I saw the most amazing license plate the other day. I suppose you have to be into the web to get the joke, but on the back of a car in front of me this is what I saw:

404-UHH

The best part is that it wasn’t a custom plate, so the person inside probably had no idea that I was behind them laughing because their car was throwing me a vehicle not found error and was to top it all off confused and speechless about the whole thing.

The fact that I found this as funny as I did probably indicates that I should spend more time outside and less on the computer, but such is life.

To quickly recap: Bob Keefe asked Steve Jobs why Apple doesn’t put Intel stickers on their computers. The world leaped down his throat, quickly notifying him that he’s a jackass and a moron. Duh, Apple doesn’t use Intel stickers because they are ugly. QED. Idiot.

Except no one bothered to ask Mr. Keefe why he asked the question. Fortunately, he decided to share. He even posted a picture of his head on a jackass. Pretty damn classy, if you ask me. He asked a question that, granted, does seem to have a fairly obvious answer to us egotistical Mac fanatics (even if there are solid reasons why asking a seemingly obvious question can be a good idea), and when the opinionated Mac blogging world jumped down his throat he responded with humor instead anger.

So why are people still shitting on Mr. Keefe? Simple: people prefer to be stupid. Life is much more fun when Mac users are right, Windows users are wrong, and Bob Keefe is a jackass (unless you’re a Windows user or Bob Keefe, of course). Making fun of people is hilarious. It’s easier, too; you never have to think about the fact that the person you’re ridiculing is another human being with a set of reasons for their actions. (And as to why bloggers prefer attack mode to investigating and reporting, it’s because attacking takes little to no time and sells well; people much prefer split-second opinions to hearing that the world is more complicated than their black and white fantasies.)

I don’t think the whole thing is about cultural relativism as M Diced claims (after all, Mr. Keefe is a Mac user). I think it’s because, in general, people prefer to be stupid (and John Gruber, who loves the jackass thing, enjoys falling victim to the fundamental attribution error—hell yeah I took psychology).

And then there’s me: I think the people who are making a big deal out of Bob Keefe’s question are being stupid, so I go on the attack and write a blog post about it. The irony does not escape me, but I at least have a consolation prize: I’m pretty sure that I’m right, and those other people are wrong.

Via Daring Fireball:

Send Voicemail to Yourself on an iPhone

Nifty trick for sending voicemail to yourself on an iPhone—a poor man’s voice memo feature.

Poor men have iPhones?

Lost Dog by Bill Cameron is a very good book. I don’t read much crime fiction, but I hang around a forum where the author has been known to post and when other forum-ites said they really liked I picked up a copy.

It lay around on my bedroom floor for a while, until last night before I went to bed I decided to read a chapter before sleep.

Needless to say, I’m completely sleep deprived today because I was up until 4:00 in the morning reading it. Character-driven, action packed, and with a wonderfully twisted villain, Lost Dog is an amazingly fun read. I highly recommend it. My only quibble was that there weren’t any elves.

I really missed elves.

I created the design that became my new Mac software blog Tagamac by accident. I was in between web design clients, but had just bought a new font (Estilo) and wanted to play around with it. I started messing around in Photoshop and pretty soon I had a mockup image that was quite intriguing. Aside from Estilo, which just oozes personality, I had come up with a border that was a lot different from any of my previous designs: it extended a little over halfway across the from both sides, but didn’t go all the way across. The top and bottom complemented, but didn’t complete each other.

I had to create the HTML just to see if I could. This would not be a difficult design with tables, of course; heck, I could have Photoshop figure out how it wanted to break it up for that. Divs, however, were another matter. After fighting the good fight, I have a method that I think is pretty slick. In fact, the only thing I regret is that I had to use a pixel fixed width; the squishy fixed width that I’m using for the Idol Bat, One Crayon, and this site could play no part (it’s squishy because it’s in ems; if you resize the text, the width of the page will grow to keep the line lengths similar).

I doubt other people will have quite the same fixation with asymmetrical designs, but I figured I’d outline how I achieved the Tagamac design here. If you want to see exactly how it’s done you can of course check out the source.

The problem I ran up against was not getting the middle main area looking good, but making the borders I’d created extend to the edges of the screen. I solved my problem by using two main header divs and two footer divs. Each div is 50% the width of the screen. For the headers, the left header has a background image along the bottom for the border; for the footers, it’s the right footer. Then each of the header divs has a content div. The content divs are each half the width of the whole page (which is 800px), have an ‘auto’ outer margin, and contain images that hide the background in the parent divs.

And voilá: an asymmetrical page! Of course, the header and the footer have to be broken in half (so there can’t be anything that spans them) and the page width is a fixed pixel width, but overall I’m pretty happy with it. Asymmetry is a relatively easy way to make websites that stand out (from my standard designs, if nothing else).

And now, without advance warning, I have launched a new blog! Tagamac focuses on Mac tagging software and generally exploring the phenomenon of tagging. I noticed several months ago that there is a serious dearth of easily digestible information about tagging online, and since I’m into tagging software, I figured I would try to rectify that situation.

Check it out if you enjoy tags, and particularly if you enjoy Mac software! I’m hoping to publish general articles about tagging, track tagging software updates, and review Mac tagging software.

Let me just say that Transmit 3 from Panic Software is a wonderful program, and my current favorite FTP program. The one thing that has been marring its beauty for me was my inability to navigate through directories or transfer files using the keyboard.

I’m a big fan of keyboard navigation. I’m still something of a novice at it in many ways, but now that I’m doing a lot more coding I’ve been forced to find the hotkeys and shortcuts that I didn’t bother to learn before (thank goodness for KeyCue). In fact, the only thing really standing in my way when it came to Website Coding Keyboard Nirvana was my reliance on the mouse in Transmit.

But it finally pissed me off so bad that I took the time to sit down and whang at my keyboard until I hit something that worked.

Here’s the the secret: cmd-↓ (command + down arrow). This one simple shortcut transfers files, opens directories, and improves your chances with beautiful women. It really is a miracle worker.

Now perhaps for the hard-core keyboard navigators among us this shortcut is all too obvious. It turns out that it’s an Apple standard; cmd-↑ and cmd-↓ can also be used to navigate through the Finder. I’m sure the real mice-burners are laughing at me, but it just wasn’t a shortcut that I was familiar with. I’m used to using cmd-O in the Finder, and to be honest I’ve never taken the time to learn its keyboard navigation secrets because I got hooked on Path Finder’s excellent shelf system before I started really making an effort to navigate using only the keyboard.

In any case, when I went looking for the shortcut in Fetch I discovered what is possibly the worst decision next to leaving any reference to the shortcut out of the program entirely: the only place where I can find it mentioned is in the preferences.

That’s right. It’s not in the documentation. It’s not in the menus. It’s in ten point font in the preferences. I ask you: who looks in the preferences for a keyboard shortcut? Sure, if the program allows you to create your own (Transmit doesn’t). But normally? Panic, where’s the excellent interface love that is so evident throughout the rest of the program?

In any case, I can at last navigate through Transmit without leaving the keyboard, which, despite my recent trackball purchase, is bound to make my wrists that much happier, not to mention speeding things up.

Now if only there were a standard shortcut for switching between tabs, my life would truly be perfect.