The new iMac is what very few products from Apple are – boring. It’s an iBook with the screen on the outside glued to a metal stand. Yuck. They can do better.

Some great stuff here

I had no idea what I was cracking open when I started listening to Ryan’s shared iTunes library. Scroll down past Beck and Black Sabbath and other stuff I’ve heard of and finally just select something at random, click Play and…. Jeeez! What the hell is that noise!!? But wait…as I was lunging for the Stop button I heard something. Right in the middle of that noise was something interesting. Something that was exactly like what music isn’t.

I’m sure I’ve posted this one before, but it’s worth another look. First Principles of Interaction Design from AskTog. “The following principles are fundamental to the design and implementation of effective interfaces, whether for traditional GUI environments or the web. Of late, many web applications have reflected a lack of understanding of many of these principles of interaction design, to their great detriment. Because an application or service appears on the web, the principles do not change.

When and if I switch back to a Mac, I’ll probably need some software. I’m compiling a list of neato-peachy-keen utilities I’d like to have and try… BBEdit Color Consultant Pro Art Director’s Toolkit GraphicConverter Still looking for: screenshot, MySQL editor, Finder enhancements, etc.

Years ago I lived in BBEdit. When I moved to a PC I couldn’t understand how anyone could edit text at all in Windows. Over the past year I’ve grown to like jEdit quite a lot. I’m switching back to a Mac soon and it looks like BBEdit 8.0 might have addressed what I considered its biggest shortcoming: multiple document management. Can’t wait until I get a chance to try it again.

Well thank God for the design talent at work, because there’s no way I could handle the actual “design” part of web design. I spent about two hours today staring at my site, hating it and thinking I should come up with something better. What did I end up with? Well, I stole that orange color and scurried home mumbling something about “no-talent, design-deficient idea-less wanker…” Update: No more orange. Gone by popular demand.

GmailFS turns your Gmail space into a mountable filesystem. Quite cool. Jeremy, you readin' this?

I keep choosing “old” technology: Film cameras, 900mhz phones, things like that. The latest is my mail client. I’d been using Mozilla’s Thunderbird since before it was really in any shape to be used daily. It’s a great piece of software, and free, but a couple annoying little bugs have recently caused me to give up and go back to using Mutt. Mutt is a terminal based mail client for unix.

Just added another one to the reading list. The Philosophy Gym. 25 Short Adventures in Thinking Discusses things like… Is Time Travel Possible? What is Knowledge? The Consciousness Conundrum Seems like an easy intro to philosophy, which I know nothing about.

Very few ads are as perfect as this one…

There’s been some disappointing behaviour lately around these parts. There have been things written and things hinted at which don’t line up exactly with reality. These things seem to be directed at my partners, Steve and Bryan Lewis. I wouldn’t normally bring it up, but these are not just my partners, they are also my friends. I’d like to tell you a little bit about my friends. I met Steve and Bryan about 10 years ago, just before they founded Fusionary Media.