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1. Fitted button-up dress shirts (16.5 34/35)
   
2. Dress Shoes (10.5)
3. Steve Madden Driving Mocs
4. PS3
5. Starcraft II (Will this freaking come out already?)
6. iphone radio adapter

Saw this on flickr and thought it was hilarious. Then I thought it was depressing. Now I don’t know what the heck to think. It’s dark humor, right?

Here in New Zealand a new copyright act went into effect on 1st November. The most controversial clause has been delayed until 28th February. This clause says that an ISP must have a policy of disconnecting anyone repeatedly accused of copyright infringment.

I agree that this act would place the responsibility of judge in the hands of the ISP. But without some governing body working with the ISPs instead of against them, it seems the RIAA is setting the ISPs up for some muddy waters.

Within the wishlists of RIAA is making ISPs liable for copyright infringement that happens through their networks.. This we need to be very vocal about. How’s an ISP to know what that packet you pull is a copyright infringement?? by only allowing you to talk to sony.com + apple.com ?

This I can also agree with, to an extent. Without the pressure to localize and enforce copyright infringement on the Internet, then those committing the crimes won’t have any reason not to do it. The right thing to do notwithstanding, the world is faced with a new twist on an old problem. I believe the legislation will eventually balance itself out, and freedom/justice will find it’s way to Internet.

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Have you seen those lawn signs around your city that say something like “Single? SanDiegoSingles.com” or something similar? I certainly have seen them everywhere. I have been very interested in how this company’s model works and how successful it has been thus far. Apparently they are pulling in a “solid six figure” revenue. I am no expert in guerrilla marketing or the matchmaking business, but I imagine it can get interesting and quite lucrative. After all, they aren’t really selling anything but opportunity. I’m more interested into the legal implications of a business model that relies massive scale print marketing (involving signs that are often placed illegally). Apparently not much has been done by way of stopping them, although I wonder if a company sponsoring gross illegal sign placement is guilty of more than hundreds of thousands of “petty crimes”? Well, Robert Moore didn’t touch on that aspect of it but he did break it down every other way possible, with great graphics to boot! Definitely a great read about one man’s insightful modern investigation. Update: Tim Williams has posted more information about the prosecution of this company.

In This Economy
If I hear the phrase in this economy anywhere in a sentence one more time I am going ballistic.

An Historic
It’s a historic people, look it up! I had never even heard this phrase before election weekend and now everyone wants to keep saying it.

The three internet giants Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google are joining together by agreeing to a common set of principles concerning conducting business with nations that restrict free speech and expression. They are basically trying to protect people’s information overseas with oppressive governments. I was interested to learn that the Human Rights First and Committee to Protect Journalists and nonprofits the Center for Democracy and Technology and Business for Social Responsibility took part in the formation of this humbly crafted entity known as the Global Network Initiative. What I found troubling was the lack of specific implications and obligations pertaining to these companies. Some other points of interest are the restrictions on citizenship and how that plays into this decision making. I would also like to hear the CCIPS chime in.

At least one human rights organization that didn’t sign onto the plan said it doesn’t go far enough. “More serious questions have to be asked about these company’s legal obligations,” said Morton Sklar, executive director of the World Organization for Human Rights USA. For instance, he said he would have liked the document to address whether Internet companies are violating U.S. or international laws by complying with requests from certain governments.

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I hope I’m not the only one who consistently experiences this annoying behavior when browsing specific web sites. I have been able to reproduce the issue both at home and at work, so I doubt I’m the only one.

Update
Kev (below) has identified that this is caused by a conflict with firefox. Sounds logical. Switching to version 1.2.0b4 or disabling firefox reportedly fixes the problem.

The Issue:
When browsing a site with one of Doubleclick’s ads on it, sometimes the ad will take over the whole page (likely due to malformed HTML in the iframe or some type of javascript error), effectively rendering the page useless. The back button doesn’t work because it just keeps taking over the page when you press ‘Back’. I usually end up just closing the tab and forgetting about it. That being said, I imagine other annoyed users are doing the same. This behavior is occurring across multiple very large sites (list below). It makes me wonder if these publishers are aware of potential dollars they are wasting by compromising the user experience in such a big way.

Over the past month, I have taken screenshots of this issue across various sites. It could be a conflict with a FireFox plugin (although I only use Web Developer Plugin and Firebug), but that’s unlikely. This issue seems to be caused by firebug. This issue has been recorded in firefox 2 and 3. By looking at the status bar text which reads something like ‘Transferring data from m0.2mdn.net’ or ‘Read m1.2mdn.net’, and by a quick glance at the source of each of these broken pages, I can quickly conclude that the problem lies somewhere within Doubleclick’s ad code.

yelp, YouTube, Gizmodo, and LinkedIn have all been captured with this problem.

I also wonder if Doubleclick is aware of this issue. They deal with very large advertisers and I can’t imagine something like this going unnoticed for too long.

Has anyone else seen this bug while browsing popular web sites?

I was recently considering canceling my Netflix account as I have noticed a decrease in return time and lack of good movies to watch instantly. I love watching a movie right before bed on my 22″ Samsung monitor, but lately I’ve been noticing that there just isn’t anything to watch except documentaries and lame TV series’. The delay in movie return time (supposed to be 1 day first class, but it’s repeatedly taken 2-3 days for a few months) probably isn’t their fault anyway - it’s probably USPS that is dropping the ball on that one. I found out today that Netflix has now partnered with Starz Entertainment, bringing a whole new set of quality movies into the ‘Watch Instantly’ realm.

Not only does this deal add another 2,500 or so movies to Netflix’s existing streaming library of roughly 12,000 films and TV shows, but it also adds some sorely-need, recent A-list titles, such as No Country for Old Men, Superbad, and Spiderman 3. Most of the movies are older titles and classics, but they represent a noticeable step up from the rather non-Hollywood-based titles that have been the main fodder on Netflix’s Watch Instantly feature until now.

Read the full article ».

I guess I’ll stick around for another month and see what happens. Vietnam war flicks, here I come!

At work I frequently encounter designs that utilize a mouseover show/mouseout hide menu that usually consists of a trigger (often an A tag, or LI element) and a menu (often a DIV, or a UL). Due to the browser inconsistencies between event handling and mouseout/mouseover DOM detection, it can be cumbersome to create a menu that is quick to implement (thus cost effective) and most importantly, stable.

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Recently at Ajaxian there was a post describing Custom Events and how they could be used to better structure an event-driven application by ’subscribing’ or ‘binding’ certain actions to an event. At Pint we use YUI as our main library, so I’ve ported the author’s example into a version that uses YUI.

Here is the code:

YAHOO.util.Event.onDOMReady(function() {
    document.body.event1 = new YAHOO.util.CustomEvent();
    YAHOO.util.Event.on('colorchange', 'change', function(e) {
        if (this.checked) document.body.event1.subscribe(changeColor);
        else document.body.event1.unsubscribe(changeColor);
    });
    YAHOO.util.Event.on('contentchange', 'change', function(e) {
        if (this.checked) document.body.event1.subscribe(changeContent);
        else document.body.event1.unsubscribe(changeContent);
        }
    });
    YAHOO.util.Event.on(document.getElementById('leftchoices').childNodes, 'click', function(e) {
        document.body.event1.fire(e);
    });
});

See example »