Im sure this has been noted but I dont know who to credit.

Both Douglas Adams and Monty Python have been noted for their sense of the absurdity of life. The difference is that for Adams there is always an answer and even a question underneath all the absurdity. Its hidden and it may be deeply strange, but its ultimately knowable.

But for Monty Python its absurd all the way down.

If we geeks had theological debates, I think this would be our debate.

I didnt know that animal shelters used towels as bedding. Its Towel Day Happy Towel Day! and some shelters are doing towel drives. See the events list on the Towel Day website.

I enjoyed the video of Daves talk from The Next Web Conference.

NickB: Old Farts Know How to Code.

One thing I love about my company of six people: three are over 40, and the youngest is 30. (Nick is the oldest by about 10 months.)

I prefer working with software veterans they have more and better scars and lessons learned from those scars.

(Metaphor switch alert.) Have you ever drawn with charcoal? You know how you use your fingers to smudge the lines to get things to look good?

New developers are those crisp and clean lines. Veteran developers have been smudged just right.

Guy English:

Its fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but thats not insight. Its a tag team wedgie patrol.

Guy writes up the three things that should trouble Apple.

Joshua Bixby on GigaOM: The growing epidemic of page bloat:

Theres a huge body of research that shows that when people visit slow sites, they spend less, view fewer pages, click fewer ads, and spend less time on site.

The average page has grown to 1MB.

The Facebook Fallacy:

The growth of its user base and its ever-expanding page views means an almost infinite inventory to sell. But the expanding supply, together with an equivocal demand, means ever-lowering costs. The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isnt Google; its Yahoo or AOL.

Also see Doc Searls: After Facebook Fails:

But totally personalized advertising is icky and oxymoronic. And, after half a decade or more at the business of making maximally-personalized ads, the main result is what Michael calls the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of peoples Facebook profiles.

Ive been a Cocoa developer for ten years. (Less than some, but more than most.) And whenever I see new in someones code, I assume theyre new to Objective-C, that theyve just gotten here from Java or C++.

But now, because of ARC, Ive started using new as a replacement for alloc/init, just because its more compact.

In other words, Ill type [NSCache new] instead of [[NSCache alloc] init].

Total surprise to me.

Matt Mullenweg:

As John Borthwick put beautifully today, A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it. How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress current dashboard does. Its not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, its re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

I wrote about a thing that bugged me and Daniel Jalkut wrote an AppleScript that solved the problem for me.

I put the script into FastScripts (Daniels product, which I use every day) and gave the script a cmd-H keystroke and it works. Problem solved!

Nick Bradbury:

Androids fragmentation problem is miniscule. Its overstated in the tech press because it generates traffic.

Have I linked to Nick enough recently? You should subscribe to his feed.

A long time ago in the system 7 or 8 days, Im sure you could do this sequence in app

1. Hide Others.

2. Do some things in that app.

3. Hide [app-name].

and end up in the Finder, with all other apps hidden.

It hasnt worked this way for ten years or so. But I still hit cmd-H many times a day expecting to end up in the Finder. Instead nothing happens. (The Hide command is disabled in this situation.)

It made sense to me because the Finder feels like its behind everything else. It feels like its the computer itself.

So now I get frustrated many times a day and option-click on the desktop. (Im not a frequent cmd-tabber, though I realize that would get me out of using the mouse in this situation.)

Lets Sing! and Lets Sing! Free are like karaoke Draw Something. The apps are by Lex Friedman and Marco Tabini.

Found in my closet. (Click thumbnail for full version.)

Heres the explanation:

In 1995 I went indie. My company was called World Wide Power & Light. (Another company already had a similar name, so we renamed the company to Ranchero Software later in 1996. In those days all the cool domain names ended with a vowel: Tango, Marimba, etc.)

Our first main product was a search engine CGI for Macs running WebSTAR (originally MacHTTP). It glued together Frontier and Filemaker Pro to index files on the hard drive and make them searchable.

The price was $99 and we sold 9 copies.

The plaque is from Apple and signed by Heidi Roizen (formerly of T/Maker; then VP of Apple Developer Relations). Ive never seen any other plaques like this, so I dont know how many they gave out.

But I was brand-new to all this, and I loved it.

(It looks like our product page is still on the Wayback Machine.)

Update 4:05 pm: Yes, our search engine was called Spotlight. This was long before there was a Spotlight feature on Macs.

Earlier today I downloaded the Mule Radio Syndicate iPhone app. Good podcasts. Made by Black Pixel. All good.

How to deal with them.

Dustin Curtis writes about how Twitter is tracking you on the web. (Via Daring Fireball.)

This shit makes me terrifically angry. I recently quit Facebook deleted my account. I dont want to quit Twitter too, but its on my mind now.

Tim Bray:

It seems very likely to me that theres something simple and beautiful lurking inside the browser platform that will hit the greatest 80/20 point in software history. But Ive been thinking that for a decade or more, now.

Because Im a Cocoa developer you might (might) assume Im a partisan in a browser vs. apps war. But Im not, and I think its an imaginary war. (I spent a couple months working on websites around the beginning of this year. And enjoyed it.)

I do think that Tims right when he says its complicated and there are reasons to use and not-use both.

It also seems as if partisans tend to assume that the other technology is standing still. Its not.

Blogging is not a thing, its an attitude:

After almost 20 years of writing news stories and blogs about Apple, its become very clear to me that large media companies do not get blogging.

Drew McCormack pops the hood to see how iCloud and Core Data syncing works.