This blog turns 4 today. In that time, I’ve ranted, raved, lost my baggage, and wasted my time and yours. And I’ve had a blast doing it. Thanks for reading!

I’m too good for Facebook. While I give the site props for its huge user-base and its resultant ability to put you in touch with people you haven’t seen in years, this whole closed-social-networking-system thing is for the birds. Why do I have to log into Facebook to check and reply to messages from my friends? That problem’s already been solved, and the solution is called—listen closely—email.

It is not the early days of the internet anymore, and Facebook shouldn’t be trying to emulate AOL. Remember what happened to AOL?

Like I said; I do understand the benefits of getting in touch with people on FB—I had lunch this week with a friend I hadn’t seen in 13 (!) years, a friend who happened to be living in the same city as me, clear across the country from where we grew up—but I don’t understand the benefits of keeping in touch with those same people in this artificially closed system.

Well, it’s only a matter of time before all these closed systems become open, and social networking is as transparent as air and email.

his acceptance speech at the DNC tonight, and I am having a hard time concentrating on the speech because the NBC on-screen graphics are so damn ugly. Pink and purple? Gold and silver? What is this? Glitter Barbie Does Denver?

And that blue? That awful typography? This looks like a broadcast from 1988, not 2008.

About the speech. Obama is hitting all the Democratic talking points: Bush sucks, McCain doesn’t get it, no more outsourcing, renewable energy, energy independence, affordable education, affordable housing, affordable, accessible health care, and all this with tax cuts, too. Magic!

As always, he’s a great, great speaker.

I don’t even know how long it took me, but it was a long time—but I just finished rating my entire iTunes music library! Yes, all 6000-odd songs. Now I can rest easy that all my smart playlists are getting the most complete data. Yay! I feel like I should get a diploma or something.

was my score on this incredibly difficult quiz requiring you to guess the movie title from just one movie poster letter. How well can you do? (via)

So now instead of putting the entirely misleading transaction total at the bottom of your account activity, Chase just has the last statement balance at the bottom; you have to go to the summary page to see your current balance. That’s useful.

Never, ever, ever use an apostrophe to pluralize letters, numbers, acronyms or initialisms (e.g. TV’s, PDF’s). It’s ugly. I don’t care if it’s widely used, accepted and cited in writing guides; it’s an affront to the language.

by the way, by me trying to link to the slides from one of the most useful sessions at An Event Apart SF: Jeremy Keith’s presentation on patterns in the design process. It was also, IIRC, the only one that was Creative Commons licensed.

Anyway, it’s got a lot of good stuff, so all you web developers/designers should check it out.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m no fan of Adobe products, especially the bloated, sluggish Adobe Reader—unless I want to fill out PDF forms, it’s of absolutely no use to me when Preview does everything I need, faster and better.

So when I installed Leopard from scratch on my personal laptop, I decided that under no circumstance would I install Adobe Reader. Problem was, every time I tried to open a PDF in Safari, I’d get a dialog box prompting me to choose an Adobe product to view the PDF in—and to add insult to injury, all non-Adobe products were not selectable.

When I obviously couldn’t choose Adobe Reader and clicked Cancel, the Safari window would just go grey and sit there, forcing me to download the file^* and open it in Preview if I wanted to view it, even though Safari was supposed to support inline PDF viewing as of Tiger.

As you might imagine, this drove me ABSOLUTELY BATTY. Gnashing teeth, foaming mouth, shaking fist, the whole enchilada. ARGH. <pause for deep breathing exercises />

Anyway. This state of affairs was mildly irritating, so I was pretty happy (okay, okay, I did the Snoopy dance) when I found out how to fix this problem this morning. You need to do two things:

1. Go to /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and remove AdobePDFViewer.plugin.
2. Open up Terminal and type

   defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitOmitPDFSupport -bool false

   at the prompt. This ensures that Safari will open PDFs rather than forcing Preview to.

What I can’t figure out is how the PDF viewer plugin got installed on a vanilla Leopard installation. I suspect it happened when I installed Photoshop. Sneaky bastards. (cf. reference 1, reference 2)

^* That is, if the referring web page didn’t redirect through some dumb download script, but don’t even get me started on that.

• Nothing to Lose by Lee Child – 3 stars

  Though this latest Jack Reacher novel is leaps and bounds beyond the decidedly underwhelming Bad Luck and Trouble—it was, typically of Child, engaging and well-written, and thankfully suffered from none of its predecessor’s plot discrepancies—I just couldn’t get into it. I think my problem is that I am starting to feel a real lack of credible motivation from Reacher himself. I’m tired of reading Reacher books where he involves himself in something because they messed with the wrong guy, or that the organizing principle of his life is relentless forward motion. When does it become personal? When does it become difficult for him? Where’s the challenge?

  The last few books have followed the same formula: someone pisses him off and he goes in and cleans the floor with the villain(s). Not since One Shot, in fact, and probably actually not since The Enemy, has Reacher seemed fully, emotionally engaged in the book’s conflict. Really, he’s lost his humanity, or is near it, and I’m near to never picking up another Reacher book.

• Cry Wolf by Patricia Briggs – 4 stars

  The beginning of a new series set in the same world as Briggs’ Mercy Thompson books, Cry Wolf is another strong offering from a very talented author. It was very good, but not quite as good as the Mercy books, and I think it’s because of the character development. Each of the two main characters is still a bit of a cipher, though I hope and expect that will change as the series progresses—it is admittedly a bit unfair of me to compare this single novel to a series that has 3 whole books out, and which is therefore guaranteed to have better fleshed-out characters.

  Again, I have to say that Briggs is rapidly becoming one of my favorite authors, and Cry Wolf is only strengthening her position. If you haven’t read her excellent, excellent urban fantasy books, I don’t know what you’re waiting for.