Uh, Hairspray was the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. I know, I can’t believe it either. Something this bright and giddy and unabashedly fun is just what a person needs. I’d sing if I could.

I bought an iPhone the day after it was released. Paid $599, and love almost everything about it. It was worth the money I paid for it or I wouldn’t have bought it. It’s now a couple months later and Jobs drops the price to $399. I would rather have paid $200 less than I did, but at the time there was no other option, so I made a choice and bought one.

When I purchase something, the contract is as follows:

1. I give you money equal to the selling price

2. You give me the device

That’s it. If the device works as I expected, the contract has been fulfilled. I understand that someday you may decide to introduce better models and even charge others less for the current one. So be it. I’ve gotten what I paid for and presumably what I wanted.

If on the other hand, he’d introduced a newer, better model I’d be pissed. But he didn’t. I still have the latest, coolest phone on the planet.

Hell, I hope Apple drops the iPhone price again so even more people can choose to buy them - they’re wonderful.

A minor annoyance with Google Reader is that unread feed counts only go up to 100 (or 100+). Alluva sudden today, I get this…

Much better, thanks!

Update: And now search as well! Finally!

If you have a blog, and allow comments, please do me a favor. Include the real date and time with each comment. I’m too lazy to do the math when the comment says “Anonymous Dufus said, 241 days later…”

241 days later than what? Now I’ve got to scroll all the way back up and find the date of the original post and then start counting. By then I’m terribly confused and annoyed. Let’s stick with just a date, m’kay?

I’ve sent a couple emails recently which contained everything the recipient needed, and yet were completely misread. In both cases, I included the important bits in the very first line, which was promptly ignored. They looked something like this…

My immediate and completely unscientific conclusion is that one should never include valuable information in the first line of an email. Stick with “Dear so-and-so,” or “Hi,” instead.

Twitter Rules. No, not as in “Twitter Rulz Dude!” but as in, “Here are a few nice guidelines on how to Twitter effectively and not annoy the shit out of those following you”.

I ran into the above while looking around to find out if I was the only person who found the recent scourge of Tweets ending in “FTW!” completely annoying. I’m not.

Google Analytics is pretty cool, comprehensive and huge. I’m just a little guy with a little site and the whole Analytics thing can be overwhelming. I know there are tons of options for site tracking, but currently I’m in the middle of trying Clicky. It’s small, looks nice and gives simple tracking right down to the individual visitor level. Free for lower-traffic sites. Not much more for others.

It seems that Comcast is aggressively shaping BitTorrent traffic (torrentfreak.com) and in some cases resetting seed connections. There goes my ratio! Now it’ll take forever to download the latest episode of, er. latest Linux distro.

A link in the above article points to a Whalesalad post on tunnelling BT connections over SSH. Should do the trick (althoug I haven’t actually tried it yet.)

Seth Godin on the modern version of hard work…

bq. Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.

bq. The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

bq. So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort.

“more here”:http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/09/labor-day.html

I know, you’re aware of the Steven Poole piece. You’ve used WriteRoom for years. Everyone heard the Mark Cuban thing before I mentioned it, and so on.

Sorry ‘bout that.

The cool thing is that almost every time I link to something useful or interesting, someone will write to thank me for pointing it out. Surprising how few people have heard of the things that “everyone” already knew about.