“I think being shy basically means self-absorbed to the point that it makes it difficult to be around other people. For instance, if I’m hanging out with you, I can’t even tell whether I like you or not because I’m too worried about whether you like me.” [via]

Through the miracle of credit, civilization actually gets to run on the illusion that there are several times more money available than we all actually have. This has worked mostly pretty well for several hundred years now. But as of this week, it’s all locked up, and even the good outcomes envisage a contraction of the credit universe and thus the necessity to get along on less money.

I’ve made some (more) tweaks to the design of this website over the past few days. They’re mostly little things and, unless you visit the site often, you probably wouldn’t notice them unless I were to point them out. In fact, in comparing the design today with the template I relaunched with on the 28th June, 2008, it’s amazing to see just how much the design has changed — while still sharing a common overall aesthetic. But then this is how web-design should be isn’t it? A website evolves with small, subtle, incremental changes, yet retains its “brand” by remaining true to its original design.

While I was applying the revisions I started thinking about web-design. I considered the current state of the art, how far we’ve come (I started building websites right back in the beginning when IBrowse on the Commodore Amiga really was cutting edge), standards compliance and the W3C, etc.

The catalyst for these thoughts was my adoption of a simple little CSS3 property known as border-radius, which is used to produce the RoundRects that, depending on which browser you’re using, may or may not be visible to you when you visit this website. If you’re using a Gecko or WebKit based browser, then you’ll see this website exactly as I intended - complete with RoundRects. With other browsers you’ll only see an approximation of the design I intended.
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“The Web has a particular architecture and it makes sense that if you are deploying a service or API on the Web then it should take advantage of this architecture instead of fighting against it. There are millions of deployed clients, servers and intermediaries that support REST and it makes sense to be compatible with their expectations.” [via]

This is partly a story about a company called Apple Computer. It’s also partly a story about a fancy new iPod that plays videos as well as music and that could dramatically change the way people entertain themselves. But it’s mostly a story about new things and where they come from, about which there are a few popular misconceptions. [via]

“Apple would gain nothing from telegraphing its intentions and capabilities by releasing public conceptual products. The company is being more than prudent by not displaying their unconstrained fantasies to competitors, media, investors or customers.”

“When you are busy and having paying clients banging on the door, you don’t have time to focus on exploring new areas, discovering the depth and meaning of your medium. … Real innovation in software seems to happen when we have underemployment of the true geeks. Either inside of companies where the geeks are allowed to explore, or outside of companies through economic forces. Long hours and tight focus is often needed to get a startup going, or ship software, but it’s not what creates something really new.”