If you say “Call me %” where % is your name, Siri will say your name instead of just showing it on screen. This works for any phrase and does not need to be in your address book. Siri currently calls me “Captain Awesome.”
Other fun phrases I found:
I’m sleepy.
I love you Siri.
Tell me a story.
How old are you?
How old am I?
Who is on first?
What is your favorite food?
When is your birthday?
I need to go to the bathroom.
What the f*ck, Siri.
I thought these were ironic and clever:
Can you wash my dishes?
Can you clean my room?
I’m drunk.
I’m bleeding.
Where can I buy drugs?
I want to go for a walk.
What kind of bear is best?
Since Siri is an external service, the chance exists that any response can or will be tweaked in the future. That’s pretty exciting since more and more clever responses can pop up at any time. If you have any good ones, I’d love to see them in the comments!
Working at Automattic and on several open source projects means I am often working with people from all over the world at any given time of the day or night. As such, we tend to coordinate our lives around UTC. Between traveling, daylight savings, my absent circadian rhythm, and my shorter than average attention span these days (squirrel!) I’m always a bit worried about missing a meeting that’s happening someplace I am not.
I know that right now I am EDT, UTC -4, which will be UTC -5 come winter. Half of my team is on PDT which is UTC -7, which is -3 more than me. At the end of September I’ll be at WordCamp Lisbon which is UTC (GMT +1 DST) and in October I’ll be in Hungary which is CEST (GMT +2 DST).
This is me going cross-eyed.
I’ve had quite a few exciting changes in the past 2 years. I have a dog; I switched over completely to OS-X; I switched to Dvorak; I switched to the Lion backwards-mouse-thing; I moved to a part of the United States I’ve never had aspirations to live in; I survived a hurricane. Since times they are a changin’ I’m switching all of my clocks over to 24 hour UTC time until I memorize what’s going on where.
If you see me around, please don’t ask me what time it is for the next few weeks, because I will literally have no idea.
I found this email to be hilarious. Copy and pasted, bad grammar et all:
Gooday, I am your group regional Instructor for Gooday,I am your group regional Instructor for Ebay Secret Shopper LLC,. Henceforth. We are looking for a secret shopper and your wage is $200 per assignment. Email me back with the Information below then i can send you the procedures on what you will be doing 01 – Full names: (**last Name first): 02 – Home Address(include Zip): 03 – Phone: 04 – Country: 05 – Age: 06 – Occupation: Regards Sean Duffy
There’s a reason why Google chose circles for its new Google + social graph, and it isn’t just because it’s a clever name. If you search Google’s archive of images for the phrase “social graph” every single relevant image that comes up portrays relationships as being circular.
In the screen shot above, it’s clear that we humans seem to naturally illustrate our relationships as being… rounded. We live our lives constantly juggling these relationships with friends, partners, family, and colleagues in an intricate network that is unique to us. What better way to depict these predictably random dynamics than with a shape that has absolutely no bias towards any direction or alignment – the circle.
It's not you, it's me… Wait no it's totally you.
Up until now, we’ve been forced to map these relationships within rigid digital constructs built by developers (see: me) to make it as easy as possible to manage that data as it scales into the millions of relationships.
It’s easy to lump people into classes and demographics and groups and categories because we receive (false) positive reinforcement from doing it, and quantifying these relationships by putting them into boxes makes them feel real.
You are my: [ ] Friend [ ] Family [ ] Pet [ ] Dinner
Since the first time someone drew a recognizable picture of someone else, having something we can go back to and look at and touch and say “Yeah, that person exists and we are important to each other!” has been an evolutionary significance in our development that technology hasn’t been able to properly convey quite yet. With every emerging social platform that comes around we get one step closer to translating the complexities of our relationships in ways that actually make sense, beyond being friends and followers.
If nothing else, Google + (and Circles specifically) is a reminder that our lives are ever-changing and the people we know now and will meet tomorrow don’t belong in any rigid box. If you are my friend, I appreciate my judgmental classification of you in my life just a wee bit more today than I did yesterday.
This afternoon Paul the puppy and I laced up our retro Nike Shox and took part in the World Wide WordPress 5k. Our goal for today was neither speed nor endurance, but rather to get our butts off the couch on a Sunday afternoon and explore the neighborhood. These are the results, tracked with RunKeeper Pro:
I ordered two of the Twelve South BackPack’s so that I could hide my Mac Mini and the two 1TB drives I have hooked to it. While I was getting everything situated, I zip tied some cables together and took some shots of the rest of the work bench.
As you can see, my battery backup is still a rats nest that I haven’t really figured out what to do with. I tucked the Verizon Fios router in the bottom drawer of my little shelf under my desk, on top of which is an Airport Extreme that is setup so I get great signal on the patio (if the precipitation ever stops.) I think the end result is better than what I had before, but could use additional cable organization. Would love to hear suggestions on how to hide the giant battery backup and organize the power cables.
For anyone that’s curious, most essential software is sync’ed to the MacBook Air either via MobileMe or DropBox, so things like Skype, Colloquy, keychains, and non-sensitive local development files are always in sync between the two computers.
A few months back I jumped on the iPod-Nano-as-a-watch bandwagon, and have been waiting for a suitable watch band ever since. I tried a few and none of them really felt solid enough for daily wear. I even made my own out of a $6 X-Men wristband from Hot Topic, which lasted an hour until I ripped it taking it off.
Then I saw the LunaTik on Kickstarter. I went for the limited anodized red edition, which came with the awesome (but not quite as awesome) TikTok.
I’ve been wearing it for 10 minutes so far, and it’s as awesome and well constructed as it looks. The band feels really strong and comfortable, and the Nano fits exactly perfectly inside it. Unlike the Transformers watches I had when I was like 7 years old that kept falling off in the Wisconsin leaf-piles, there is no way the Nano is coming out of this thing no matter how sweet of a jump I hit.
If there wasn’t a limitation on the length of text it speaks back, I could keep it going for longer with other variations. This also gives a neat peek into how the speech algorithm works, since it’s sensitive to punctuation and syllable patterns.
Jess and I took yesterday off and spent some time at Zoo Miami, formerly known as the Miami Metro Zoo. It was really hot and we made the mistake of walking the entire thing instead of paying the $2 for the train or renting of these crazy two-seater bicycles.
I love zoos. Penguins and giraffes are my favorites, but we didn’t see any penguins. It was kind of a sad place because there were so few animals around considering the size of the empty spaces allotted for them. There were lots of empty exhibits, the monorail was broken, and there were no signs to tell you what animals were in what direction.
We did meet a nice man named Ron, who talked to us for a bit about koalas and kangaroos, and we were fortunate enough to get really close to a few animals that were relaxing near their windows to freedom. I took some pictures with my iPhone 4 (with HDR turned on) and shot about 2 minutes of video of a Galapagos turtle walking, slowly, into a wading pool.
