From The Wall Street Journal (via parislemon):

Best Buy Co. is testing a new turnaround strategy: making its cavernous electronics emporiums look more like Apple Inc.’s sleek retail outlets.

The heart of a test store near Best Buy’s headquarters here is a Solution Central help desk, rimmed with chairs and manned by the company’s black-tied Geek Squad. It strongly resembles the Genius Bar at Apple’s stores.

Reminds me of those kits that turn a Pontiac Fiero into a Lamborghini.

Beautiful animation of the Evolution of the Formula One Car:

via FlowingData

Great advice from Stu Maschwitz (via Matt Mullenweg):

TVs are designed to do one thing above all: sell. To do so, they must fight for attention on brightly-lit showroom floors. Manufacturers accomplish this in much the same way that transvestite hookers in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district do–by showing you everything they’ve got, turned up to eleven. You want brightness? We’ll scald your retinas. You want sharpness? We’ll draw a black outline around everything for you. Like bright colors? We’ll find them even in Casablanca. Oh, and since you associate “yellowing” with age and decay, we’ll also make the image as blue as a retiree’s bouffant on Miami beach.

Yes, yes, LCD displays have come a long way from the early days in comparison to plasma displays, but a lot of what Mr. Maschwitz says validates a lot of what I’ve already known about television optimization. And he is a filmmaker, so I’m going go ahead and take his advice and make the necessary adjustments on my LG television. Something tells me he might know a bit more about this shit than me. Just a hunch.

Sit down, relax and be brilliant.
This is what Cary Grant’s character’s wife say to him after he spaces out and acts like the absent-minded scientist he is in the movie Monkey Business.
Why doesn’t my wife say that to me when I space out?

The whole vanity license plate thing 98% of the population in Los Angeles partakes in still perplexes me.

Last Friday Michael Sippey released a statement from Twitter, explaining how they’re reigning in their API and how developers can use it:

These efforts highlight the increasing importance of us providing the core Twitter consumption experience through a consistent set of products and tools. Back in March of 2011, my colleague Ryan Sarver said that developers should not “build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” That guidance continues to apply as much as ever today. Related to that, we’ve already begun to more thoroughly enforce our Developer Rules of the Road with partners, for example with branding, and in the coming weeks, we will be introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used.

One of the bigger websites affected by this move was LinkedIn, where you will no longer see tweets showing up in the activity stream on your homepage.
Some developers reacted by resurrecting ideas for a decentralized Twitter.
So rage-against-the-machine. I love it. You gotta take the powah back! C’mon, C’MON!!!
Pardon me if I come across as a bit abrasive, but while Twitter’s move might throw a monkey wrench in some developers’ plans, can’t Twitter do whatever the fuck it pleases? Maybe, because, well, it’s their product?
These calls to create a decentralized, Twitter-like platform are funny. Services/platforms like Twitter (or Facebook or LinkedIn or AIM) rise to prominence because of people with vision. Now maybe some of these people who are proposing this new decentralized platform have that vision, but I’m not holding my breath.
Platforms, even decentralized ones require money and resources. “Free and open” platforms are rarely free and open. Just ask anyone who gets paid to develop for PHP or Red Hat Linux.
So, Twitter’s move. Bold? Douchey? Yes, but it’s their prerogative.

Vanity Fair has a sneak peak (via DF) of the new article on ‘Microsoft’s Lost Decade’. The next 5-10 years are not going to be a fun time for Microsoft fans. Check out Horace Dediu’s charts of Windows lead over Macs steadily deteriorating since it’s peak in 2004.
This statistic from the VF article slapped me in the face pretty hard:

Today, a single Apple product–the iPhone–generates more revenue than all of Microsoft’s wares combined.

As MG Siegler noted, there’s a lot of smoke around the supposed iPad ‘mini’. Things are only going to get harder for Microsoft as it gets up to speed and merges onto the tablet highway. I have plenty of popcorn in my cabinet. This is going to be a fun show.

I pass this sign often. It’s one of the best ads I’ve ever seen.

You think you’re past it. You no longer sit bolt upright at 2:00 AM, asking yourself what you could have done to save the marriage. You no longer worry that your kid will become a junkie because her parents divorced. You no longer imagine the neighbors finding your dead, naked body in a room full of flies, cats, and pizza boxes. You no longer dread your lawyer’s call.

Zeldman has a lot of guts writing so openly about his divorce.

Sorry, but I love the fact that Clayton Christensen, the guy who introduced us to “disruptive innovation” and “asymmetrical competition” (Yes, he was Horace Dediu’s Jedi master and where Horace got the name for his website, Asymco) was dead wrong about Apple’s iPhone:

So music on the mobile phone is going to disrupt the iPod? But Apple’s just about to launch the iPhone. The iPhone is a sustaining technology relative to Nokia. In other words, Apple is leaping ahead on the sustaining curve [by building a better phone]. But the prediction of the theory would be that Apple won’t succeed with the iPhone. They’ve launched an innovation that the existing players in the industry are heavily motivated to beat: It’s not [truly] disruptive. History speaks pretty loudly on that, that the probability of success is going to be limited.

Just goes to show you even smart people get shit wrong.
Let me take a little sip of this schädenfreude. Mmmmmm.
via DF

The 99 Percent on careers:

We’re at an interesting crossroads in terms of careers. We still want them, but they don’t exist anymore. In the US, the typical job tenure is now 4 years, with most workers cycling through about 11 jobs in their lifetime.*

This post is full of great advice. Obvious to some, but all great none-the-less.
For those of us in ‘creative’ fields, I think ability to cycle through jobs is more common than in other fields. As a web designer, I used to bounce around a lot, from design studio to design studio. Probably more than I should have. I remember telling a good friend I started at a new company and he remarked, “So when’s your last day?”
But back to non-creatives. I think they’re the ones being most affected by the shrinking of job tenure. They’re not as nimble on their toes. They learn a skill, get a job and go on autopilot. Not anymore. Now everyone has to be nimble, responding to changes in the workforce and technology.
The article brings to mind my favorite Charles Darwin quote: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”