John Gruber brings it home with a little freebird.

Watch me segue from “all brains, no heart” to a man who has a brain for a heart.

He’s coming. He’s coming. HE’S COMING.

When you think “worse logo EVAR,” you think Pepsi. Now, thanks to the incomparably rockin’ Cabel Sasser I can tell you why. The entire document is a goddamned trippy read, but well worth the trouble if only to get a sense for what large corporations will pay millions of dollars for.
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I like to think of myself as a pretty open-minded guy when it comes to what goes on in peoples’ bedrooms. But honestly, can someone please tell me what’s so G.D. awesome about shagging a vampire? (via Google Zeitgeist 2008)

Google Book Search

Fastest Rising (U.S.)

1. breaking dawn
2. twilight
3. lora leigh
4. vampire kisses
5. new moon

Either way, it’s hot and you need one. I am, of course, talking about Drobo, “The world’s first storage robot.” Why robot? Ostensibly because there’s a lot of data-management intelligence embedded in the device. This is not a simple RAID — Drobo is doing some very clever things under the hood to keep your data safe (without supervision!). But I can’t guarantee you that, if it had been released a few years earlier, it wouldn’t have been touted as “The world’s first storage clown fish.” But enough poking fun at technology mechamorphized into anthropomorphized robots. Let’s talk whys and wherefores:

Last time I moved, I decided I’d boxed up my DVD collection for the last time. I needed to shift HandBrake into gear and give my AppleTV something other than iPhone instructional videos to chew on. But where to put all these newly ripped videos? I had some large firewire drives I was using for backups, but they weren’t expandable (and the last thing I wanted was to remember which movie was on which drive). And to end up with a net minus of “stuff” at the end of this process, I had to be able to pitch the original DVDs. But that meant backing up my “backup” drives. How was I going to do that? Some kind of reverse Time Machine? Clearly the answer was to buy a cheap computer, mount my external drives in it, and hire a consultant to keep the blamed thing updated, duplicated, and safe.

Or get a Drobo.

I was highly skeptical. The type of data-shuttling Drobo claims to do sounds suspiciously like syncing to me (I am of the firm belief that syncing never works). But I’d been told Data Robotics has a flexible return policy, so I took the plunge. I can tell you nothing of this fabled return policy because the moment I opened the box, I could tell this was one of those Apple-like game-changing product experiences. Drobo looked and felt sexy. Everything worked exactly as advertised. The hardest part about adding storage was removing the drives from their old enclosures. It was so easy, I even threw in some “too small to be useful” drives I had laying around. Drobo ate them up.

Now my entire iTunes library rests easy on Drobo. In addition to keeping my movies safe, this spares me the yearly “back up new music to DVD” dance (I’m trying to get rid of DVDs, after all) and keeps Time Machine from going into apoplectics any time I add media. I have a 1Tb, a 500Gb, and two 70Gb drives in the Drobo, and thus far I’m only taking up 30% of my storage.

Best part? When I max out, I’ll throw away one of the 70s and buy whatever’s on sale at Micro Center. I would have had to buy a 2Tb drive just to hold my current movies (and maybe another one to back it up!?). Now, by the time I get to the point of cycling out my largest drive, 2Tbs will be $50 on the discount rack.

I know. It’s cliche to say something “pays for itself”. But maybe that’s what makes it a robot.

George Carlin has died. Gene Wolfe and Lawrence Lessig, please be extra careful for the remainder of June, k?

I was going to say something asinine here, like, “If anything I ever wrote was funny, it was because of him.” That’s the first thing one assumes of a comedian, right? That he informs and evolves your sense of humor.

But George Carlin affected me on a much more sociological level. I act like I do because of him. I take the chances I do because of him. I have the courage to call “bullshit” because of him. I’m a more thoughtful and involved citizen because of him.

He also taught me my love of words — for which the rest of the world may sigh in collective indifference, but for me is the greatest gift I’ve ever received.

For the majority of my adult life, it’s been true that “if it’s Sunday, it’s Meet the Press.” Now I’ve learned Tim Russert has died, and it’s unclear to me what I’ll do with my Sundays from here on out.

Here’s the thing about Russert: he’s irreplaceable. The man was an honest-to-god genius with an interview. It’s easy to overlook if you just see clips or sound bites of his work here or there, but he had a way of asking questions that, when taken in aggregate, revealed something about the interviewee regardless of whatever answer he or she might gave. As a result, politicians went home happy thinking they dodged the tough questions, and careful viewers were treated to golden moments of truth laid bare in their performances.

Tim Russert had this process down to an science. But no one else, I think, ever really mastered the “Russert Method”. At any rate, I can think of no one able to step up and fill his shoes. He was the gentle giant of the Sunday morning talk show, an authentic man everyone sought out and no one dared dissemble to. Now that he’s gone, I feel as though one of my senses has been blighted, and this ability I had taken for granted to see into the hearts of politicians may never be returned to me.

Seeing as I don’t have time to both write scripts and work on Bamf!, I figure it’s time to find some other script writing software to tide me over. I decided to give Scrivener a try, and ended up banging out a silly Love Bunny and Mr. Hell story as a result (Love Bunny and Mr. Hell created by, ©, ™, ®, etc. the handsome Tim Seely).

Overall, I found writing in Scrivener way more productive than writing in, say, Final Draft. Still, Scrivener could stand to enumerate more things. I constantly had to go back and count to discover what page/panel I was on. Very annoying. Also the formatting options leave something to be desired. You can see from the Love Bunny script that in many places the pagination just doesn’t make sense. Dialogs are split! Paragraphs are orphaned! The humanity!

I suppose I could always import these files into Final Draft which, actually, has great print and pagination settings. But this seems just too counterproductive to bear. If other comic writers out there have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them. Otherwise, I may have to start blocking out time for Bamf! again.

A quick note to anyone who’s thinking about installing WordPress on one or more of your webservers: save yourself some trouble and don’t. Unless you like manually updating your blog software every two weeks. Then knock yourself out.

But me? The longer I can go without committing SFTP against my servers, the better. WordPress makes this impossible. The third-party auto-update plugin neither updates nor plugs-in for me, and never has. It apparently can’t grok concepts as obscure and esoteric as /var/tmp. Whatever. I know there aren’t a lot of developers in my audience, but can you imagine the shame of having a hobbyist with a crappy website that makes broken plugins be the sole, sane, tenuous strand connecting your customers to the updates that that are their only protection from an army of crackers and spammers intent on their humiliation if not outright destruction?

I forget who first recommended WordPress to me, but I want to take up smoking just so I can stub my newly acquired habit out on their prefrontal cortex. WordPress may have a bunch of good things going for it, but who can tell with all the bullshit?

I submit that it is!