furiousBlog

At the risk of giving Elroy the blog-hater some ammo to use in our constant arguments about whether or not I am an Apple fan-boy, I post this entry about a couple interesting Apple stories I've read recently.

First up, a quick story about the origin of the weird little icon on the 'Apple' button:

Swedish Campground

Finally she came across a floral symbol that was used in Sweden to indicate an interesting feature or attraction in a campground. She rendered a 16 x 16 bitmap of the little symbol and showed it to the rest of the team, and everybody liked it. Twenty years later, even in OS X, the Macintosh still has a little bit of a Swedish campground in it.

Secondly, a considerably longer and more entertaining story about the creation of the graphing calculator software for Macs:

The Graphing Calculator Story

I used to be a contractor for Apple, working on a secret project. Unfortunately, the computer we were building never saw the light of day. The project was so plagued by politics and ego that when the engineers requested technical oversight, our manager hired a psychologist instead. In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed.

I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple's doors, so I just kept showing up.

It goes on to talk about how he worked for months and months on this project, recruiting others to help, getting caught and thrown out, sneaking back in, and finally getting the software included in the original release of the Mac OS for the PowerPC. It's really a good read, even if you're not a techy type.

I found the calculator story from this 37signals, and the Swedish campsite story from SimpleBits.

This is somewhat weird, but something I may actually try to make. It's an 'open-source' pattern for a Tux the Penguin stuffed animal. From the site:

Why is it that on the one hand in the Linux® world all code of software is freely available and on the other hand the code to compile a soft toy penguin is still not open source?

Seems like a pretty logical question to me. Thankfully, the nature of open source was proven once again: someone had an itch and shared the scratch with the world.

OK Go is this band that I've seen two or three times as an opening act (once for They Might Be Giants, I think -- I can't remember the other(s)). As I remember (it's been a couple years since I've seen them), I didn't much care for them. All their songs tended to sound pretty similar, and they were kind of goofy on stage, but not in an endearing way.

But, it is just that quality (goofiness) that I am putting value on now. My friend Chas sent me this link in an email with this promise:

You won't regret treating your auditory and visual senses to this video.

He was right. Go to the video section on okgo.net and watch the video for A Million Ways. It's just them doing a choreographed dance in someone's backyard, and it's actually pretty funny. Well worth the 3 minutes or so.

This is kind of sad. I can't say that I've seen him in anything other than Big Fish, but he was great in it, and it's sad that he died so young:

'Big Fish' Giant McGrory Dies at 32

Seven-foot-plus actor Matthew McGrory, best known as Karl in "Big Fish" and Big Foot on Howard Stern's radio show, died Tuesday, Aug. 9 at the age of 32.

(Thanks to Gary for the link)

As a true Firefly fan, I declare this the coolest thing ever:



The site has a bunch of photos showcasing a lot of different angles. Be sure to check out the light-up fun page. There's even a photo of the crew as lego-people.

Thanks to Rob for sending me the link.