A whole series of great 70s-ish studio portraits. Hilarious.

I’m logged in to Twitter all day, every day (twitter.com/jackbaty). It’s become an important part of my workflow, or whatever you call what I do these days. That being the case, a good desktop Twitter client is important to me. I’ve been using Twitterrific since shortly after I learned how to spell it. Twitterrific is a very nice OS X app that looks good and works flawlessly for the most part, which is more than I can say for Twitter itself lately.

<img src="/files/box_netscape.gif" " alt=“box_netscape.gif” border=“0” width=“74” height=“74” /> The first version of Netscape I remember using was 1.1n for Mac OS. If I recall correctly, it was 1995 and introduced tables. That was a long time ago. And now, it’s over. Long live Netscape.

My little web site here can now be reached via the domain copingmechanism.com. Just because.

Would you like to have a whollotta text-based cheat sheets available any time right from a terminal? Me too. Enter Cheat Just type “cheat sheets” to see what sheets are available… How come I never heard of this? Very, very handy.

It sounds crazy, but I’ve never read any of the Harry Potter books. I just haven’t been interested. Late last night I finished reading Bad Monkeys – the first complete book read via the Kindle – and enjoyed it so much that I thought I’d find something new. For some reason Harry Potter came to mind. Surprisingly, it wasn’t available for the Kindle. At first I assumed that this was a crazy oversight by Amazon, but it turns out that Rowlings has never allowed any of the Harry Potter books to be published in electronic form.

How can you not love Christopher Walken?

My Kindle arrived last week, finally, and I’ll cut to the chase: I love it. What a relief the Kindle turned out to be! Scoble and others trashed it in their reviews. Amazon’s own ratings are still hovering at 3 stars. I was worried that I’d made a mistake. I didn’t. The Kindle is terrific. Following are some notes after a few days of using it. I’ll split them into pros and cons to keep things easy.

I use Safari now, so I don’t get the fabulous Web Developer Firefox plugin unless I go way out of my way. There’s no replacement that works with Safari, but Allan Jardine’s Design bookmarklet does give us some nice tools. Design is a suite of web-design and development assistive tools which can be utilised on any web-page. Encompassing utilities for grid layout, measurement and alignment, Design is a uniquely powerful JavaScript bookmarklet.

Growing up, we didn’t live near water but we spent much of our time seeking it out. Every weekend and 4 weeks every summer were spent traveling, camping or boating. Usually all three. There were a few smaller boats when I was very young, but the one I remember most was a 1975 22' Sea Ray. I found a couple photos of her taken during the early 80s. My family took that boat everywhere.

James Russell has a piece at Luminous Landscape called Leica M8 Revisited. The reason I bring it up is that I want one. I mean really want one. Shooting the Leica is like going out with Pamela Anderson. The camera keeps saying you can make me clean, cook, raise the kids, but I won’t be very good at it., though if you let me do what I’m good at you’ll be very happy.

Thought #1. At what point does the quantity-over-quality value proposition of user-generated content so overwhelm us with with crap that quality content becomes impossible to find? Seems it may have already happened. Thought #2. Something feels wrong when the value of a viral video becomes more important than the rights of those of artists and authors whose work was used to create it.