Marco.org

$5,000 solid gold SanDisk cards

AT&T broke the internet.

You kill yourself and you make a big old sacrifice and try to get your revenge. All you’re gonna end up with is a paragraph in a newspaper. … It does nothing … nothing changes. The world goes on and you’re gone. The best revenge is to live on and prove yourself.

— Eddie Vetter of Pearl Jam on his song, Jeremy, about a kid who shot himself in his high school English class

The Ebb and Flow of Social Networking

If we remove all the original reasons for Al-Qaeda’s existence, I believe they would find new ones. It is unlikely the members of terror cells would decide to quit and become insurance salesmen.

— The Dilbert Blog: Rational Evil

xkcd: Linux User at Best Buy

No other cell phone is advertised by showing off the user interface.

— Daring Fireball (thanks Jakob)

• Look at porn.
• Find information.
• Buy stuff.
• Argue about stuff.

In approximately that order.

Dumb Fancy Restaurants (thanks Serious Eats)

No Direction, Period - Superdeluxe (thanks Scott)

xkcd blag: New Apartment. “I’ve got some Sharpies in a drawer in case I need to lock it from editing.”

Well, all the interns got together and decided it was time to give back to the community that has given so much to us thus far. So today, from 10am-Noon, we have arranged free iced coffee at Starbucks for all of you. Now, we know that some of you go to different store locations. As a result we have made this free coffee available at all Starbucks Coffee shops nationally.

— Jason Mesches, CollegeHumor intern, emailing the whole company (reblogged from Jakob). But as far as I can tell, there isn’t a free-coffee day anytime soon. Jakob, when was this?

I switched away from Verizon (with a Motorola E815, and a VX4500 before that) a few days ago to Sprint’s ridiculous $30 SERO plan (with a Motorola Q). Since they’re both CDMA and share many phone models, I didn’t think there would be much of a difference, but so far it looks like I’m wrong. It also looks like Sprint has improved dramatically in the last two years.

Initial thoughts in no particular order:

• I get fewer “bars” of reception in a few places, but it doesn’t seem to matter for calls or data. Maybe the reception meter is just more honest on the Q.

• Incoming voice quality is much better.

• EVDO phone-as-modem usage is far less laggy, with pings around 250ms instead of Verizon’s 450ms. It makes a huge difference. And this is in the NYC metro area, where nobody has an excuse for inferior service.

• Sprint’s voicemail system allows you to skip the PIN when calling from your own phone, and disable the call-metadata reading before each message (“New message from 6… 1… 4… 5… 5… 5… 1… 2… 3… 4… sent today at 8… 30… PM…”). Tiff said she’d switch for this feature alone. Verizon’s voicemail is awful.

Full review coming soon.

Adding to David’s post: “Mac asked how the ‘Top Tumblelogs’ on the Tumblr home page are chosen. The algorithm behind it is actually really boring, and only based on the raw traffic numbers.”

It’s not quite that boring. We run a number of filters to detect “good” tumblelogs, and filter out the ones that are obviously spammy. And every day, we go through them and remove any that shouldn’t have passed the filters or haven’t been updated in a long time. And we combine RSS readership with tumblelog readership in an intelligent way.

But David’s right: this will be dramatically updated soon.

It’s newsworthy that Apple is about to release a fourth iPhone commercial.

You can’t pay for that kind of marketing.

YouTube’s new player is almost unusable. (reblogged from David)

Serious Eats: Does Anyone Use the Honey Thing?

Dan Meth’s self-portrait

If I get up early enough in the morning I can check to see the day’s XKCD - and if it’s good, I can post it before Marco, which makes him have to decide whether he should post it as well, whether he should not post it because it’s already been done (even though way more people will read his tumblog than mine) or whether he should reblog and thank me for something he would have posted anyway.

— Dan

Pairing a phone that begs to be on the internet to a network that all but abhors it is like hiring Mel Gibson to throw a Bat-Mitzvah.

— Tech Op/Ed on the iPhone, which is probably a fake review designed to attract traffic with inflammatory comments against Apple (like John Dvorak’s entire career). But a good observation nonetheless.

At the moment you accept your diploma today, you will have an average debt of $20,000 and no health insurance. You may be feeling desperate enough to take whatever comes along. Some of you will get caged in cubicles until you’re ejected by the next wave of layoffs. Others – some of the best and brightest of you in fact—will still be behind a counter in Starbucks or Borders three years down the road.

— Barbara Ehrenreich (thanks AZspot)

Click to view larger version of the image. (thanks Incidental Thinking)

I asked Carrie, our excellent office manager (I think. Or maybe she’s Fred’s assistant. I don’t really know what her title is. She just gets a lot of stuff done in the office. She’s at least a beer expert.) to get us some additional colors of dry-erase markers because we can only find red and black in the office. She came back with this insanely awesome collection. I had no idea that these colors even existed in the dry-erase world.

80s Estonian Meat Commercial (via robharper)

I was reading a story about Iraqi insurgents, and how they often wear ski masks to avoid identification. This made me wonder, who was the genius entrepreneur who decided to sell ski masks in the desert? Man, talk about your “outside the box” thinking. Be honest, how many of you, at the start of the Iraq war, thought “They’re going to need a lot of ski gear”?

— The Dilbert Blog: Best Entrepreneur Ever

Shopping hell for guys.

The new 1920x1200 screens

IKEA

Keynote Bingo

Google has created the most onerous privacy environment on the Internet.

— A Race to the Bottom - Privacy Ranking of Internet Service Companies (thanks Stumblng Tumblr)

0 more days until my birthday!

Today’s xkcd: “Thoughts”

I don’t know if you have ever tried to pick up a tiny piece of soap after it hits the shower floor. It’s difficult, even if you aren’t in prison.

— The Dilbert Blog: For the Love of Soap

I like Leopard’s new dock. (thanks Engadget)

qlat on SA about the WWDC keynote

Safari on Windows?!

I wish I were joking.

A bit of a kick in the balls to all those Mac developers that the big announcement of the day is a Windows app.

— abstemious on WWDC 2007

One of the great little things about my birthday is when I wake up to a handful of auto-generated “Happy Birthday” emails from old vBulletin forums that I signed up for, including Maxima.org (I sold my Maxima 2 years ago) and TA Universe (wow, they’re still running and there’s still news), which I never really liked because I was always loyal in my Total Annihilation fandom to Annihilated.com (which died in 2000).

Reblogged from Dan: “All of my user generated content suffers from a peculiar source of gentrification. I’ll start out by thinking, ‘Gee, this will be a place I can post stupid things. After all, who will ever read it.’ Then I will learn that people actually read what I’m writing. Suddenly I feel bad about posting stupid things. Now I need to put more thought into what I do. The stupidest things get cut—and the quality standard goes up. Perhaps more people read it. Next thing you know my internal quality standard has gone up so much that I can’t write anything that meets my own standards. I need to find a newer, darker part of the internet to pollute.”

If all you have to offer is a shit sandwich, just say it. Don’t tell us how lucky we are and that it’s going to taste delicious.

— Daring Fireball on WWDC 2007

US States Renamed For Countries With Similar GDPs (thanks Slartibartfast)

Opening video at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday (thanks Incidental Thinking)

Ian peers at Scott

Today’s big rainstorm

My idea will solve the energy crisis, reduce global warming, put a cap on terrorism, reduce pollution, eliminate traffic congestion, and virtually eliminate drunk driving. But I’m sure you did something useful today too. Good for you.

— Scott Adams

It’s a slow internet day, so here’s a sign that’s been at Masten Lake since my childhood and has always been vandalized in the current manner: “Dead (meat) End (of your life)”.

I discovered tumblelogs, which are blogs stripped down to their essentials: a link here, an image there, maybe just a snippet of text. No comments or other complications to stop the pure flow of niftiness. Suddenly, blogging was fun again.

— Rule the Web

1600 emergency room visits last year were blamed on roller shoes or “heelys.” For those of you not familiar with “heelys” they’re the wheeled shoe that sends children floating past you like the nun in Blues Brothers as you walk around Target shopping for paper towels and Diet Coke.

— Consumerist: Roller Shoes Send 1600 Uncoordinated People To The Emergency Room (thanks David Moldawer)

Awesome. (thanks C’est Quoi?)

The 5 Worst Candies of All Time (thanks Serious Eats)

“Douchey future man” - I reblogged this from Ian for the caption alone.

cronolog kicks ass in every conceivable way in which a utility like cronolog can kick ass.

— sjd on cronolog, an awesome Apache log-rotation program that most human beings will never need to know about

I can’t think of any other piece of computer hardware that has improved so little since 1984.

— Where Are The High Resolution Displays?

Today’s xkcd: Long Light

The Tumblr Dashboard screen should be MUCH faster to load now if you have a lot of friends.

Swingin’ (reblogged from Where’s Jason)

I have to approve the first comments quickly so I don’t get a thousand comments saying ‘first comment!’

— The Dilbert Blog. The sad reality of blog comments… 

Wow Wow Wubbzy! Strange things happen in this building.

In an ironic Dilbert twist, the lawyers at Warner who are authorized to speak with us are apparently not willing or able to speak with anyone in their own company who can make the kind of decisions needed to finalize the contract. Our current projected timeline for penetrating their bureaucracy is infinity. I don’t expect the deal to be completed.

— Scott Adams on the Dilbert movie

Entire ghost town Rocky Bar, for sale in Idaho for $250,000. Comes with “8.9 acres of land, a rustic hotel building, a mine, a wading pool that won’t hold water and the town jail.” (reblogged from Cameron I/O)

Reblogged from Hello Bauldoff: “Am I the only one who finds the (albeit recognizable) logo for Sherman-Williams somewhat violent and unsettling?”

Every salesman is ranked by the number of protection plans (or extended warranties) that they sell. At my store all the time we would throw on scratch protection plans to CD’s, since they’re only a buck, most people don’t notice. During the $9.99 CD special days, customers who weren’t aware of the sale were easy prey.

— 27 Confessions Of A Former Circuit City Worker

It turns out I don’t want anyone to know what I’m doing right now. Adios, Twitter.

— Ben McGaughey

People must have thought the early explorers were nuts. Magellan, Marco Polo, Christopher Columbus… whoever decided to sail out into the ocean for months with a hundred people on the chance that they might survive and find some new land that might be there.

To most people of the time, the world ended with their coastline. The ocean was endless and empty. Can you imagine those send-offs?

“Bye Chris! Best of luck!…”

The ships start to leave.

(muttering to a friend) “Well, they’re dead. What nutjobs. We’ll never see them again.”

It would be like if we loaded a space shuttle with 200 people and blasted them off into space, just headed in one direction, blindly, forever. Hey, they might find something interesting.

“Bye!… Those people are nuts. They’re all going to die. What a shame.”

Words cannot express how much I hate inkjet printers.

Wow, FCKGW has its own Wikipedia mention. (Flickr image)

It’s a wonder people don’t just give up on computing altogether.

— Coding Horror on modern Windows spyware

Tags aren’t really that useful. They’re subjective, people use different keywords for things, and sometimes you don’t have any idea how to find what you’re looking for. So what’s the point?

— Earthling on tagging

Brisgone, a field operations manager for a telecommunications company, said that he alternates among three credit cards when filling up the 32-gallon tank in his Ford F-150 pickup.

— The most American sentence I’ve read all month. (article)

Marco.org Weird Fruit Review: Kiwano African horned melon

Everything on the iPhone interacts directly with the kernel. …based on what I know, I don’t personally believe that there will ever be an open iPhone SDK.

— Anonymous Apple engineer to Ars Technica. I hope this is technically incorrect, since it would be quite an insult to the iPhone’s OS, and would ensure that it’s definitely not OS X or even something based on Mach.

It’s interesting how much web-app downtime people will tolerate when it’s something non-critical. And these are big sites. Tonight Digg was down for a while. Digg. And Twitter has become almost beloved for its frequent downtime.

I take huge precautions to make sure that Tumblr never has any downtime. Hell, I don’t even let Marco.org have any downtime. Even with huge revisions like DB schema changes, I always code it such that there isn’t a single dropped connection or user-facing error. It doesn’t always happen this way, of course - I’ve made mistakes that caused a few minutes here and there of temporary downtime. But I never consider it an option for development.

There are some MySQL configuration options that I’d like to change but I’ve worked around them because the Tumblr database server’s mysqld process has never been intentionally restarted, and there’s no MySQL equivalent (that I know of) to Apache’s “graceful” restart (in which it staggers child process restarts such that no connections are dropped).

I couldn’t even imagine telling our users, “We’re going to be down for the next 6 hours while we run a bunch of database maintenance and ALTER TABLEs.”

But looking at other sites, maybe I’m a bit too narrow-minded on that. Sure, Amazon has trouble if they lose a few minutes’ worth of sales. But if I can’t make a smartass comment about the latest Apple rumor to 105 of my friends and followers right this second, the world isn’t going to end.

…and Tumblr suffers some downtime at 5 AM EST this morning from a crashed webserver. I swear I didn’t know about that when I wrote the previous post.

Parents “check in” on their kids every so often during nap or night time. As an outsider, you think that it is simply to see how the child is doing and is an act of love. In actuality, it is to see if the kid is dead or not breathing. The relief gained from having a not-dead child is priceless.

— Parental Myths That No Parent Will Tell You About

Traditionally, when mentioning oneself and others, the rule has been to place “I” or “me” in the final position … More and more I notice people placing themselves first. Perhaps this tendency accounts for “Me” being used as a subject. After all, ours is a “me first” culture. Once I corrected an eighth-grader on this point. He looked at me in utter astonishment and asked “Why would I want to put myself last?

— All Pronoun Cases Are Created Equal

Detecting Photoshopped images in software

I just don’t get the LOLcats thing. It’s not funny or cute to me at all. These awful image macros give me absolutely zero enjoyment.

Then again, I don’t like Will Ferrel, Colbert, RPGs, or anime either. Most of geek culture doesn’t appeal to me. Not sure why.

Irony: about 23% of all Tumblr posts are lolcats.

— cameron i/o in response to my previous post. Believe me, I know. They’re filling up my precious database with garbage. Every time I optimize something, I think, “This will make LOLcat propagation 10 times faster and 3 times easier to post… do I really want to do that?”

Dawn: “My [cats] are smart. If they did speak English, they’d spell correctly and speak with proper grammar, I’m sure of it.”

I agree. Cats are soft little balls of pure evil. They always know I’m allergic to them more than any other animal (except rabbits, which are clouds of allergies), so they walk right past the other 10 nearby people who want to pet them, coming right up to me and rubbing fur and allergies all over me even when I completely ignore them. Thanks a lot.

They’re definitely not dumb. They know exactly what they’re doing. Cats are pure evil. Soft, furry evil.

Long Island last weekend

Leopard 9A466 Gallery on ThinkSecret (hurry before Apple demands a takedown). Is it just me, or does this look like crap? Like Vista?

It’s just like the printing press. It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.

— The creator of PowerPoint on its use

I just discovered a pop-under ad below my main Firefox window, and it seemed like the most alien thing in the universe. I was honestly surprised, and actually read it because I haven’t seen one in so long.

I’ve nearly forgotten about so many computing hells that plague most users. Popups, spyware, BHOs, Windows Update auto-reboots, drivers, systray clutter, shortcut clutter, installers, uninstallers, Acrobat Reader, Windows’ awful pagefile management, CD-ROM drives falling back to PIO mode, MS Word auto-everything, the Language Bar, reinstalls, recovery discs, recovery partitions, serial numbers, activation, crappy VIA chipsets, PC gaming (crashes, patches, FilePlanet, disc protection), Java Web Start, Java Update, InstallShield Update, QuickTime stealing Winamp’s file extensions, Windows Media Player, Windows Security Center, software firewalls, antivirus software, Norton anything, yellow systray balloons (pop!), slide-up systray squares, and the Desktop Cleanup Wizard.

It’s amazing that so many people tolerate the hell that our industry has forced on them.

If this doesn’t crash or secretly break under PHP5’s uncommon OO functions like eAccelerator did, APC might be the greatest thing to happen to Tumblr in the last 4 days.

First impression: Seems fast. Really fast.

If our children ever say ‘like’ more than 3 times in a sentence, let’s kill them and start over.

— Tiff

The State of The Union’s Fat (thanks Contrived Chaos)

That’s how politics works. The best liar wins. As long as our choices are limited to liars, we’ll keep electing them and wondering what went wrong.

— Scott Adams

I know why the Monty Hall problem works mathematically, but it still screws with my mind every time I think about the reasoning behind it.

Dawn: “Up until today I thought all the folks using this thingy were techhie guys who love macs. Be nice if there were a page to go to on the tumblr site to find random links to more diverse pages.”

There is, but we don’t prominently link to it anywhere because it’s extremely NOT work-safe (NWS). We don’t do any regular censoring on it, so it might contain porn or other offensive material when you look at it.

With that in mind, you may go to (NWS) Tumblr Radar (NWS) at your own risk if you choose. It contains the most recent Tumblr posts from random tumblelogs.

Server load is so low right now that I keep checking my tumblelog to verify that Tumblr is actually up and running.

I finally did it! Usually I conserve exclamation points, but this is a special occasion. To celebrate, I’m taking the next few hours off from tumblelogging to leave this at the top. :)

The inspection video was sort of funny. “Don’t fall through this window. It’s not tempered glass, so it won’t break into pebbles. You could cut yourself.” The window in question was about a 1 foot by 2 foot window about five feet high. To “fall through the window,” you would literally need a running start to clear the bath tub and dive through it. I’m tempted call and say that we were happy with the house until we learned that we wouldn’t be able to safely play the dive-through-the-bathroom-window game.

— Dan on buying a house

Most programmers these days, sadly, just want the degree. They don’t care what they learn. They want a degree so they can get a job so they can pay the bills.

— Steve Yegge: Rich Programmer Food

Where are we today? The Baby Bells have re-consolidated. Telephone service in this country is essentially controlled by AT&T (in the West) and Verizon (in the East), with Qwest filling in gaps. And two-way communications in this country […] are controlled by a duopoly of Big Phone and Big Cable. […] The duopoly is something like Shamu and Godzilla on hire for televised wrestling – giant beasts gently swatting at one another for the cameras. They aren’t competing, these giants. There is a clear failure in the market for highspeed internet access in this country.

— Susan Crawford (via AZspot)

USB hub opens letters, wakes you up. Wow.

Cyanide and Happiness

Incidental Thinking posted: “It seems I’m currently in the only area of the US without widespread Internet access. This is yet another reason I need the iPhone next week.”

If you’re in an area without widespread internet access, how likely is it that the area is covered by GSM towers, which Cingular doesn’t even bother to deploy in upstate New York or all of Vermont?

If you can get a signal at all, will you have strong enough reception that you can use their horribly slow internet access?

Will you be happy with the iPhone as your only internet-connected device, since you can’t use it as a modem for a laptop (like you can with almost any other modern phone)?

For internet access on the road, nothing beats CDMA coverage, devices, and speed.

I think if I had a billion dollars and never had to take the bar, I’d just hole myself up in the basement with a Pentium 166 playing old Microprose games until rats devour my corpse.

— Mark on Marco.org

xkcd: Online Package Tracking

Microsoft didn’t have the guts to make standard users the default - as they absolutely should have - in Windows Vista.

— Coding Horror: Don’t Run as an Administrator

Every pat on the back came with a kick in the nuts. […] Finally, I got the call. “You’re number one.” I can’t describe what that felt like. If you’re thinking it feels a lot like being number two, only slightly better, you missed it by a light year.

— The Dilbert Blog: Champagne Moments

Joy of Tech on the Cisco/iPhone negotiations (thanks tumbl.us)

Saw this in an IKEA parking lot. Yes, that’s a business-card holder for this Mary Kay saleswoman.

You can get to Columbus, Ohio for $50 one way, which would be great if I wanted to go to Columbus. Unfortunately, I never want to go to Columbus. Ever.

— Eric on Skybus

Best. Dialog box. EVER. (reblogged from bisrael, thanks)

I don’t think Apple’s going to be a big player in this at all.

— Edward Snyder, a cellphone industry analyst, quoted by Daring Fireball

Wikipedia’s article on cassettes (thanks, Travels of a Geek)

Social-network burnout is going to be a major problem in the immediate future.

The bigger problem is the AT&T network. In a Consumer Reports study, AT&T’s signal ranked either last or second to last in 19 out of 20 major cities. My tests in five states bear this out. If Verizon’s slogan is, “Can you hear me now?” AT&T’s should be, “I’m losing you.” […] You have to use AT&T’s ancient EDGE cellular network, which is excruciatingly slow. The New York Times’s home page takes 55 seconds to appear; Amazon.com, 100 seconds; Yahoo, two minutes. You almost ache for a dial-up modem.

— New York Times: iPhone review

David Pouge’s hilarious video review of the iPhone. (thanks Cameron)

Wendy’s Baconator | Ian Jenkins. Scary.

Cyanide and Happiness

I don’t like couscous. When people ask me, “do you like couscous?” I reply, “no.

— Triangle on the SA Forums: Foods that are awesome until you eat them

The robber asked for a “time out” using hand signals.

— Thief asks for time out in police chase. Reblogged from Dan: “I can’t believe the police didn’t respect the ‘T’ hand signal. Honorless pigs.”

What the hell are you doing that’s so important? You’re not only reading The Dilbert Blog, but you’re leaving a frickin’ comment.

— The Dilbert Blog: Irony Storm

Whenever I launch a new product, I’m going to have Ghostvirus review it.

On the office air conditioner. “No! I would not like to save money.”

It’s fun sharing an office with an animator.

I switched to Netscape after Monday’s post (download) and have been using it heavily since then.

• It’s basically Firefox with some new buttons and menu items about “sharing”
• The interface is more responsive (feels fast) upon first load
• It has just as many interface bugs as Firefox (permanent blank tooltips, window-moving snap-backs, unreliable bookmark dragging, unreliable file-upload selection, wrong-position right-click menus)
• It bogs down after a while, just like Firefox

Verdict: It’s nice to see the green-N icon again after 10 years, but there’s no practical reason to use Netscape Navigator instead of Firefox. If nothing else, Firefox will probably be first to get bugfixes and improvements in the future, so just use it instead.

I’m switching back.

Incidental Thinking: “So you have a laptop with a wireless card. You are able to go downtown to the local coffee shop or a hotel and hop on their wireless network to get online. The only problem is that open wireless networks aren’t secure. […] if someone at the same location knows how to, they can view all of your activity including any passwords you type in.”

That’s partially right, but you’re forgetting about the beauty of SSL. Anything sent via SSL is immune to man-in-the-middle attacks like what you describe. SSL, indicated by “https://” and the padlock icon in most browsers, is used by all banks, PayPal, Amazon, eBay, and pretty much any other site that needs any security at all.

The marvel of SSL, and public-key cryptography in general, is that it can establish a secure communication channel on a public network without any prior exchange of information between the two parties (like a secret password). It doesn’t matter if your entire session is recorded by someone else - they’re not getting your bank password.

I just deleted about 600 spam accounts from the official 7-year-old Marco.org forum. They were easy to identify by their random or spammy names or email domains.

The interesting part is that the vast majority of these had 0 posts. It was a giant army of spam accounts ready to go whenever their owners wanted, but they were never used. I imagine this is so the spammer can go to clients and say, “I can get your message on X forums with PageRank Y in 30 seconds.”

And I’ve implemented this registration CAPTCHA with a simple PunBB hack so the Marco.org forum doesn’t get any PunBB-targeting automatic spambots.

Gummy Bear FUTAB by +.Kealoha.+

Mean Bean, Big Black, and Loca Moca sound like nicknames of people who would rape you in a prison shower, but they’re actually the flavors of the new Java Monster premium coffee drinks.

— Java Monster review. This blog is awesome.

My last job had executives and whatnot filling out Excel spreadsheets and Word documents on brand-spanking-new Dell machines with huge LCDs, while us devs were stuck with crusty old machines.

— SA discussion of the previous link

Google’s perks can be a gilded cage.

— More SA discussion on “Life at Google”

The next time your nephew asks you what you do for a living, don’t say “I write software.” That is the fastest way to kill a conversation. Instead, say what I started saying about 6 months ago: “I write the software that makes websites work. Have you used MySpace or YouTube? I didn’t build those, but that’s the kind of stuff I do. Someone else does the graphic design and then I write code that makes everything work.” That has elicited more “cools” and “awesomes” in a week than “I write software” received in seven years.

— Computer Science Enrollment is Going Down, and Taking Software Jobs With It

Blake Robinson just called a laundromat a “washeteria”, claiming it’s a common term. Anyone else ever heard that?

The whole entire internet is pretty much about one thing: the internet.

— Cameron. A few months ago I resolved to stop reading blogs about blogging. My life improved dramatically.

Mika Brzezinski of MNSBC rips Paris report. (thanks tumbleville)

It’s on the internet and isn’t completely private?! GASP

— comment by SickPigzJohnny from Facebook Private Profiles Not As Private As You Think They Are (via Dugg Comments)

For whatever reason, we were expecting more (way more) people and generally fewer clowns.

— Not much going on at San Fran’s Apple Store

by Tumbl.us

Verizon actually sent out a press release to let everyone know that their stores will be open “all day” today - and what’s more, you’ll be able to purchase and take home any of its 18 offered music phones!

— Good news - Engadget

P.S. for Y Combinator kids: Don’t be smug because you think that conglomerates went the way of the dodo. “Conglomerate” is just an old word for what you call “Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google.” Oh and Condé-Nast.

— Joel on Software

If Fire Were Water (I’m a little late to this party.)

Wii Would Like To Play (via +.Kealoha.+ and randomacts)

The iPhone is a gift for every cell phone marketer in the world. Why? Because it creates a problem where there was none before. Now, a cell phone is not just a phone. Now, a phone is worth spending money on. So, since Apple created that ‘problem’ in my mind, how are you going to solve it?

— Seth Godin: Positives, not negatives

a tumbl.us exclusive (until I reblog it)

If you’re an optimist, the more intriguing possibility is that Apple’s iPhone is a Trojan Horse. The iPhone is fatally attractive to AT&T, since it gives the firm a chance to steal tens of thousands of new customers from rivals like Verizon. But Apple may be betting that, once it has its customers, they’ll be more loyal to Apple than AT&T. With its foothold in the wireless world, Apple may be planning to slowly but inexorably demand more room. If iPhone 2.0 is a 3G phone that works with any carrier and supports third-party apps, then industry power will begin to move away from the carrier oligopoly and toward Apple and other Silicon Valley firms. Now, that would be a revolution.

— Slate. iTunes Music Store, anyone?

Free, public WiFi points are a dying breed. Most WiFi points these days are locked down tight with passwords and encryption. And if they’re not locked down, they want to charge you exorbitant rates for a few measly hours of WiFi access.

— Coding Horror (linked to the article earlier, but forgot to quote this)

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

iPhone launch at the glass Apple store in Manhattan. Photo by Tiff.

Technology Show Internet - Episode 1: iPhone Launch; 59th and 5th, NYC. Guest-starring me toward the end.

iPhone scratch/crash test - it holds up very well. (via lentife)

I think I found my favorite tumblelog ever. Don’t miss the video.

Tiff figured out how to turn yarn into a good-smelling octopus