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Thanks to xkcd, I note that there’s no entry for “Infinite Girls, Infinite Cups”. Let’s fix that:

So Michael Symon is the new star of the retooled Dinner: Impossible show, replacing “the lying limey” Robert Irvine.

I think they missed the point of the show, shared also by “Throwdown with Bobby Flay”: the host of such shows should be kind of a dick—so you secretly want to see him fail miserably, and when he seems humbled by his ordeal, you’re rewarded. Michael Symon just seems to be having fun. And he’s a nice guy who loves bacon. What kind of person wants to see a guy who makes chocolate-covered bacon fail?

Which is why they need to have that snooty-faced Ice Queen from the Next Food Network Star win that competition, so she can do Dinner: Impossible and have breakdowns and triumph, humbly, in the end.

Dear corporate copywriters the world over: Stop using ‘utilize’.

Every day I see “utilize”, “utilized”, or “utilizing” used to mean “used”. You don’t “utilize our partnership” or “utilize the website” or “utilize your desk phone”. No. You use them.

You can only “utilize” something that isn’t really a tool to begin with. Let’s say that your corporate jet crashes on a deserted island. Then and only then may you utilize your phone to crack coconuts; or, utilize your binder as a serving tray for poi. You may even utilize your tie as a makeshift tourniquet. Hopefully on your neck. Because you’re an evil evil person who hates language and clear thought.

Wanted, a movie featuring Angelina Jolie’s Stunt Double’s ass (I can only assume–though she did make out with her brother, so who knows…), is an awful film. It’s like if The Bourne Identity had been screenwritten by a gang of 13-year-old foster-home boys during a sleepover, fueled by Mountain Dew and Metal Gear Solid: “And dude! Dude! He can bend bullets!” “woah!” “…yeah, yeah, and he like, kills everyone, and, like, totally makes out with Angelina Jolie!” “Dude! Awesome!” “Maybe we can show her butt, too!” “Yeah! She’s all hot and stuff.” “…I have to go to the bathroom.” “You just went, Ralph…” “…I have to go again!” …and so forth.

Now don’t get me wrong, dude totally bends bullets. And you see Angelina’s butt. And things explode and trains explode and cars …well cars don’t explode as such, but there’s sparks and stuff and guns and the et cetera. So the 13-year-old boy in me totally dug all that stuff. But at the end of the movie, when the main character breaks the fourth wall and asks what I’ve “done lately“, I had to admit that what I had done lately was “Sat through this shit.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be in the bathroom.

So the key reason to upgrade to Vista only applies to tablet users: handwriting recognition. Vista’s tablet functionality is simply awesome. And Vista comes with Windows Journal, which lets you use your laptop as a virtual quire* of paper, and take notes as you normally would for any given purpose, as naturally as writing. The awesomeness comes in when you select your notes and convert them to text. It’s super-keen. I tend to think more clearly when I write things out longhand, and can draw (literally) [...graphically?] connections between different ideas, which helps me order things when I finally set them in print.

But Windows Journal has one problem: to change pages you have to use the fiddly scroll bar, which is just about useless, or the up-down buttons on the corner of the screen, which truly are useless. There’s a handy display of which page you’re on at the bottom of the screen that just begs to be a target for a menu, like the menus in ArtRage or SketchBook.

The control should work like a spring-slider. When you click on it, and drag the slider left or right (or up or down: my intuition was left/right), a bar should appear and the pages should tick down or up, depending on which way you drag and whether your Windows is running a right-to-left language (if it’s left/right dragging). The only downside is that dragging “further down” leaves you with little room for accelleration. Alternately, I was thinking you could turn the margin into a draggable region, where moving the cursor into it shows a little cartoon ‘draggy hand’. To get rid of the hand, you could scribble the pen until it disappeared with a poof of magic smoke, after which you could write and it wouldn’t appear so long as you came back into the margin within five seconds.

*I just learned this one. A quire is 25 sheets, a ream is 500 sheets.