And if I eat a sprout

You gotta eat a sprout

You gotta suffer too…

“I don’t care.”

It doesn’t matter if the woman is a love interest, a family member or co-worker – never use that phrase. Ever. The question could be “Would you like a paperclip or staple for your copies?” to “Missionary or Doggie Style tonight, honey?” – and in many cases may represent a completely false choice. It simply doesn’t matter. There’s probably more than one right answer to any question – and probably several categories of wrongness in others – but none compare to the red-hot anguish you will likely embrace in response to the abject intellectual poverty of that three-word phrase [especially if it's true].

But I’ve recently found that there’s also an equally wrong phrase that will that will likely land you in the seventh level of Venusian Hell:

“Are you serious?”

You might think that this is an appropriate means to gather more information, but in fact you likely just flunked an emotional spelling bee by slamming the door on her side of the conversation. There is no calculus known to humankind that can measure the depths of loathing that these two answers inspire in the fairer gender.

Instant PERSONAL INTERACTION FAIL. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.

Save yourself a lifetime of grief by taking two seconds to think of anything else other than those two answers for your response. Your odds of finding the appropriate balance of rightness/wrongness will improve dramatically, as will your potential interaction with those of matching X chromosomes.

The wedge described as “Cost of downtime for designers, engineers, and software writers who sit at their desks in awe of what they just created” and “‘Just because we can’ charge (Fanboy Fee)” are my favorites. Now that I look at it – I’m surprised that there’s not a large wedge of this pie graph dedicated to those silly Mac vs. PC ads.

Mekong and Pumpkin sniff a bottle of Kubler absinthe

And this one I just can’t pass up – it’s a pic of Mekong and Pumpking “spooning” during a nap, with Mekong stretching a paw out over Pumpkin’s head. It was hard not to wake them up with our snickering, so we’re glad to have captured the moment with a picture.

Being cute 24/7 is simply exhausting

Anyway – best wishes for a happy, fun, and safe holiday weekend from all of us here – both in and out of costume…

I’ve watched the unbridled Windows bashing for months now – wondering when people (particularly power users) were going to notice that it’s actually a pretty decent operating system. Granted, there was a lot of homework to do for vendors to come up to speed building drivers for third party devices, but I know people that are *still* waiting for Mac Intel drivers for their audio devices (well, ones that work reliably, anyway) on the Apple side of the fence.

As usual, the hype has far outstripped reality, with snarky Apple slacker TV ads smirking at a Windows geek falling all over himself – Apple panders in a way that would make P.T. Barnum blush. Everywhere you turn, Steve Jobs creates a kind of group amnesia – then the love fest continues as Apple is given a free pass on everything from poorly designed devices to web services that don’t deliver as promised to undercutting third party developers as well as numerous other anti-competitive practices. They get a free pass because of their relatively small portion of the personal computing market, and through that they’ve stirred up a relative perception that is so far from reality that it’s almost funny.

So the Mojave Experiment has been a little breath of fresh air. Notice that I didn’t say “dose of reality” or some other nonsense. But it’s hard to ignore the irony that people are so enamored with “Mojave” right after declaring the Vista was “awful”, “buggy”, and is “too slow”. It’s a bit of a straw-man presentation – but then again, Apple has been getting away with straw-man tactics for years, it’s time that Microsoft grew some stones and ripped off more than Apple’s Fisher-Price warm and fuzzy UI.

Food for thought.