dilbert

'Dilbert' creator uses fake ID to tell Web he's great--report

This writing thing isn't easy.

You reveal yourself (or at least part of yourself) to the world every day and hope the majority of people who encounter your work won't want to spit in your general direction.

So who can't find a trace of sympathy for Dilbert creator Scott Adams?

It seems Adams, despite his undoubtedly boundless riches, still wanders onto message boards to see what people are saying about him (at least according to Gawker)--and he uses a false handle and says very, very nice things. About himself.

That would be, at a human level, … Read more

Scott Adams: The unexpected economist

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is best known for his sense of humor. He seems to be developing a sense of social responsibility, too.

Adams' blog is one of my favorite places on the Internet, one of only a handful of pages I try to check every day.

I like his blog because Adams is both funny and smart. He understands that he can exert a certain amount of public influence, but unlike most celebrities, he's smart enough to recognize his own limits. He's also smart enough to expand those limits by gathering data and studying the opinions of others.

Earlier this month, Adams spent his own money on what he calls the Dilbert Survey of Economists, gathering the opinions of over 500 professional economists to see if they could tell us anything useful about McCain's and Obama's economic plans.

They couldn't, really--ask 10 economists to count their own fingers and you're likely to get 11 different answers--but this in itself is good information, because it teaches us that economics is not yet a real science.

On Tuesday, Adams asked the readers of his blog (a valuable if unreliable resource) to help him find a good analysis of the potential consequences of allowing the free market to deal with the recent market meltdown. … Read more

Dilbert.com relaunches with Web 2.0 flavor

Update: I've added some comments from Scott Adams that came in by email after this posted.

How does a comic strip upgrade to Web 2.0?

The answer may well be the direction that Dilbert creator Scott Adams and his distributor, United Media, have chosen with a relaunch of the iconic strip's Web site, Dilbert.com.

Adams and United Media are now inviting Dilbert fans to the site for a series of new interactive features.

The most interesting of these is a three-pronged approach to what is being called "mashups": giving readers the ability to create … Read more

Underexposed blog: Links of the day

Aperture exit strategies - Apple discussion forum - A post just days before Aperture 2.0 was released. "As there seem to be some issues concerning the long-term viability of Aperture, I am looking at how to salvage my work and move to a supported professional-level application." Some Apple commentary on raw support with Aperture 2.0 - Not a huge advance in the discussion here, but some scraps of detail from Apple execs. Tech Tips from Chuck Westfall - No, shooting a Canon PowerShot G9 set to 6 megapixels doesn't produce better image quality than set … Read more

Sidesplitting tech comics

Whoever said geeks have no sense of humor was wrong--laughably so. Some of the funniest comics out there are Web comics (or those rendered for the Web,) written by techies, for the techies who love them. Here's a bushel of geeky favorites, in no particular order.

1. xkcd Randall Monroe, physicist, cartoonist, and at-heart romantic, is behind xkcd, a Web comic whose name curiously holds no mathematically obscure meaning. In his own words, Monroe's stick-figure style "occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors)." See? Funny.… Read more

Dilbert today

Quickly check out Dilbert today. Pointy-haired Boss gets into open source. It will disappear into the Dilbertian archives in 30 days, so get it now.

Minisodes: For those who find 30-minute sitcoms too deep and drawn out

The average half hour sitcom runs about 22 minutes, but for some people that's simply too long. Most successful web videos average between 2 and 5 minutes, and the folks at Sony Pictures Television have found a new way to deliver classic television to this shortened-attention-span set. As highlighted in a recent story by CNN, The The Minisode Network is presented on Myspace and offers a swath of retro television episodes that have been carefully edited down to five minutes in an effort to update the old shows for the post millennium web format.

The network offers a variety of programming from Dilbert to Diff'rent Strokes, but is something lost in translation as the video editors slice and dice everything from the original that is considered not essential? Are these mostly ancient sitcoms even worth watching today in either form? While I can't be certain whether it's a result of the hack jobs or the dated material, most of the mini-episodes I watched felt incomplete and not really worth watching. The editing was clean and seamless, but the stories lacked any real development (something that's already a problem with the sitcom genre). The jokes were still there and the punchlines were also kept intact, but the timing was wrong and the humor was all but lost on me.