This post really is this week’s “Lunchtime Links,” but after Will Smith’s reference to “Boom Goes the Dynamite” on the Oscars, I just can’t help myself. It beyond-cracks me up. I say it and I can’t stop giggling. It’s one of those things that somehow bypasses my consciousness and links directly to the spastic laughter lobe of my brain. Meme goes the dynamite. I could be watching videos of baby seals being clubbed to death while having my house foreclosed on, and if someone said “Boom goes the dynamite,” I’d start chuckling.
For those who have no idea what the hell I’m talking about, explanatory links are in order. Here’s Keith Olbermann explaining it. And of course, Dr. Wikipedia’s Electric Answer Machine.
OK, back to the show.
Here’s Jon Stewart gently telling Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, that the Kindle 2 is a piece of crap. Did anyone else think Jeff came off as more-than-slightly psycho? His laugh made me think he was about the start beating Stewart over the head with the K2, like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas 2.0. “You want DRM?! Here’s your DRM!!!” Boom goes the CEO.
O’Reilly has a new site on the design and development of Rich Internet Apps. It’s called Inside RIA.
If the Oscars didn’t quench your thirst for awards, check out the CODiEs. They’re awards for technology excellence in software development, education, and content management. The finalists have been announced, let’s see… Pearson nabbed five nominations. Brilliant. McGraw-Hill got two. Uh-huh. And…boom goes the dynamite.
Here’s a tip: if you have any technology or app that you’re keenly interested in, it’s probably available for following on Twitter. Case in point, TLF, or Text Layout Framework. I gushed about TLF here a while back as the “text best thing to sliced bread” (don’t bother, I already copyrighted that). Now you can follow the TLF team and get the news straight from the horse’s, uh, tweet.
Registration is open for the Adobe Creative Suite Developer Summit in Seattle. May 11-15. It’s free(ish), and if you can’t make it out there, you can partake via Acrobat Connect. I’m not a real developer, but I play one on TV, so I may check it out remotely. What I’d really like to go to is the Movemen class on IDML. But that one ain’t free: $990 US. Still, not bad for getting in on the ground floor of the Most Important Feature Ever.
Nitro PDF Software has released a public beta of a free PDF-to-Word online conversion service. The first 2000 people to sign up at the PDF to Word site with the code “nitro” receive instant access.
For any DITA-heads out there, Adobe has a free eLearning seminar on Framemaker 9 this Thursday Feb 26.
And lastly, some joker on InDesign Secrets claims to show how to alter placed PDFs and graphic layers with XML (well, INX).
That’s it. Till next time, may your worst failures all become succesful memes.
Filed under: Adobe, CMS, Educational Publishing, InDesign, O'Reilly, PDF, RIA, Twitter, Word, XML, ebooks | Tagged: Adobe, Amazon, Boom, CODiE, creative suite, DITA, Framemaker, IDML, InDesign, Kindle, Olbermann, PDF, RIA, TLF, Will Smith, Word, XML
Boom boom! I so agree with you about Mr. Bezos; that was a little eerie, though to give him credit, I hardly think I’ll do better when it’s my turn to be interviewed on D.S. (though Jon S. will be 97 years old, so the interview might be slightly different).
Yeah, I did feel a little bad for Jeff, thinking how I’d come across in the same situation. Hey, there’s a mission: create something that would get you interviewed on TDS and find out for real. Actually, I did meet Jon Stewart once, a loooong time ago (1992). It was after a gig he did at Catch a Rising Star in Cambridge. It was the funniest show I’d ever seen and I saw him afterward, sitting at the bar. So I went over and said hi. He was cool and nice, as you might expect.