Thank You Stephen Colbert

(Quick reminder, this is my personal blog. Standard disclaimer applies.)

I’m guessing the White House Correspondents’ Association didn’t run their choice of dinner entertainment past the actual White House. Last year, Stephen Colbert had this hilarious bit on Laura Bush’s “after hours” show @ last year’s dinner.

I wonder who thought “Let’s get the guy that made the joke about President Bush bathing in a bucket of horse semen last year to appear at this year’s Correspondent’s dinner.” Actually, I don’t have to wonder. It was Mark Smith from AP Radio, the President of WHCA, who admitted to being responsible for signing Colbert while introducing him Saturday night. This guy considered “Colbert: AP is America’s #1 threat” a “pit-in-my-stomach, career-in-flames moment”. I’m guessing he’s in full barf-o-rama mode after Colbert’s stunning performance. This administration isn’t exactly known for forgiving and forgetting. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark Smith could get to the White House in the future was the online tour.

You can get the transcript from Daily Kos and the video from Vast Moderate Conspiracy. The video is also up on YouTube (in parts). Check out Thank You Stephen Colbert for links. And while you’re there, you can join the nearly 14,000 people who have said thanks in just under 24 hours.

Spell With Flickr

Mike just posted a list of sites he was using in a presentation. I had never seen Spell with Flickr before. Silly, but cool.

Here’s DevHawk spelled with Flickr.

D E V H A W K

Caprica

Battlestar Galactica is already one of the two best shows on TV in my opinion. Lost is one of the best shows ever, but I digress. Now comes news that their doing a prequel spinoff:

SCI FI Channel announced the development of Caprica, a spinoff prequel of its hit Battlestar Galactica, in presentations to advertisers in New York on April 26. Caprica would come from Galactica executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, writer Remi Aubuchon (24) and NBC Universal Television Studio.

Caprica would take place more than half a century before the events that play out in Battlestar Galactica. The people of the Twelve Colonies are at peace and living in a society not unlike our own, but where high technology has changed the lives of virtually everyone for the better.

But a startling breakthrough in robotics is about to occur, one that will bring to life the age-old dream of marrying artificial intelligence with a mechanical body to create the first living robot: a Cylon. Following the lives of two families, the Graystones and the Adamas (the family of William Adama, who will one day become the commander of the Battlestar Galactica), Caprica will weave together corporate intrigue, techno-action and sexual politics into television’s first science fiction family saga, the channel announced.

OK, Comcast officially needs to get Universal HD so I can see this & BSG in HD.

FeedBurner

I finally got around to signing up for a FeedBurner feed for DevHawk today. It’s available here. I’ve updated my site template, but existing readers are still getting the old feed. Scott has built support for FeedBurner into dasBlog, but it isn’t released yet. Feel free to switch over on your own if you want, but I’ll get the automatic redirection working soon enough.

Update: Apparently I didn’t look hard enough. FeedBurner support made it into the currently shipping version of dasBlog, so I’ve turned it on. Thanks to Tomas Restrepo for the heads up.

Getting Better With Use

One of the topics that comes up regularly in the context of Web 2.0 is the idea that social software gets better the more people use it. Tim O’Reilly wrote about it when describing Web 2.0 and brought it up when he was on stage with Bill Gates at MIX06.

Tim called it a principle of Web 2.0. But I don’t think getting better with use is exclusive to social software. Alan Cooper wrote about building software that learns how the user works and optimizes itself for that usage pattern. For example, Windows Vista has a new feature called SuperFetch that “understands which applications you use most, and preloads these applications into memory, so your system is more responsive when you first boot or when you switch to a different user profile.”

The big difference that I see is that personal software has to be designed to learn where social software automatically improves with use.