The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

• Abbyshot Clothiers - Browncoat
  not that I have $550 to spend on a coat, but the mere existence of Mal’s coat in retail form makes me so, so happy.
  (tags: firefly clothing coat browncoat serenity)

• Bruceclay.com - 7 Site Usability Mistakes That Bug Me
  dear intarwebs… please make your sites suck less
  (tags: seo usability webdesign webdevelopment userexperience)

Tom tagged me to name my last 5 songs purchased, which made me giggle, because he’s usually sitting next to me when I buy them.  I also haven’t been buying that much new music lately- there’s not a lot that’s really grabbing me.  But this is what I’ve bought recently, where “recently” means “since late June.”

But, I love a good music meme, so here goes:

Le Disko - Shiny Toy Guns - I’ve been hearing this one a lot on Ethel lately. It’s rare to hear a male/female duet in alt-rock lately, and this one is kind of an earworm.

Sunshine (Go Away Today) - Jonathan Edwards - I’ve loved this song for a long time, so I’m not sure why I hadn’t bought it before the other day.  The line, “He can’t even run his own life/ I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine” sticks with me.

Lazy Eye - Silversun Pickups - Purchased as part of their album Carnavas. The guitar is really distinctive in this song, and it reminds me of summertime, road trips, and a general feeling of relaxation.

Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) - Mika - Purchased as part of his iTunes Festival London set. I’ve been kind of a Mika junkie ever since I first heard “Grace Kelly” on Ethel as I was on my way to work one morning in February. His Life in Cartoon Motion album has been my at-work attitude adjustment for months.  I caught him at the 930 in June, and heard him perform this song- it was amazing.  This recording doesn’t do it justice- he’d been having some throat problems/overwork issues over the summer and this set kind of shows the strain, so he didn’t hit the sustained high note that he did just-for-the-hell-of-it in DC, but it’s a pretty fine cover nonetheless. 

Killer Queen - Queen - Do I really need an excuse for buying Queen songs?  What I love about Queen is that just when you think you’ve figured out what their style is, you hear some other song that’s unlike anything else you’ve ever heard. 

I don’t usually tag people for memes, and most of the people I’d want to hear from have probably already been tagged… but consider this your invitation.  What are you listening to lately?

Jim and Tiff

Originally uploaded by TheShumas

My friend Jim is always making jokes about how dorky he was in high school. But look at this photo- who’s the dorky one?

• TuneCore: Welcome
  (tags: capitalism iTunes money music vendors distribution tunecore audio)

Twitter / Mr. Web2.0: just got a sneak peek at we…

Originally uploaded by seanbonner

I don’t think I can add anything to this.

• KarateParty.org - Chat Like a Pirate
  another talk like a pirate link
  (tags: geek humor language tips talklikeapirateday pirates arr pirate)

Unlike my husband, I was not especially perturbed about the sudden iPhone price drop.*  Oh sure, it stung a bit to have the price drop so quickly after I bought mine (I had been expecting the usual procedure of “Wait 6 months/a year, introduce a better one, and drop the price on the previous one.”)  After all, no one WANTS to pay more money than they have to for anything.

But I tended to fall more in the John Gruber camp: I paid $600 for an item that was worth $600 to me.  If it wasn’t worth $600 to me, I should not have paid that much for it.  And since I still love my iPhone, I adopted the “viva la capitalism” approach.

But that doesn’t mean I won’t take the $100 store credit offered to early adopters. I think it was a nice “No, we don’t take you for granted” gesture by Apple, and besides, since I’m considering my $600 gone and spent, it’s essentially $100 free from Apple.  Duh.

And as I hoped, the store credit claim process is completely painless- you don’t still need to have your store receipt, or even the box your iPhone came in.  You can complete it with just your phone number and the serial number etched into the back of your iPhone.  The process took me about 3 minutes, including waiting for the claim code to come by SMS and printing out my credit code. You can claim your iPhone credit too.

*Probably contributing to our difference of perspective, Tom’s iPhone was purchased out of our household budget- we decided that the Bridge Family Budget could only responsibly support one iPhone purchase at a time, and agreed that since Tom runs his business essentially off his cell phone and his laptop, those two items have to be the best they can be, and are therefore worthy priorities. Also, he would have to start supporting it for his clients, so we bought his first, with the idea that I would get mine later.  My iPhone, on the other hand, was purchased sooner than anticipated due to an unexpected windfall I received from one of my personal projects that I had never expected to make money from.  So for Tom, the early iPhone purchase affected our shared bank account, while for me, it just meant that my “fun money” didn’t stretch as far as it otherwise could have just a few weeks later.  From that perspective, it’s not hard to see why Tom was bent about it and I wasn’t.

• Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Good Samaritan Sex Offender
  A prostitute approaches the family car, and the husband is arrested for solicitation. Though cleared of wrongdoing, the family car is seized and the family is billed for towing and storage fees. Aren’t you glad we regulate the sex lives of consenting ad
  (tags: crankylibertarian outrage sex)