’ve been using a Nexus One for a month or so now and there is one singular annoyance that continues to frustrate – the heavy reliance on the Menu button to access critical app functionality.

During SXSW, I was talking to a friend who works at Google about this issue and he pointed out something I hadn’t thought about. Turns out, this is a by-product of an evolving operating system for multiple hardware devices. While Android officially requires a touchscreen for Android devices that want to have the ability to install 3rd party apps, there isn’t much that cannot be done by navigating using hard buttons. And, if I’m not mistaken, it wasn’t until Android 2.0 that more softkey functionality was made available.

So, you have a philosophy of supporting multiple versions of hardware and, because of this, not every combination of SW and HW are perfectly matched.

Excellent critique from Alexander Murphy (pseudonymous Hollywood visual effects supervisor) explaining what’s wrong about all the recent 3D live action films other than Avatar — they were made “3D” in post-production rather than being shot in true 3D with dual cameras. I didn’t even like Up in 3D, which wasn’t live action. The one and only 3D theatrical film I’ve ever seen where the 3D made the experience better rather than worse was Avatar. (Some of the 3D attractions at Disney World are good, too.)

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humantorch is suffering form some filesystem trouble after the RAID backup battery died. Running filesystem checks to verify and fix filesystem inconsistencies before bringing the system back online. There is no ETA for the moment, but expect hours.

Great tip from Merlin Mann on off-site rotation:

Peg your off-site rotation to a date-certain (like how you probably changed the 9-volt in your smoke alarm for Daylight Savings Time yesterday). I do my rotations within the first five days of each new month. So, yes, do automate the creation of backups, but then also do the physical rotation like you’d pay your mortgage. On time and without fail.

If there’s a weakness in my own system, it’s that I don’t do this often enough. I like the idea of doing it on the first of the month.

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USDA Economic Research service has some interesting charts on long term trends. (via)