*Inspired by John Siricusa in this morning’s episode of Hypercritical

From Mein Kampf by David Lerner

From Grammarist:

A Macintosh (now usually just Mac) is one of a series of computers made by the Apple company. A mackintosh is a style of waterproof raincoat invented in the 1820s by Charles Macintosh (the k was added to the raincoat name almost immediately). A McIntosh is a type of red apple grown primarily in eastern Canada and the northeastern U.S.

Macintosh and McIntosh are proper nouns, meaning the first letter (along with the I in McIntosh) is capitalized. Mackintosh is a common noun, so it is not capitalized. The plurals are Macintoshes, mackintoshes, and McIntoshes.

Now you know.

Neil Armstrong died this past weekend. First man on the moon. Amazing stuff.
But he is human, and therefore bound to make mistakes. Like the one in his legendary speech. Larrick was kind enough to bring this to my attention this morning.
I found a BBC article from 2009 talking about this lunar mess-up:

Neil Armstrong missed out an “a” and did not say “one small step for a man” when he set foot on the Moon in 1969, a linguistic analysis has confirmed.

The researchers show for the first time that he intended to say “a man” and that the “a” may have been lost because he was under pressure.

They say that although the phrase was not strictly correct, it was poetic.

Yeah, yeah. He messed up. I’ll let it slide given the circumstances.

From Marcelo Somers (via Jim Dalrymple)

Our job as independent writers isn’t to be first or even to get the most pageviews. It’s to answer the question of “so what?”. Taken as a whole, our sites should tell a unique story that no one else can, with storylines that develop over time that help bring order to the chaos of what we cover.

This is exactly what goes through my head when I post to Daily Exhaust.
There’s many times the link I want to link to and quote is already linked to and quoted by John Gruber, Jim Dalrymple, Shawn Blanc, Jason Kottke, Ben Brooks or someone I found on Techmeme. If I don’t have a unique perspective to the link in question, I usually won’t link to it. I don’t want to be the noise in the conversation.
I try to do the same with the images I post. While it’s tempting to get caught up in the whatever’s popular on Tumblr at the moment, I try to post my own designs, photography and scans.
Writing original content and posting original imagery makes me a source, not just just another reblogger of other peoples’ stuff. Sure it’s more work, but it’s worth it.

Surely, this is the sign of maturity: we are finally admitting to ourselves that our appetites are not nearly as ravenous as we thought, our bellies not quite so deep. We’ve realized that the way to make sense of this meal may not be to stay seated at the table, but rather to step away for a while and come back. More than this, these anthologies finally make good on the purpose of all our automated archiving and collecting: that we would actually go back to the library, look at the stuff again, and, god forbid, do something with it.

—Frank Chimero

Last week while I was looking through my site referrals I came across an interesting writer. Her name is Elmo Keep.
How could I not dig deeper with a name like that?
Like most good writers both her words and the words she recommends you to read are solid.
Here’s a bit from a piece she wrote on technology and culture called Don’t Fear the Reaper:

A lack of knowledge of the technology being critiqued is evidently not a reason to not espouse your thoughts on it. Aaron Sorkin deigned to use Facebook for a two-week research period in preparing to write the almost hysterically overwrought Social Network. He compared it unfavourably to reality TV, as only two weeks of cursory use will allow. Jonathan Franzen will call Twitter the antithesis of in-depth thought without so much as being connected to the Internet. Roger Ebert is happy to declare video games exempt from the “real art” canon without ever having played one. All these failures of imagination seem to spring from an age old knee-jerk reaction to the New: it is far easier, and takes less time, to dismiss something foreign outright than to properly interrogate and investigate it.

So far, the few pieces I’ve read by Keep resonate a lot with me.
I also dug her piece in The Age on the new HBO series ‘Girls’ which I’ve been watching because, well, my wife’s been watching it.
Keep also has a well-designed website. In the same way I think it’s important for designers to write well, I also think it’s as important for writers to know how to present their work on the web. I don’t expect either to master the other’s craft, but shit, at least try. She seems to be trying.

Black Hockey Jesus gets self-referential:

I want to pause here and clear a space to allow the post to become aware that, before now, it was merely a post about wanting to write a post; however, it just entered the quirky new realm of being meat-meta blogging, aware of itself as blogging about blogging about blogging and, if we had some really good pot, we could infinitely regress into an abyss of metalicousness where we might vomit or have an orgy or some other signifier that revealed us as bloggers on the fringe, man.

Over at Wired UK, Olivia Solon says book publishing is having it’s Radiohead Moment with the move by JK Rowling to publish her own e-books on her new platform, Pottermore.
Platform! Ha! How about that. I was just writing about fucking platforms yesterday.
I didn’t even plan that.

Craig Mod starts putting some critical thinking towards the tablet page:

Tablets are in many ways just like physical books–the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books–the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?

This essay looks to address these very questions. This essay also marks the release of an HTML baseline typography library for tablet reading. It’s currently iPad optimized. It’s called Bibliotype and the hope is for it to provide a solid base atop which we can explore. It’s very rudimentary, but rudimentary is a damn fine place to start.

Frank Chimero on Reading Readiness:

It irks me when people say that blog posts are too long. Sometimes, I catch myself saying the same. Who ever decided the proper length of a blog post? Not me. Not you. Not anyone. An individual only decides the length of their attention. Text takes time–to make, to design, to read. For things to work, effort must be matched. To return to our kung-fu movie: effort and attention from the student is matched with the attention of the master. Similarly so with the writer and the reader. To be willing to match attention is to be kind and ready.