Written by artofmanliness

Drunk Fella: “Hey Chief! Chief!”

My co-worker: “If that guy calls me ‘Chief’ one more time, I’m cutting him off.”

As I write this, I’m sitting at my bar, just off of work on a Friday night. I feel sorry for my co-worker; I’m the one who got Drunk Fella that way.

“Chief!”

What Drunk Fella doesn’t know is that he is being ignored on purpose.

———-

When Mr. McKay asked me to write this article, I had to think about it for a couple weeks. I really had to talk to a lot of bartenders I know to find out what their process is for getting their customers drinks. Do they just start at one end of the bar and work their way down? Does a regular get served before someone they don’t know? Do friends take precedence? Or do they just serve the loudest guy first, in an effort to get him to shut his trap? After talking to a few co-workers and fellow bartenders, I think I’ve got it down to a few key concepts.

1. Always, always, tip.

An elephant never forgets. Neither does a bartender (or waiter, for that matter). If you don’t tip well, or at all, you are automatically on the bottom of the list. And don’t play games with your tipping, either. If you pay cash each round, tip with your change. Don’t pull it all back and then tip at the end of the night. Tipping is expected, no matter how much you think of it as “extra.” If you start a tab, tip when you pay at the end of the night, or when you get your rounds with whatever cash you happen to have. Either will do! Both!

Let’s be honest: if you don’t have money to tip, go to a liquor store, buy your favorites, and watch the game at home. If you don’t have money to tip, you don’t have money to go out in the first place.

Here’s a tip: tip big on the very first round. I have a customer that hands me a $20 bill after he’s paid for his first drink. I take care of him until he leaves. He often gets refills before he’s even done with his last one. I take care of him because he’s taken care of me already, and no matter how busy it is, I always have time for him.

And guys, your phone number is not a tip. Give my female bartenders out there a break.

2. Know what you’re going to order before you start yelling for service.

Hopefully, I’ve gotten there just as your group has approached the bar and I’ve asked you what you’d like to have. If you’re the one who ends up ordering for the group, I understand if you don’t know what everyone wants. That’s why I have no problem waiting for your order if I’ve approached you. But if it’s super busy and you’ve finally gotten me over to take your order, KNOW WHAT YOU WANT. There is nothing worse than hearing you call for service for a few minutes and when I get there, you don’t know what you are ordering. I can’t stress this enough. In the time it takes you to figure out what everyone is drinking, I could have filled two other orders. All that time spent yelling for service should be used for figuring out what your group wants.

Case in point: for some reason, I always end up being the “order guy” for my group. Last time, we had a new person with us and I didn’t know his drink, so I asked him BEFORE we got to the bar. When the bartender came over, I rattled it off to her, she quickly called my price, and I paid her. She took my money, ran to get the drinks, and brought them back with the correct change. The whole thing took 5 minutes. Because I tipped well, the next time, it took 2.

We understand that if we approach you, we’ve caught you off guard and you may not know who needs what. But if you’re yelling, waving your arms, slapping the bar, trying to get our attention, then we get there and you don’t know what you want, understand that we’re a bit unhappy.

3. Chief, Boss, Bro, Scout, Partner, Dude…

The list goes on. Don’t use them. For bartenders they’re the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Now, I know that not all bartenders will call you “sir.” But they should call you something respectable if they don’t know your name. My line is “Sir, can I get you a drink?” and when I deliver, “There you are, sir. My name is Mike if you need anything else.” I expect to be called by my name or sir, or if you’re impolite, I’ll answer to “bartender.” “Chief” especially chills my spine.

The key is not the names, but what they represent: respect. Like it or not, the bartender is in charge of the bar. You are in his territory. Waiters come to YOUR table, but you have entered the bartender’s area. Treat it, and him, with respect, and you’ll both have a good time.

4. Don’t stand at the server station.

If the bar has a station where servers come to pick up drinks, it’s a bad idea to try to stand there to get one. You’ll get mad because the bartender is there 50% of the time, yet he’s ignoring you, and he’ll ignore you because you’re not supposed to be there in the first place, so he’s hoping you’ll get the idea and move.

5. Be a regular.

Find a bar you like. Go there as often as you can. If they serve food and it’s good, eat there on a slow night. Talk to the bartender when he’s not busy. Get to know about him and let him know about you. Create a rapport. When he sees you on a busy night, he’ll make steps to make sure you’re having a good time and getting taken care of. Unless you’re the creepy jerk regular that only tips with phone numbers given to the waitresses!

My Method

I’m lucky because I’m tall. Not NBA tall, but tall enough. I find a hole in the bar chairs that allows me not to reach over someone’s back. I hold my money in my hand, elbow on the bar, hand in the air, facing the bartender. I look at them until they’ve made eye contact. Now they know I’m there. Now I can scan the bar for beautiful women, friends I didn’t know would be there, or check the score of the game. But I keep watching the bartender. When they come over, I rattle off my drink order, and repeat if necessary. Explain drinks if necessary. The money is still in my hand. I say thank you when they bring the drinks back to me. They take the money. I say thank you again when I get my change, and because I know what I’ve already planned on tipping, I give it straight to them, saying thanks for a third time. If I need a helper for my drink load, they’re already there with me, and I start handing drinks back. Then I make my way to the spot where my group is. They next guy who is paying for a round usually ends up just giving me the money and having me do it…or we all just sit there parched while he calls the bartender “Chief” a thousand times…

Written by S.T. VanAirsdale

Who’s ready for the new Sex and the City 2 trailer, which plunks Carrie Bradshaw and company right where you knew their destinies would always take them: Abu… Dhabi? What? Forget it. Sometimes you just know when something stinks, and I would sooner tattoo my eyelids than watch this effing thing. In fact, I can think of a million other things I would do before I watched a frame of this garish, overextended, ovary-tickling twaddle. For starters:

1. Babysit Sarah Palin’s children

2. Inherit the killer-whale show at Sea World

3. Suck the hairspray out of Donald Trump’s comb-over

4. Competitively eat, like, anything

5. Lose my mobile phone

6. Vacation at Abu Ghraib

7. Live on the Staten Island Ferry for 30 days

8. Have my own humiliating Family Feud category

9. Sit on my glasses — naked

10. Spend an hour in a sleeping bag with Glenn Beck

11. Dispose of the biohazard waste in Heidi Montag’s plastic surgeon’s office

12. Gulp every last pill in Liza Minnelli’s medicine cabinet

13. Marry Dennis Hopper’s ex-wife

14. Lose my Social Security card

15. Pogo-stick across the 405

16. Move to Kyrgyzstan

17. Wingwalk

18. Eat a 48-oz. breast-milk cheeseburger

19. Re-watch this year’s Oscars

20. Listen to the entirety of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music — on headphones

21. Sleep on a bed of used NFL jock straps

22. Convert The Godfather to 3D

23. Lick George Lucas’s wattle

24. Lose my wallet

25. Change the oil in each of Jay Leno’s cars

26. Direct Breaking Dawn

27. Chew the head off Iron Man 2’s evil cockatoo

28. Handwrite all of the dialogue to every Police Academy movie, up to and including Michael Winslow’s voice-sound effects

29. Adopt a Gosselin

30. Own MGM

31. Smoke a menthol cigarette through an asbestos filter

32. Clean up after all of Sharon Osbourne’s dogs

33. Clean up after Ozzy Osbourne

34. Lose my iPod

35. Be stranded in outer space

36. Tumble down a flight of stairs

37. Cancel baseball season

38. Yodel the Bible

39. Appear in drag on Chatroulette

40. Dethorn the entire White House rose garden with my teeth

41. Raise pigeons

42. Stare into an atomic explosion

43. Convert to Scientology

44. Lose my house keys

45. Perform a bris

46. Reunite Color Me Badd

47. File for bankruptcy

48. Sequelize The Runaways

49. Wash, dry and detail all the taxi cabs in New York

BONUS:

50. Trust John Corbett

BONUS: Why and How Men Cry

Source

As Told to Liz Welch

Along with his sons, Jerry Murrell of Five Guys Burgers and Fries built a 570-store chain that enjoys a cult following.

Chris Crisman

The Real Deal His restaurants are Spartan. And Jerry Murrell never advertises. Instead, he prefers to spend on worker bonuses and fresh ingredients.

Sell a really good, juicy burger on a fresh bun. Make perfect French fries. Don’t cut corners. That’s been the business plan since Jerry Murrell and his sons opened their first burger joint in 1986. When they began selling franchises in 2002, the family had just five stores in northern Virginia. Today, there are 570 stores across the U.S. and Canada, with 2009 sales of $483 million. Overseeing the opening of about four new restaurants a week, the Murrells are proof that flipping burgers doesn’t have to be a dead-end job.

There was this little hamburger place where I grew up in northern Michigan. Almost everyone in our town, except the uppity uppities, ate the burgers. Even though the owner had a cat, which he’d pet while cooking. People called them fur burgers, but they still ate them because they were good.

I studied economics at Michigan State. I had no money and needed a place to stay, so I ran a fraternity house’s kitchen. I got the cook a raise and let her do the ordering. We started making money, because she knew what she was doing.

My parents died my last year in college. I married, had three kids, divorced, then remarried. I moved to northern Virginia and was selling stocks and bonds. My two eldest sons, Matt and Jim, said they did not want to go to college. I supported them 100 percent.

Instead, we used their college tuition to open a burger joint. Ocean City had 50 places selling boardwalk fries, but only one place always has a 150-foot line — Thrashers. They serve nothing but fries, but they cook them right — high-quality potato, peanut oil. That impressed me. I thought a good hamburger-and-fry place could make it, so we started with a takeout shop in Arlington, Virginia.

Our lawyer said, “You need a name.” I had four sons — Matt, Jim, Chad are from my first marriage, and Ben from my second to Janie, who has run our books from Day One. So I said, “How about Five Guys?” Then we had Tyler, our youngest son, so I’m out! Matt and Jim travel the country visiting stores, Chad oversees training, Ben selects the franchisees, and Tyler runs the bakery.

Three days before we opened, I was still working as a trader in stocks and bonds and was in a hotel for a meeting in Pittsburgh. I found a book in the nightstand, next to the Bible, about JW Marriott — he had an A&W stand that he converted and built into the Hot Shoppes chain. He said, Anyone can make money in the food business as long as you have a good product, reasonable price, and a clean place. That made sense to me.

We figure our best salesman is our customer. Treat that person right, he’ll walk out the door and sell for you. From the beginning, I wanted people to know that we put all our money into the food. That’s why the décor is so simple — red and white tiles. We don’t spend our money on décor. Or on guys in chicken suits. But we’ll go overboard on food.

Most of our potatoes come from Idaho — about 8 percent of the Idaho baking potato crop. We try to get our potatoes grown north of the 42nd parallel, which is a pain in the neck. Potatoes are like oak trees — the slower they grow, the more solid they are. We like northern potatoes, because they grow in the daytime when it is warm, but then they stop at night when it cools down. It would be a lot easier and cheaper if we got a California or Florida potato.

Most fast-food restaurants serve dehydrated frozen fries — that’s because if there’s water in the potato, it splashes when it hits the oil. We actually soak our fries in water. When we prefry them, the water boils, forcing steam out of the fry, and a seal is formed so that when they get fried a second time, they don’t absorb any oil — and they’re not greasy.

The magic to our hamburgers is quality control. We toast our buns on a grill — a bun toaster is faster, cheaper, and toasts more evenly, but it doesn’t give you that caramelized taste. Our beef is 80 percent lean, never frozen, and our plants are so clean, you could eat off the floor. The burgers are made to order — you can choose from 17 toppings. That’s why we can’t do drive-throughs — it takes too long. We had a sign: “If you’re in a hurry, there are a lot of really good hamburger places within a short distance from here.” People thought I was nuts. But the customers appreciated it.

We have never solicited reviews. That’s a policy. Yet we have hundreds of them. If we put one frozen thing in our restaurant, we’d be done. That’s why we won’t do milk shakes. For years, people have been asking for them! But we’d have to do real ice cream and real milk.

When we first opened, the Pentagon called and said, “We want 15 hamburgers; what time can you deliver?” I said, “What time can you pick them up? We don’t deliver.” There was an admiral running the place. So he called me up personally and said, “Mr. Murrell, everyone delivers food to the Pentagon.” Matt and I got a 22-foot-long banner that said ABSOLUTELY NO DELIVERY and hung it in front of our store. And then our business from the Pentagon picked up.

When we first started, people asked for coffee. We thought, Why not? This was our first lesson in humility. We served coffee, but the problem was that the young kids working for us don’t know anything about coffee. It was terrible! So we stopped serving coffee. We tried a chicken sandwich once, but that did not work, either. We do have hot dogs on our menu, and that works. But other than that, all you are going to get from Five Guys is hamburgers and fries.

Our food prices fluctuate. We do not base our price on anything but margins. We raise our prices to reflect whatever our food costs are. So if the mayonnaise guy triples his price, we pay triple for the mayonnaise! And then we’ll increase the price of our product. About five years ago, hurricanes killed the tomato crop in Florida, and prices went from $17 to $50 a case. So a few of my franchisees called and said, “We’re not using tomatoes. The prices are too high.” I suggested using one slice instead of two. My kids were furious: “It should be two! Always!” They were right — it’s too easy to start slipping down that slope. We stuck with two slices, and so did our franchisees.

My kids wanted to franchise from the start, because we couldn’t get the money to expand on our own. Opening a store costs $300,000 to $400,000. Banks won’t help. They thought we were crazy going up against Burger King, McDonald’s.

I was dead set against franchising. I didn’t think we’d be able to control the quality. That worried the heck out of me. They pulled me into it kicking and screaming. At that point, we had five stores in the northern Virginia region.

When we started to sell franchises in 2002, Virginia went in three days. We accept only financially sound franchisees who can weather the storms without the help of banks.

We make 6 percent of sales on the franchises. All franchises work the same way: People say they want to sell your product. So you give them a Franchise Development Agreement that explains all the ways we can beat them down. I don’t know if I would ever sign it. We can get out of the deal a million ways, but they are stuck.

Still, we have never had a franchisee go legal on us. I think that’s because we have an independent franchise committee that meets once a quarter. People said, “Don’t do it! They’ll form a union!” But we thought, If someone comes in with a wacky idea, instead of the Murrells putting it down, the other franchisees would say, “That’s a dumb idea.”

Franchisees are opening four new stores a week. But we always wanted to run more than our franchisees, so we can say, “Look, we are doing it.” We own 90 stores — Chicago, San Diego, Phoenix, a bunch in North Carolina and Virginia. We don’t do any less than five stores per franchisee. We have one in California that just signed up for 400 stores.

Before we agree to work with a franchisee, Ben and I sit down and talk about our marketing plan. A lot of companies put 3 percent of their revenue toward marketing or advertising — we collect 1.5 percent from all our franchisees and give bonuses to the crews that score the highest on our weekly audits.

We have two third-party audits in each store every week. One is called a secret shopper — folks pretend they’re customers and rate the crews on bathroom cleanliness, courtesy, and food preparation. Then we have safety audits — they identify themselves and check all the kitchen equipment. The crews make about $8 or $9 an hour. If they get a good score, they will split another $1,000 among them, usually five or six people per crew. A press release goes out to every store announcing the winners. Right now, it’s the top 200 stores. Last year, we paid out between $7 million and $8 million; this year, it will be $11 million or $12 million.

We try to make the kids feel ownership in the company. Boys hate to smile. It’s not macho. And it’s definitely not macho to clean a bathroom. But if the auditor walks in and the bathroom isn’t clean, that crew just lost money. Next thing he knows, the guy who was supposed to clean the bathroom has toilet paper all over his car and a potato in his tailpipe.

To grow this fast, we had to come up with some big bucks — we got a $30 million loan from GE and used that to move into a 20,000-square-foot office space in Lorton, Virginia. That’s where 80 of our 200 corporate employees work.

We’ve had many of the same vendors since 1986. And they’re not the cheapest by a long shot. We stick with what we like. One day, our purchasing guy said he wanted us to switch to a frozen burger product. But we all picked the fresh one in a blind test and stuck with that. We taste-tested 16 different types of mayonnaise to find the right one.

We make the same bun we started with. We hired the old guy who used to bake our bread for the first store, and one of his partners. They work in the Virginia bakery. We have 10 bakeries scattered around the nation. Our bread is baked daily, picked up by 3 p.m., and put on truck or plane so every store gets fresh bread every morning, even if they are 400 miles away from the nearest bakery.

When we got pulled to Florida, I didn’t want to go! Too far. I didn’t want to go to Canada — we’re there now. Two princes came from the Middle East. They want us to go over there. We have another group that says, “Anywhere you want to go, we’ll fund it.” We’ve also had a few companies that want to come in and buy us. They say they would let us run it, but I don’t think they would. Why would they put up with fresh bread and taste-testing 16 different mayonnaises?

BONUS: ***** Tourists

source

Written by John

Eleven years ago Dave Devries started the Monster Engine project with one single question: What would a child’s drawing look like if it were painted realistically? This month, Dave’s art is being celebrated at the INDYINK gallery where dozens of artists are putting their own takes on children’s sketches. Look for those photos next week. Many more photos here.

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Bonus!    Hell

Source: xkcd

Written by S. Wade Hansen

photo: Cayusa

Too many people – particularly young ones – wait too long to start investing. Their excuse? “I don’t have enough money.” The truth is, even if you only have $1,000 to spare, becoming an investor today is the best move you can make because it puts the power of interest compounding in your favor.

Let’s say you’re 25 and you want to retire when you’re 65. If you invest your $1,000 today and earn an annual rate of return of 7%, after 40 years your $1,000 will have turned into $14,974. On the other hand, if you invest your $1,000 when you turn 30, by the time you’re 65 you’ll only have $10,677.

If that seems like small potatoes to you, consider this: instead of a one-time investment of $1,000, let’s assume you invest $1,000 every year. If you begin when you are 25, you will have $214,610 by the time you are 65. Wait until you’re 30, and you’ll only have $148,913.

So what are you waiting for? Let’s take a look at five great ways to start investing today.

Your Company’s 401(k) Plan

If you have access to a company 401(k) program that offers a company match, you should think long and hard before putting your money (whether that’s just $1,000 or more) anywhere else but in that 401(k).

A company match is free money that could instantly turn your $1,000 into $2,000. To put that in perspective, if you just put that $1,000 in a tax-deferred account earning 7% a year, it would take it just over 10 years to turn into $2,000.

Now, you may be saying to yourself: ”Well, that’s great, but I have the $1,000 in my checking account and I can’t move it from there into my 401(k).” That’s okay. All you have to do is sign up to have $100 per month automatically withheld from your future paychecks and deposited into your 401(k). Then you can use the extra $1,000 you have in your checking account to make up any budget shortfall those monthly deposits may cause.

The best part is, because 401(k) contributions are not taxed, the hit to your paycheck will be smaller than your actual contribution. Someone in the 25% tax bracket, for example, would receive just $75 less per month while contributing $100 to their 401(k).

TreasuryDirect

TreasuryDirect is your gateway to owning U.S. Treasuries. If you are looking for a conservative way to invest your $1,000, this is it. Plus, since your tax dollars fund the Treasury, you don’t have to pay any commissions or fees to buy or hold Treasuries.

Two of the most popular products individuals buy directly from the U.S. Treasury are I Savings Bonds and Treasury Inflation Protection Securities (TIPS), because both investments protect you from inflation.

You can buy I Savings Bonds in increments as low as $25, and you can buy TIPS in increments of $100. But don’t get carried away. Treasuries–especially those that protect against inflation–may be the safest way to invest, but their returns are typically lower than those you will find long-term in the stock market.  So you probably only want a portion of your portfolio tied up in Treasuries.

Direct Stock Purchase Plan (DSPP) and Dividend Reinvestment Plan (DRP)

Direct Stock Purchase Plans (DSPPs) are stock purchase plans that enable you to buy shares–and fractional shares–of stock directly from the companies that issue it. Because you don’t have to open a brokerage account, there are no minimum initial investment requirements to worry about. Want to own shares of General Electric? You can buy them directly from the company. Want to own shares of Microsoft? You can buy them directly from the company.

Now, you won’t be dealing with the company per se, but rather with the transfer agent it has contracted with to handle the sale and distribution of its stock. While some transfer agents don’t charge you a dime, others do charge a small fee for every purchase you make, usually in the $1 to $2 range. Two of the major players in the transfer agent market are Computershare and BNY Mellon Shareowner Services. If you can’t find the stocks you are interested on one of these two sites, check the investor relations page on the company’s website to see if it offers a DSPP or DRP.

Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRPs) are a lot like DSPPs, but they take things one step further by actually using your dividend payments to automatically buy more shares of the stock. This is really setting your investments on autopilot. All you have to do is set up an account with the company or its transfer agent, fund your account with enough money to make your initial purchase and then sit back and let the account administrator use reinvest your dividends.

Incremental Purchase Plan

Incremental purchase plans allow you to automatically buy shares–and fractional shares–of stocks, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) using a set amount of money each month. These plans typically have no account minimums and allow you to invest in small dollar increments.

The benefit here is that you don’t have to buy a full share of stock. You can buy a fraction of a share, which allows you to spread a smaller amount of money out across a larger pool of stocks. Of course, you can get this same benefit by buying a mutual fund or an ETF. But if you want to have more control over the specific shares you are holding, this may be the route for you.

The most popular incremental purchase plan provider is ShareBuilder.

IRA or Roth IRA at a Discount Broker

Even though you may only have $1,000 to get started with, you can still take a more traditional approach and open an Individual Retirement Account (IRA) or a Roth IRA at a discount broker.

It used to be that you couldn’t open a brokerage account unless you had $10,000 to $25,000 to invest. Those days are long gone. With the proliferation of online discount brokers like Scottrade, Trade Monster and Zecco, you have access to an incredible amount of investing tools and trading platforms.

Of course, if you put your money into an index fund, you won’t need all of these tools. But if you plan on being more aggressive with your little nest egg, you will have everything you need to analyze company fundamentals, stock charts and trade flow, right at your fingertips.

Article Provided by Learning Markets.

Learning Markets offers daily articles, videos and investing guides – for free – about everything from investing in stocks and options to trading currencies in the forex market and more.

Written by Cory Doctorow

I’ve spent ten years now on Boing Boing, finding cool things that people have done and made and writing about them. Most of the really exciting stuff hasn’t come from big corporations with enormous budgets, it’s come from experimentalist amateurs. These people were able to make stuff and put it in the public’s eye and even sell it without having to submit to the whims of a single company that had declared itself gatekeeper for your phone and other personal technology.

Danny O’Brien does a very good job of explaining why I’m completely uninterested in buying an iPad — it really feels like the second coming of the CD-ROM “revolution” in which “content” people proclaimed that they were going to remake media by producing expensive (to make and to buy) products. I was a CD-ROM programmer at the start of my tech career, and I felt that excitement, too, and lived through it to see how wrong I was, how open platforms and experimental amateurs would eventually beat out the spendy, slick pros.

I remember the early days of the web — and the last days of CD ROM — when there was this mainstream consensus that the web and PCs were too durned geeky and difficult and unpredictable for “my mom” (it’s amazing how many tech people have an incredibly low opinion of their mothers). If I had a share of AOL for every time someone told me that the web would die because AOL was so easy and the web was full of garbage, I’d have a lot of AOL shares.

And they wouldn’t be worth much.

Incumbents made bad revolutionaries

Relying on incumbents to produce your revolutions is not a good strategy. They’re apt to take all the stuff that makes their products great and try to use technology to charge you extra for it, or prohibit it altogether.

I mean, look at that Marvel app (just look at it). I was a comic-book kid, and I’m a comic-book grownup, and the thing that made comics for me was sharing them. If there was ever a medium that relied on kids swapping their purchases around to build an audience, it was comics. And the used market for comics! It was — and is — huge, and vital. I can’t even count how many times I’ve gone spelunking in the used comic-bins at a great and musty store to find back issues that I’d missed, or sample new titles on the cheap. (It’s part of a multigenerational tradition in my family — my mom’s father used to take her and her sibs down to Dragon Lady Comics on Queen Street in Toronto every weekend to swap their old comics for credit and get new ones).

So what does Marvel do to “enhance” its comics? They take away the right to give, sell or loan your comics. What an improvement. Way to take the joyous, marvellous sharing and bonding experience of comic reading and turn it into a passive, lonely undertaking that isolates, rather than unites. Nice one, Misney.

Infantalizing hardware

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).

The model of interaction with the iPad is to be a “consumer,” what William Gibson memorably described as “something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth… no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”

The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it works and making it better. The way you improve the iPad is to buy iApps. Buying an iPad for your kids isn’t a means of jump-starting the realization that the world is yours to take apart and reassemble; it’s a way of telling your offspring that even changing the batteries is something you have to leave to the professionals.

Dale Dougherty’s piece on Hypercard and its influence on a generation of young hackers is a must-read on this. I got my start as a Hypercard programmer, and it was Hypercard’s gentle and intuitive introduction to the idea of remaking the world that made me consider a career in computers.

Wal-Martization of the software channel

And let’s look at the iStore. For a company whose CEO professes a hatred of DRM, Apple sure has made DRM its alpha and omega. Having gotten into business with the two industries that most believe that you shouldn’t be able to modify your hardware, load your own software on it, write software for it, override instructions given to it by the mothership (the entertainment industry and the phone companies), Apple has defined its business around these principles. It uses DRM to control what can run on your devices, which means that Apple’s customers can’t take their “iContent” with them to competing devices, and Apple developers can’t sell on their own terms.

The iStore lock-in doesn’t make life better for Apple’s customers or Apple’s developers. As an adult, I want to be able to choose whose stuff I buy and whom I trust to evaluate that stuff. I don’t want my universe of apps constrained to the stuff that the Cupertino Politburo decides to allow for its platform. And as a copyright holder and creator, I don’t want a single, Wal-Mart-like channel that controls access to my audience and dictates what is and is not acceptable material for me to create. The last time I posted about this, we got a string of apologies for Apple’s abusive contractual terms for developers, but the best one was, “Did you think that access to a platform where you can make a fortune would come without strings attached?” I read it in Don Corleone’s voice and it sounded just right. Of course I believe in a market where competition can take place without bending my knee to a company that has erected a drawbridge between me and my customers!

Journalism is looking for a daddy figure

I think that the press has been all over the iPad because Apple puts on a good show, and because everyone in journalism-land is looking for a daddy figure who’ll promise them that their audience will go back to paying for their stuff. The reason people have stopped paying for a lot of “content” isn’t just that they can get it for free, though: it’s that they can get lots of competing stuff for free, too. The open platform has allowed for an explosion of new material, some of it rough-hewn, some of it slick as the pros, most of it targetted more narrowly than the old media ever managed. Rupert Murdoch can rattle his saber all he likes about taking his content out of Google, but I say do it, Rupert. We’ll miss your fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the Web so little that we’ll hardly notice it, and we’ll have no trouble finding material to fill the void.

Just like the gadget press is full of devices that gadget bloggers need (and that no one else cares about), the mainstream press is full of stories that affirm the internal media consensus. Yesterday’s empires do something sacred and vital and most of all grown up, and that other adults will eventually come along to move us all away from the kids’ playground that is the wild web, with its amateur content and lack of proprietary channels where exclusive deals can be made. We’ll move back into the walled gardens that best return shareholder value to the investors who haven’t updated their portfolios since before eTrade came online.

But the real economics of iPad publishing tell a different story: even a stellar iPad sales performance isn’t going to do much to stanch the bleeding from traditional publishing. Wishful thinking and a nostalgia for the good old days of lockdown won’t bring customers back through the door.

Gadgets come and gadgets go

Gadgets come and gadgets go. The iPad you buy today will be e-waste in a year or two (less, if you decide not to pay to have the battery changed for you). The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.

If you want to live in the creative universe where anyone with a cool idea can make it and give it to you to run on your hardware, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to live in the fair world where you get to keep (or give away) the stuff you buy, the iPad isn’t for you.

If you want to write code for a platform where the only thing that determines whether you’re going to succeed with it is whether your audience loves it, the iPad isn’t for you.

Bonus:  8 Cruel But Completely Justified iPad Wallpaper Pranks

Source: Mark Wilson@Gizmodo

Just because you don’t have/want/like the iPad doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with one anyway. Set any of these images as the background on a your friend’s iPad, and watch the chaos ensue when they turn it on.

Peruse a few childish iPad pranks in the gallery below. And to see them all on one screen, go here.

Happy pranking! (If you can do better, and we bet you can, share your best prank wallpapers

update:Flowchart to Determine if You Should Buy an Ipad

The Ipad came out on Saturday, and if you weren’t one of the 3 million people standing in line at the Apple store to get one already, then you’re probably wondering what all the fuss is about, and whether you should be buying an Ipad, too. Luckily, we’ve created this flowchart to help you determine if you should buy an Ipad:

source

Written by Kawsar Ali

Chrome is the newest child added to the constantly feuding web browser family. Although Google Chrome is comparatively new, it has been producing some major buzz around web for its performance, minimalist interface, and usability.

Another useful side of Chrome is the extensions that give the user added functionality for common web browsing tasks. Many of these Chrome extensions can help you increase your productivity and enable you to perform your jobs easier and faster.

Note: Since Google Chrome for Mac OS systems is still in beta, some extensions might not work properly. However, we have tested all of the extensions in brief, and we can confirm that they function.

1. Pixlr Grabber

Taking screenshots and then sharing them is a big process. You copy the screen grab into your clipboard, open a graphics editor and save it into a web format. Then you have to upload it to a web service so that you can share it publicly. Behold Pixlr Grabber, an extension that allows you to take screenshots in Google Chrome and automatically upload it to imm.io, an image sharing service. You can take parts of the visible screen, select only parts of it, or grab the entire web page.

2. Copy Without Formatting

What do you normally do when you just want to copy some plain text without any formatting (font, color, images) from your browser to an office or email software? Copy the text, paste it into a text editor like Notepad, and then copy and paste it again into the destination? Don’t worry, you’re not alone—even the productivity bloggers at Lifehacker have this problem. With the Copy Without Formatting Chrome extension, you can easily and directly copy unformatted text from Chrome and paste it anywhere, allowing you to cut out the middleman and streamline this task.

3. Evernote Web Clipper

Do you often find something cool on the web but forget to bookmark it? And when you need the web page, do you end up spending a lot of time trying to find it again? We all do. The Evernote Web Clipper Chrome extension saves the content of your clipboard along with a link back to the original page quickly and painlessly. You can store text, images, and links into your free Evernote account so that you have ready access to them anytime and anywhere (with an Internet connection).

4. Symtica

If you find yourself using many Google web applications (seriously, nowadays, who isn’t?) and you want a quicker way to access and use them, use the Symtica Google Chrome extension. This Chrome extension can watch out for new emails, create new Google Docs documents, access your contacts list, manage your Gmail task lists, read your RSS feeds, and more.

5. Image Search

Finding images on the web can be a drag. If you’re in need of some serious web scouring to find that perfect LOLcat photo to use in your next killer PowerPoint presentation, check out Image Search, the ultimate image search Chrome extension that searches websites such as Flickr, Picasa, Zooomr, and Photobucket. There are loads of options for customizing your search options by size, type and more, saving you a fair bit of time.

6. AdBlock

This Google Chrome extension blocks any kind pop-ups and ads, enabling you to focus on the information that you are trying to obtain. Using AdBlock can improve your productivity because it can lower web page response times as well as avert you from being distracted by advertisements and pop-ups that can get you on a tangent. But do allow the sites you love to display ads because ad-blocking can affect them dearly.

7. goo.gl URL Shortener

If you are constantly sharing web pages, goo.gl URL Shortener is a must-have one-click URL shortener that makes it a snap to share links and useful resources on social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The short URL is also automatically copied to your clipboard, drastically shortening this process compared to the conventional method of URL shortening. The extension utilizes Google’s own URL shortening service.

8. Web2PDFConverter

Converting a web page to a sharable PDF file is a long and arduous job. Well, not so if you use Web2PDFConverter, a Google Chrome extension that lets you create PDF files from within your web browser. The extension even allows you to preview how the PDF document looks through Google Docs, saving you even more time in having to open Adobe Acrobat (or the desktop counterpart that you are currently using) to check your work.

9. Shareaholic for Google Chrome

Are you a social media junkie? If you are, you know that this addiction can be a ruthless time drain and can place a huge damper on your otherwise productive day. Making social media sharing easier, faster, and more convenient is always a good thing. Shareaholic for Google Chrome is an extension that will convert the current web page you’re on into a short URL and allow you to share it with your friends across many social media sites.

10. Split Screen

As this Chrome extension’s name implies, Split Screen enables you to split your browser’s viewport. Not only can it reduce the number of tabs that you have open (and thus, make it easier to find the web page you need), it also enables you to effortlessly compare and contrast several web pages at the same time. It is perfect for people that are studying and cross-referencing information.

What Google Chrome extensions do you use? If we have missed any useful extensions, share it with us in the comments.