Important Announcement

Hi everyone, welcome to May 2009. Here, in the present, it is no longer hilarious, quirky, original, or even amusing to comment on how much you love bacon (whether true or not). It is also inappropriate to suggest that every food item benefits by the addition of bacon.

Thanks.

Excuse me...

While we were in Barcelona in September, one morning at breakfast a man walked up to our table and asked me, "Excuse me, are you Andrew Sorkin?" I considered for a few seconds what I should say in response. Who was Andrew Sorkin? A celebrity? If I said "yes," what questions would follow? And what does this guy look like? Perhaps I should pretend I don't speak English?

What I did say was "no." The man continued, "Oh, ok. You look just like him. He's a financial writer for the New York Times." I think I might have said something like, "yeah, definitely not me." This was right around the time that Lehman Bros. was failing, perhaps WaMu had just collapsed, and at least 90% of international news was focused squarely on how the US economy was going to collapse if congress didn't intervene. In other words, it was the sort of day where the person you'd be least likely to meet while enjoying a leisurely breakfast in a Mediterranean city would be a financial writer for the New York Times. Maybe this guy's follow-up question was going to be, "What the fuck are you doing here? Have you heard about the money thing back home?"

Anyway I didn't get a chance to look up Mr. Sorkin until I got home. I have to admit that he looks kind of creepily like me.

Mmm

Oh yeah.

I've made it!

I'm pleased to announce that my blog is the #1 search result on Google for... wait for it... "うれしく生きて". Wow! Also, if you look at the results page, click on "Translate this page." Observe how terrible a job it does.

BTW, I'm thinking I should change the url here from "iheartteriyaki" to "idontheartyoursoftware."

Newsgator doesn't remember me

ATTENTION NEWSGATOR:

It has now been about two months that the "remember me" checkbox on your login page has been broken. This is becoming more and more annoying with each day and every login.

I wanted to tell you this by email, but your support page tells me to use the forums instead--I'm a "free client" and you won't give me "direct support." Ok! I tried to start a forum thread about this, but I had to create a new forum account to do so. And to do that, I had to sign up with my email address and respond to a validation query and, oh, screw it, why are you making it so difficult for me to help you by giving you feedback?

So I just figure I'll scream the problem into the internet: NEWSGATOR'S FAILURE TO LOG ME IN AUTOMATICALLY IS A CONSTANT, IN-MY-FACE FRUSTRATION. And I'll hope that someone on your development team finds it via google or technorati or whatever when they search for "newsgator sucks" or "defect to google reader" or "newsgator remember me broken" or "i'll take my OPML and go play elsewhere" or something. Please. God. Fix this. Trust me, I can appreciate the cost of deploying fixes and the agony of long development cycles, but it's 2008 and this is a web app and seriously, someone just forgot a quote:

<input type="checkbox" name="Persistent" id="Persistent value="true" />

Thanks!

On Leopards and Crocodiles

Submitted without comment: http://www.halbrindley.com/photos/leopard-seq/01.html

Uh Oh

As part of my 2.0 firmware update, the iPhone tab in iTunes has undergone a radical simplification. There's only one button now:

Ok, fuck, I was going to upload a screenshot of the dialog that says "An unknown error occurred (-9838)", but Blogger says "This image could not be uploaded due to an internal error."

It's not a good morning for software.