I like your monkeys

“My wife has purchased a half-dozen pairs of lucky socks that she wears to the clinic. They have monkeys, ninjas, and moustaches on them. The doctor likes them. My wife gets into the stirrups. The doctor puts things into my wife’s vagina—they are always putting things into my wife’s vagina—and the doctor says, “I like your monkeys.” I watch, leaning on the cabinet that contains gauze and syringes.

We don’t tell many people about what we are doing. When we do some say: “Well, it must be fun trying.” Or: “Are you sure you’re doing it right?” I laugh with them; after all, how many times have I said something insensitive while trying to be funny? I don’t talk about the large doses of medicine that I inject into my wife’s buttocks that cause her to inflate like a hormonal balloon. Nor do I discuss how intimacy itself has become such an awkward, uncomfortable thing that it’s scheduled on a Google Calendar named “LadyStuffings” with events that show up in pink.”

The Age of Mechanical Reproduction via Daring Fireball

Wow. Hope they get what they want.

Update: Apparently they did. Twice. A boy and a girl. Congratulations.

Don’t be Evil

“Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman joined the firing squad and told senators that “Google is no longer in the business of sending people to the best sources of information on the Web. It now hopes to be a destination site itself for one vertical market after another, including news, shopping, travel, and now, local business reviews.”

Stoppelman said that Google had licensed Yelp’s content, then tried to buy the company after the license ended. When that failed, Google simply scraped Yelp’s local review results and incorporated bits of them into its local search products. When Yelp sent Google a letter demanding that it stop this practice, Google “informed us that it would cease the practice only if we agreed to be removed from Google’s Web search index, thereby preventing Yelp from appearing anywhere in Google Web search results.” (Google’s outside counsel said Yelp was “micromanaging” where its content would be used and that “extra engineering” was needed to allow Yelp result to appear in general search but not in location search.)”

“Ars Technica

I guess the upside on this is that at least this time they are not actively and directly screwing the end-consumer. Just indirectly.

Hewlett-Packard Board Meets on Replacing C.E.O.

“Less than a year after hiring Léo Apotheker as its chief executive, Hewlett-Packard’s directors were meeting Wednesday to consider replacing him, according to several people with knowledge of the board’s actions.”

The surprise move revealed not only the confusion inside the company over its strategy, but also the directors’ difficulties in choosing the leadership of the company.

NYTimes.com

You’ve got to be kidding!

The Focused MacBook Air

“In the process of setting it up – I’ve decided to make this new machine a focused, minimal, work, machine. Despite Migration Assistant – I want to start some new habits, not repeat old, bad ones.

So far this means:

Not setting up email, IM, Skype, or any sort of communications app. Nothing. This is a creation machine – not a communication machine.”

Garrick Van Buren

Yep. ‘Been thinking about this as well. The problem with the two accounts route is when you actually need to have a way of communicating with your co-workers or clients. As soon as you set up email you’ve stepped in a mine field and everything else follows.

Separating completely your work and personal life is hard. More than it seems and even more on your self-owned single machine. Specially if you’re passionate for what you do and you basically do it (or think about it) most of the day.

Never mind the fundamentals…

“Today we’re launching Skype 5.4 for Mac Beta. The launch introduces the same Facebook integration found in Skype 5.5 for Windows. We are excited to finally deliver Facebook integration to our Mac users.

Just like in our Windows client, you will now be able to IM and connect with your Facebook friends without leaving Skype. You will also be able to read and update your News Feed, as well as comment and ‘Like’ your Facebook friends’ posts – all within Skype for Mac.”

Skype – The Big Blog

…Just aim for the shiny accessory. Ooh! Shiny!NewImage

Yeah, that will definitely work out great. Skype 5 is a UI mess, it has been since its Beta stage. Many have complained already and made long blog posts stating what’s wrong(here and here) and even on of its (former i think) main UI designers has stated his disappointment with it. (( the original statement that started the brief conversation ))

Yet, Skype Co keeps marching faithfully on the horror path and instead of correcting the UI mess, that everyone complains and can find out how unusable it is in less than 5 minutes i can bet, well, instead of that, they go and…

(wait for it. Wait For It!)

Add Facebook! Yeah! That will work. Not.

Footnotes

Footnotes are a great way of inserting additional information into a text that, either it is not relevant enough or simply would break the text flow with some link or bibliographical reference. I use them on this blog as you might have noticed, by virtue of this wordpress plugin.

Now until now the way to see a footnote was either by hovering above it, and you would get this:

No Footnote

or by clicking on it, and it would take you to the bottom of the article to read the footnote. If you clicked on the orange return it would return the browser view to the where you were reading.

No footnote at bottom

As you see neither option is perfect. The hovering option will display gibberish if anything else than standard letters are used, including an “apostrophe” or quotation marks. The clicking option will disrupt your reading and probably take some time as the browser redraws the webpage.

However there is a third option. Available for all of the major three browsers (( As you should guess this means Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Opera likes to play alone in its corner and IE, well, IE is on its own small limited world and enjoys beeing there. If you use it, stop it right now. Try something else and you will find out an entire new world out there, where you can get rounded corners on pictures and other great aesthetics. Oh, and speed. And more speed… )) as a plugin called Footnotify. Whith it, when you click a footnote mark you will get this:

With footnote

Feeling convinced? Footnotes are now aesthetically attractive and you keep your page location and can go on with your reading flow. It should work on every site with a standard footnote html tag. Try it.

Windows 8

Has anyone seen a video of Windows 8 running on anything else than a tablet?

Because if this is to be the One OS to rull them All, i’m really curious to see how that “touch UI over standard Desktop” mess works on someone that only has a mouse and a keyboard…

On the plus side, the lipstick (Metro design/ touch UI) is gorgeous, and the first design from Redmond that is actually nice and “easy” on the eye. On the down side, why do they keep the pig?


thisismynext.com

DigiNotar cleanup

“Description: Fraudulent certificates were issued by multiple certificate authorities operated by DigiNotar. This issue is addressed by removing DigiNotar from the list of trusted root certificates, from the list of Extended Validation (EV) certificate authorities, and by configuring default system trust settings so that DigiNotar’s certificates, including those issued by other authorities, are not trusted.”

About Security Update 2011-005

Apple finally corrects the DigiNotar mess that everyone else had already corrected. 10 days after it went public and another 4 or 5 after everyone else had already corrected it. Including Microsoft. Can’t say it’s a stellar record in rapid response to security threats by Apple.

So in case you didn’t read this post regarding how to clean up this mess by hand, please run “Software Update” in your Mac as soon as possible. It involves a system reboot though.