…but what exactly?
Hmm, I don’t know. Just a little something I’m working on.

We may have iPhones, but we still end up walking on foot when we get a big thunderstorm.
I need my subway!

BumpTop
I’m on the fence on this product. There’s a certain usefulness you get when you take real world office supplies and tools and you abstract them into a Graphical User Interface.
Great GUI’s take the best aspects of these objects and throws away the rest. Manila folders on your desk become simple icons with an arrow next to them, letting you ‘open’ the folder and see a nice clean list of files in that folder.
BumpTop seems to be moving back towards a real desktop, complete with messiness. I know what you’re going to say – people who have messy desks will inevitably have messy computer desktops. True – but BumpTop doesn’t seem to be helping the situation (They even refer to some things in the demo below as “piles”).
Does anyone else feel me on this?
Check the video below. Remember to ask yourself, Do I think this is just cool, or do I really seeing this as something useful?

Flickr Related Tag Browser – this is sort of an oldie, but I just rediscovered it and realized how awesome it is. It’s an example of using Flash to make an action easier and quicker.
…by the way, I recommend exploring ALL of Felix Turner’s Airtight Interactive, he’s a great example of someone who has a great balance of coding and design skills.
slower.net (via Airtight News) – Wonderful photography.

US Senators call for universal Internet filtering – I don’t like the sound of this at all. At all.
Oscar the Cat Predicts Patients’ Deaths

Oscar the cat seems to have an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients are going to die, by curling up next to them during their final hours. His accuracy, observed in 25 cases, has led the staff to call family members once he has chosen someone. It usually means they have less than four hours to live.

Blasting the Myth of the Fold (via Design View)
New Global Study From MTV, Nickelodeon and Microsoft Challenges Assumptions About Relationship Between Kids, Youth & Digital Technology
Mastodon Linoleum Knife – Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie Intro
Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. But his advice was better than that. He had a gem of a leverage technique he used on himself and you can use it to motivate yourself – even when you don’t feel like it.
He then revealed a unique calendar system he was using pressure himself to write.
Here’s how it worked.

Punchout – They have a beautiful layout on this site, what Andy Rutledge would call quiet structure. I wish the transitions were a bit smoother though.

3Signs – This site feels like liquid. Smooooth. *One complaint – the section you’re on should be in focus and all the others should be out of focus. They have it backwards.

Jory from Analogue like simplicity. So do I. Heed to it.

Ars Technica: Let a million iPhones bloom – great article.
Here’s a piece:

Well that very same AT&T in that same market just got probably half a million new two-year contracts in three days. Now I don’t know what AT&T’s usual acquisition numbers are like, but I have to think there are some big smiles in the boardroom right about now.
And that’s amusing because AT&T has almost nothing to be happy about. Those smiling executives are probably already starting to convince themselves that they’re responsible in some way for this success. That sentiment is about as well founded as the power company patting itself on the back as big-screen TVs fly off the shelves.

If anything, AT&T’s douchey-ness was amplified next to Apple. All the complaints I’ve heard thus far about the iPhone have all been about AT&T technical issues and bad customer service.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, even before the complaints started about the iPhone having only 8 gigs of disk space.
There are some people that seem to have the impression that they need to load their digital music device with as much of their entire music collection as possible. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve guilty of this in the past. “I like Talib Kweli, I’ll just load all his albums onto my iPod…”
There’s nothing wrong with this behavior, but if you’re like me, and you have your device set to SHUFFLE ALL, you notice that you spend a lot of time clicking the Forward button over and over and over until you hit a track you want.
A better route to take is to create playlists in iTunes. It might be a little time consuming, but it will be well worth your while in the long run. As much as you love the Led Zeppelin II album, you know damn well you were through with Stairway to Heaven by junior year in high school ….so why are carrying that track around on your iPod?
A first stab at creating Playlists is obviously ‘old favorites’. This is a good start and will work for some people.
Another good list that I like to make is New Albums. This takes the old mentality of ‘dumping’ albums on your device, but in this case, it’s just to sift out the tracks you like and don’t like. Once I realized what tracks I liked from The White Stripes new album, Icky Thump, I just kept those and deleted the rest.
One of the most helpful techniques for getting solid listening experience from your iPod is deleting the tracks you don’t like. Tell me if this has ever happened to you (over and over): when your iPod is set on shuffle, it seems to like to shuffle the same songs every time, and they’re the songs you always don’t want to hear.
Well, the first step to happiness is removing those tracks from your iPod. The shuffling might begin to find great tracks, or it might find more crappy ones. Just repeat the above process until you’ve chipped away the all the unwanted tracks.
ALthough this is essential to owners of iPhones and other players with smaller capacity, it’s equally powerful for 60 gig iPod owners too.
It’s about quality people, not quantity.