The worst part of the minor collision was the anticipation. My internal dialogue had echoed my frustration with riding that stretch of road since the moment I doubled back on my initial route rather than completing a true loop.

Fortunately, I left the scene with only a few scrapes and an ego bruise. My bike, however, will need its first major replacement and probably a checkup just to be safe. Of course, this happens the day after I bought brand new pedals and shoes from my new favorite cycling website.

I think I may post the city bike map in my office. One close call is enough.

Effectively a mobile ad you can use, GPSies serves no purpose without being tethered to yet another web-based account. Thus there’s no way to sync your track logs directly to your laptop. But you can set up a fairly useful page to slice and dice your track logs however you wish.

Few apps more flagrantly violate the iPhone human-interface guidelines—and yet the direct-to-cloud sync nearly makes up in utility what the program lacks in design finesse.

Three-and-one-half stars for an app I probably won’t delete. I would give four if you could at least email yourself the track log.

• Email is not dead. Sure, you can set up site-specific browsers with user scripts to fix the layout of a webmail interface, but at the end of the day, a desktop mail program should “just work.” Forget the *&^@% Finder, Unmangle Mail.
• Reliability speaks for itself. From Honda to Canon to Sears Craftsman—nobody wants to worry about a machine. The users you want intuitively understand how a well-engineered product behaves. Don’t jeopardize their goodwill with screwy “locked file” warnings and .SoftwareUpdateAtLogout.
• Smarter is better. Opening things with the application that created them makes sense. Why break years of expected behavior?

I hate needless complexity, so the concept of a lightweight OS will always appeal to me. But let’s hope Apple ends its continued neglect of the goose that laid the golden egg.

The problem

Immediate post-mortem casual analysis: PEBKAC.

Lesson learned. DO NOT USE UNTESTED CLI OPTIONS WITHOUT KNOWING EXACTLY WHAT THEY WILL DO.

In an attempt to remove legacy MacOS junk from my server (.DS_Store, eyes are squarely on you), I used rsync –delete-excluded. Which would have been terrific, except that my auto-update rsync command mirrors at the domain level, not within the various folders.

So rsync deleted every .DS_Store as well as my entire blog. No are-you-really-sure-you-want-to-do-that box, no oh-crap-⌘Z-to-undo-thank-God option, just plunge-over-the-cliff, search-and-destroy madness.

The solution

Backup database. Uninstall wordpress. Reinstall wordpress. Change wp-config.php $table_prefix (new) to $table_prefix (old). Problem solved.

All prompted by .DS_Store.

Simple problem, difficult solution. Ever had that observation in response to technical conundrums? In my case, automating the webpage workflow to save both low- and high-resolution versions of all posted photos—simple problem, difficult solution.

Until now. Using only basic shell-scripting skills, I arrived at an quick, elegant answer to a problem I never thought I would be able to solve. Store and pass an array of paths or drag-and-drop to rename and rescale? No contest.

This is why I bought a Mac.

Add to that a login/menu bar oddity. It now takes several extra seconds to replace the default wallpaper with a rotating selection from my iPhoto library, and for some reason the Spaces icon refuses to display the space number until I click on it.

A small price to pay for a virus-free existence, but I subscribe to the broken-windows (no pun intended) philosophy of software development: Quirks tolerated today lead to fundamental design flaws tomorrow.

Oh, wait, environmentalist outrage extends only to the far side of the primate divide. Perhaps the one-term left-wing hero will find the dodo a post-election habitat somewhere in Chicago?

McLean said the call center had been inundated by uninsured consumers who were hoping that the overhaul would translate into instant, affordable coverage. That widespread misconception may have originated in part from distorted rhetoric about the legislation bubbling up from the hyper-partisan debate about it in Washington and some media outlets, such as when opponents denounced it as socialism.

Where does one begin? Whose distorted rhetoric? Which media outlets? And how could certain aspects—guaranteed issue, community rating, and the slap-on-the-wrist tax penalty (essentially a wealth transfer)—not fairly be described as creeping socialism?

Two points for a lithe pigeonhole act. To blame “widespread misconceptions” about Dr. Robin Hood’s brainchild on a Republican conspiracy rather than a presidential administration’s unwillingness to acknowledge costs requires a knack for “factuality” I never learned in law school.

A man who believes in the American League but not in America. Stunning?

Anyone who would buy a quote-unquote netbook for content consumption, let alone creation, over the iPad needs to reset the user agent of his browser. Ninety percent of websites are better viewed as an iPhone than underpowered e-junk with bonus carpal tunnel syndrome in the making.

But for those who haven’t noticed, creation abhors verbosity. From books to pages to blogs to texts to tweets to a photo or video posted without comment, concise but ubiquitous prevails over verbose but infrequent.

Considering that full-featured blogging software weighs in at less than the size of your favorite song, the new sweet spot to post will be from your couch.

I can only chalk it up to my newly acquired blog software. Not having to haggle with the WordPress “user interface” has made me more productive.

Worth $30? I will let you know if I buy…

• Government creates an obstacle (wage controls);
• Private industry works around it (by offering first-party health “insurance”);
• Government responds by deeming the circumvention unfair (while subsidizing it) and sets up programs to give everyone “access” to what its own regulations inspired (Medicare, Social Security, and coverage mandates);
• Prices go up, quality goes down, and government blames private industry (for having the audacity to make a profit selling what government can barely give away);
• And finally, government uses the rising prices as a pretext for taking over the industry.

You didn’t exactly hear it here first. But then how do we explain that the inevitable may unfold notwithstanding our objections?

Score, supporting cast, and character (or should I say char-avatar) development were appalling considering this movie was as hyped as Gladiator.

Suppose you can put aside the not-so-subtle left-wing ideology in this movie’s tired themes:

• Rapacious white man vs. spiritual natives—guess who wins?
• The “organic” forest should not be sacrificed for unobtainium—surprise, surprise, we never find out what cures or unprecedented wealth unobtainium might bring.
• Brutish militiamen hired by shareholders for profit too obtuse to consider enlightened, “scientific” claims—contain your gasps of outrage as you will never learn who appointed these fringe kooks philosopher-kings of the island.

Let’s just say if you want a nuanced plot, you would be better off watching Titanic again. (As a bonus, it felt shorter.) Timid boy meets confident daughter of the ruling clan—would I spoil it to tell you he gets the girl? At least James Cameron’s last “great” movie develops its themes rather than relying on stereotype and faux drama.

Two stars for glowing jellyfish gods and robotic war machines copied from Iron Man.

Our objective is to pass both before the Easter break. Is that going to be difficult? Yes. Is it a deadline? No. Everybody understands that it’s an objective, not a deadline. If we can, we can. If we can’t, we can’t. We will continue to pursue both items.

Huh, I guess not. Reconciliation be damned—the American health care industry be saved!

Newsweek cover: The Case for Killing Granny
National Review cover: The Creeping Culture of Euthanasia

Query which is the newsweekly and which is the journal of opinion?

The demise of the former news oligopolist has been largely overlooked, though not by those in the know. News flash: You can’t be a “thought leader” with such drivel on your front page.

And trading off the decades of “goodwill” from consumers whose only option was to switch to Time probably isn’t a winning business strategy.

Whatever the case, I see no indication that Newsweek has acknowledged its unenviable position in the pecking order of left-wing bias, save for the prominent MSNBC link on its website.

Yes, Charlie, the day will come when respectable journalists will sneer about leaving it to “the newsweeklies.” Except they’ll be right.

Obama blows name of favorite team’s home stadium.

Of course, I am sure someone can explain to me why his relentless campaign for quote-unquote universal health care caused him to draw a blank. Because I am sure he spent his childhood memorizing stats and players and fields.

Seriously, just say a few kind words about our national pastime and be done with it.

And please, please do not throw another first pitch.

Since when has the Queen’s English permitted such abominations as You voted for Obama, yes? and Che was a revolutionary, no?

We have many ways to ask leading questions in the mother tongue of Shakespeare, Milton, and Buckley. A lawyer can’t question a witness without the indispensible interrogatories Isn’t it true and Didn’t you? A salesman can’t sell a widget without the sleazily suggestive Wouldn’t you like . . .

But the betraying conceit of all who employ the offending constructions—so familiar to speakers of continental European languages—is the refusal to adopt the simplest, truest, most absolute of all, right?

Derek and I follow all the protocols of professional narcotics distributors:

• using established, secure channels of communication;
• repeating a regimented script where Derek assigns, and I complete, assignments, then later I confirm I have completed them;
• exhibiting antilinguistic traits characteristic to such distributors, including crass, pink-elephant-in-the-corner smalltalk and task-relevant overlexicalization.

Fortunately for BigLaw, Derek deals in batches, not 8-balls; lists, not lines; documents, not drugs.

Unfortunately for my career, I’m a lowlife junkie hooked on the smack. Hit me up again, Derek!

[P]rofit and earning ratios are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you’ve got a long-term perspective on it.

What a hedge—starting to get to the point where they’re a potentially good deal as long as you have a long-term perspective?

Quick, somebody put this guy in charge of the untold trillions going into the already-bankrupt special-purpose entity known as Social Security.

If Bush had said that…

[CBS Host] By the way, do you know the website?

[NMW Joe] No, I’m embarrassed. [Looking stage right] Do you know the website number? I should have it in front of me, and I don’t.

If Bush had said that…