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By the way, I absolutely despise Web servers that don't respond to domain.com, only choosing to dish their content when you type "www." in front. And lest you think this is a problem seen only on the little guys, I dare you to click http://adobe.com/.

My paternal grandpa, who used to be a strapping guy, a Purple Heart recipient, weighs 117 lbs in a hospital bed today. At 5'8" and formerly a solid 180 lbs, my mom described him by saying "he didn't even make a bump in the sheets."

My sister cried. I, being 18 hours by car away, haven't seen him in two years, and even through my first 23 years on this planet, I only saw him about 5 or 6 days per year. I don't know my grandpa, either of them, really, and that's confusing.

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Steven, hours after my post on the topic, has blogged thusly:

More importantly, after marathon discussions at work, I think we are close to cracking the nut on what we should do about this 9,000-pound elephant in our pool. The solution that we seem to be arriving at is surprisingly obvious, but it took many hours to remove the blinders that were put in place by nearly four years of developing Audion to be a certain way. The environment has changed, and we must adapt to the new environment. It's Darwinism at work. Those of you who said that it is the responsibility of the small company to be innovate and be nimble, well, you were right on the money.

Seems Mike Pinkerton has cut his 15 minutes of whining short. Good for him. I'm posting this because I took him to task a bit in my blog a few days ago, and I believe that, having readjusted his attitude, he's now redeemed himself a little. Not fully, because public bitching and whining is always tough to get over, but this is the first step. The next step? Chimera 0.7. Please just name the damn thing "Chimera" though, instead of Navigator. Please?

Steven, of Panic fame, has taken a stick and scratched out an article titled "Free" into shifting sands of the Web, and I'd like to respond before it washes away. His post (article? I'm still not sure what to really call these things) talks about the "hidden cost" of Apple's free iApps. After all, "The one question we got asked more than any other at the expo this year was 'If I already have iTunes, why would I buy Audion?'"

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A Slashdot article talks about the fact that New York City residents will soon be dialing 11 digits even to call their neighbors. Frankly, I couldn't care less, and I wish the phone systems of this country could simply settle on one darn standard.

Case in point: I'm in the 561 area code. To call my neighbors, I can dial 7 digits. To call some places in Broward County (954), I dial 7 digits: XXX-YYYY. To call some other places, I dial 954-XXX-YYYYY. And for still some others, I dial 10: 1-954-XXX-YYYY. No, the last two are not interchangeable. What's worse, the same freaking thing holds true for my own area code: 561. Some 7, some 10, some 11.

And of course, my cell phone behaves differently, and tends to "just work" far more frequently. And I never need the 1.

If this article at ThinkSecret, which states that the decision to make the iApps (all but iDVD anyway) free downloads was a last-minute decision made in response to pressure from message boards and email, is accurate, this tells me two things>

Considering ThinkSecret got all of, what, one thing right this Expo (?), I hardly consider them to be a bastion of "dogooding" in reporting. After all, they deal in rumors, and they need to realize that they may at any time be the target of a misinformation campaign, a testbed for stupid ideas, the subjects of a hoax, and all sorts more. In other words, they should not take themselves so seriously. They're the best out there, but even their batting average is lower than Ted Williams'.

Matt's got an interesting article up at his blog about the difference between Cocoa and REALbasic. I've written articles about this in the past (one was taken down when I restructured Cocoa Dev Central, some others might be found at MacOpinion). Matt asks the simple questions: Which is easier to learn, which is better, and are RB apps more buggy? My answers? RB, Cocoa, and Yes. But let me explain…

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Chuq posts an interesting "look-back-but-walk-forward" type of post here in regards to the "rule" that signatures should be no longer than four lines long:

I personally stopped paying attention to the 4 line limit over a decade ago, because I felt it was no longer relevant. I still think people need to be thoughtful about signatures -- but the four line limit was arbitrary and based on an earlier day with much smaller average message size and very slow phone links.

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It would that some people continue to need a bit of a reality check. What follows was spoketh by a Chimera developer following the release of Safari:

I'm torn about what to do with Chimera. It's obvious it will only ever be a marginal product on a even more marginal platform. AOL and Netscape have no interest in supporting it. Who aspires to be number two in an already over-commoditized space? Working my ass off for 3% just isn't any fun any more. Safari has already won, the rest is just to see by how much.

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Spotted today on the back of a Chevy truck: "Surgeon General never warned about smokin' the rock."

I consider myself a fan of history. Not the dates and other stuff rotely memorized by high school and college peons, errr, students, but the stories, the people, the psychology of it all. I like to get beneath the history, and down to the people. Down to the nitty gritty. As this pertains to Apple, I like to know the code names to projects. I like knowing the story of Clarus the Dogcow. I'm your typical, average, mildly obsessed Mac user with a bent for "the inside story" and the "behind the scenes" look at life inside and around my favorite hardware vendor.

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The bloke (no, I'm not Australian or British) over at AntiPixel has enabled TrackBacks and forced his articles to rebuild when a trackback is received. So I thought I'd help him out by linking and "pinging" him. He will have been "punged" after this article is posted, if all goes well. Cool, eh? (No, I'm not Canadian.)

One of the reasons I'm drawn to MovableType is its ability to be hacked. Its insistence on CSS. Its integration with PHP. I just wish it was based on PHP so that you didn't have to do this silly "rebuild" crap every time you make the slightest change to something. Ugh.

Copied from an old blog I used to have on Blogger (one I largely ignored) comes this conversation that Aaron and I set up between two Eliza clients (that I wrote). It's quite amusing.

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There's a conversation about "being an alpha male," started by someone named Halley (I have no idea who these people are) and being followed by many a blogger, it would seem, including Dave Winer and Robert Scoble. Robert, in a recent post, made some remark about women masturbating, and then later followed up with a link to a site declaring his comments "offensive."

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