That color scheme and package design looks vulnerable to a trade dress lawsuit from Oscar Mayer. Someone is unlikely to mistake it for Oscar Mayer bologna but they might think it's an Oscar Mayer product. The photo on the Ford Gum site makes the colors look like an even closer match (strangely, it makes the gum look more like processed ham than bologna).

I saw this last month in jwz's blog. He doubleplussed the wrongness by taking a particularly freaky clip and making a slo-mo animated GIF out of it.

Rsk is right, don't use rsync's -z switch for compression when copying any of your media, it will just slow things down. Running a separate rsync job just for the compressible stuff probably isn't worth it unless you have other reasons for it (more frequent backups, different destination, etc.).

Meta question: when you use the Preview button to preview your comment, where's the Post button? I used the browser back button to get back here, is that the only option?

Ditto on Gabu's recommendation of the Sony ICF-S79V shower radio. I listen to mine for about half an hour every day and the 3 C batteries last a long time, definitely more than 6 months. It has a hanging strap I used to hang it from my shower head so I can change stations in the shower, something you can't do with the Tivoli in most showers.

Yeah, while it's good to see this issue in the mainstream press and that the AP did some independent investigation, there's no scoop here. It's a good piece, providing context and geek-to-human translation, but I didn't read anything I didn't already know from this Slashdot post about Comcast's shenanigans.

Looks like a job for Don Norman! Does he have a cape?

I think most commenters are being too forgiving to the . It's not the worst design, you can look and think about it and figure it out, but the point is you shouldn't have to. I'm not saying I have the answer but I am asserting that the answer exists.

I'll take a stab at it anyway. Each curtain could have a rocker switch, push the top part to open, the bottom part to close, push nothing and it stops. Yes, this means you have to actually hold the switch but I think that would be expected. You could also make it so if you press it for 1 full second it'll keep going on it's own, as most driver car windows will do (going down, not up) but that in itself can be confusing because then the curtain is moving by itself.

Jermedia's suggestion of changing the orientation and making them more like playback buttons is not bad but I still don't see the need for an explicit "stop" button.

OMFG! I would have sworn those dude duds were from a Halloween costume section, even in 1975. It's the hat, that is a pimp hat. The rest of it seems normal for JC Penney and the period, in all its polyester glory.

Regarding the idea of creating commerical-looking packaging for home electronics projects, I say turn to the experts in urban camouflage at Telstar Logistics!

As a dedicated RSS feed reader, the redesign won't have much impact on me *except* that the return of comments may drag me out of that backchannel.

I'm curious why you chose to manage your own user accounts instead of using TypeKey, particularly since you're already using Movable Type, so users wouldn't have to create YA username/password for a web site. I like having slightly more identity than being Anonymous and creating & managing logins at each individual site is a disincentive to participation.

http://www.sixapart.com/typekey/

Post-Preview: oh, and no HTML support in comments (but thank you for the Preview button!). Bummer, particularly the lack of linking. You're autolinking URLs like the one above so I'm not clear on the benefit of disallowing em's, b's, i's, a's and so on.