Jack Shafer, in his recent Slate piece describes what he calls a “crush” held by media outlets over Steve Jobs and all things Apple. He cannot understand why significant updates to one of the most loved and popular consumer devices ever would cause a stir. He suggests that Fortune, Globe and Mail, San Francisco Chronicle, Detroit Free Press and others are just blindly slathering unearned adoration on what amounts to a collection of ho-hum products.

Even if you’re not a fan of street or fine art photography, Elliot Erwitt is guaranteed to make you smile. Some of his stuff is just miraculous.

I learn a lot from lesscode.org, and recommend it to others. However, today’s post beating up on 37signals is just way off. The complaint is with the very nifty new 37signals product, Writeboard. Alex says that he sent a writeboard to his wife who then struggled because she couldn’t just click on the text and start typing. I’m sorry, but unless she’s never done anything useful with a browser before, this just seems silly.

Steve has been going on about Under Armour underwear like they were the only thing in the world that mattered. Okay, that’s a lie, but he did say that wearing them made him happy. Hey, I’m all for happy, so I ordered a couple. Damn, now I’m happy too! Seriously, these are some great underwear. Better is better. Thought you’d like to know. Get yours

Some good advice about doing it right the first time, even when we “don’t have time right now,” from David Heinemeier Hansson… “Realize that “don’t have time right now” is a self-fulling prophesy. You will never have time right now if you don’t take it today. The business is not going to slow down to allow you to clean all these things up one wonderful day. It just won’t happen.

Roll your own search engine with Rollyo. This is a handy new app which aggregates the search results of any collection of sites you choose. Name and create as many collections as you like – then share them with others. (Yes, it’s a Rails app.)

Take a movie trailer and remix it so that it seems as if it is for a completely different movie. What a great idea! Someone apparently ran a contest for just that sort of remix. The winner is called Shining, based on the great Kubrik film. Waxy has a mirror. It’s great.

I admit it. I’m guilty. Yes, I sometimes toss some CSS inline just so I know where to find it later. Otherwise, I’ve got to reverse-engineer the entire document structure and a 4000 line stylesheet just to find out why the hell that font isn’t blue like I damn sure told it to be! Simon Willison is asking for some guidance and I hope he gets enough of it to help little ol' me get some work done.

I’ve moved my RSS feed to Feedburner. Now I get free usage stats and they deal with the bandwidth. Not bad. The catch was that I needed to, as quietly as possible, redirect the existing URL for my feed (<xml/rss20/feed.xml>) to the feedburner location (http://feeds.feedburner.com/jackbaty.) Lighttpd makes it even easier than apache, since version 1.4 supports nested conditionals. Thanks to Poocs.net, I just added the following to the lighttpd config…

I have been replacing the mundane with the exceptional. It started slowly, as I began to realize that little things do matter. This is not about irrationally spending too much on stupid, obvious things. It is about removing as many of the boring, crappy, ugly items that we use/touch/eat/carry every day and replacing them with things that are well-built and beautiful. The opportunities are endless, but beware. Eventually everything becomes something that could, nay, should, be better – and damn if I’m not going to find it!

The new Jack Johnson CD is housed in a fancy, very thin plastic case that is cool but ugly and impossible to use. No biggie, CD cases have been crappy and frustrating for years. There’s nothing to see here. I then stumbled onto Jewelboxing. I love them without ever seeing one. Why? because it takes something mundane like a CD jewel case and tries making it exceptional. Don’t underestimate the value in that.

In Hipster PDA Tips for People Obsessed With Productivity Pr0n But Bad At Actual Productivity, you’ll find the following advice… “Go out and buy all the cool pens that everyone mentions in relation to the Hipster PDA. No really, go ahead. You won’t feel right until you’ve test-driven them all. Then, when you realize that all the new pens are too big/too small/the cap falls off/are too pretty/made you afraid to remove them from your desk/whatever, use the pen you normally use.