Sunshocked

Our nation is less than two weeks away from the arrival of the iPhone, but all is not well. Apple’s exclusive partnership with AT&T makes the iPhone a very difficult purchase to reconcile with nerd values.

Al Gore. Affable, amiable, genial… he’s charmed America with his 1337 Powerpoint skills and put us on the right path to addressing the looming menace of climate change. Moral to a fault, no one has ever questioned his motives. Until now.

I cut my finger (the pointing one) at work today and have but nine left with which to type, so I figured I’d keep the cutting going and follow it up with some pasting (that’s ⌘-X followed by ⌘-V for those playing at home).

Since I happen to be a webmaster for one of the Top 59 Smartest Organizations Online, I often get asked for advice on being a smart webmaster. Here are some of the best and/or easiest to remember.

Yep, it’s the New Year’s Resolution post. I tend to have a pretty good followthrough on my resolutions, so it’s hardly a process I take lightly. This year I have a few normal ones and one not-so-normal.

The cover of Friday’s Chronicle reported a flurry of comments from GOP leadership (among which I’m including O’Reilly) on “San Francisco Values”. These three words are intended to scare voters into voting Republican, keeping SF Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi out of the Speaker position.

I should be happy about people adapting their buying habits to incorporate solutions to the world’s problems. If you’re going to buy an iPod Nano, why shouldn’t you get the red one for the same price and help fight AIDS in Africa, right? Still, the whole thing puts a really bad taste in my mouth.

Copyrights are a lot like fraternities. At their core they have a good intention, but over the last 100 years things have gone awry. Now, more often that not, copyrights (like fraternities) are exclusive, abusive, and collusive. It’s time to put copyrights on double secret probation.

Last week I fell in love with XFN, a microformat for representing human relationships. I immediately started sketching out fun ways to make it work for me. First stop, my Mac’s Addressbook.

I spent all morning poring over Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. One might imagine that they are quite spectacular. If you’re not a developer of Apple software (which, strictly statistically, you probably aren’t), you can still find plenty of value in “Part I: Application Design Fundamentals”. In fact, I printed out pages 23 through 52 [...]