Just when we were getting absolutely sick of clear blue skies and 85 degree temperatures every day, the hills above Goleta (in Santa Barbara county, where we’re spending July) are burning. Fortunately the winds are negligible this week so the fire isn’t spreading as fast as the killer Painted Cave fire that happened here eighteen years ago. But it is messing up the program, sunset-wise.

Social network site Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as “they” or “themself.”

The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances.

But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months.

Horse hockey. This has nothing to do with grammar and everything to do with contextual advertising.

There’s a classic comment thread today on a post pertaining to the true source of petroleum (which is an interesting subject because scientists don’t actually know how it’s formed). While one hopes that this line of inquiry does not reveal oil to be a renewable resource, I really like the idea that the purpose of humanity may be to “clean the septic tank of the Old Ones.”

On December 21 2012, the “Long Count” calendar of the Maya people clicks over to year zero, marking the end of a 5,000-year era.

Belying their country’s rational and laid back image, thousands of Dutch people are convinced the date coincides with a world catastrophe, the Volkskrant newspaper reports.

Petra Faile and her husband have bought a life raft and other survival equipment in preparation for Armageddon.

“In another four years it will all be over,” she said.

“You know maybe it’s really not that bad that the Netherlands will be destroyed. I don’t like it here any more.”

Mrs Faile said she was concerned that immigration was pushing the Netherlands, a low lying country protected by dikes and sea walls, beneath the waves.

“They keep letting people in. And then we have to build more houses, which makes the Netherlands even heavier. The country will sink even lower, which will make the flooding worse,” she said.

This is one of those superstitions that actually make me happy because it causes rubes to take random actions that I can then capitalize upon. I’ve always wanted to own a second home in that part of the world and with thousands of moronic xenophobes now giving up their homes because of a Mayan (aka Mexican! Oh the irony!) prophecy, I’m now looking to beat the U.S. home mortgage crisis by picking up a nice cottage in Amsterdam. Economic Darwinism at work!

I am having fun with the family in Santa Barbara. I’m keeping a normal work schedule (juggling three big projects for clients at the moment) and taking a summer school class. In my spare time, I am teaching my children how to eat sand. Mmm, nutritious sand.

Sweet and touching story of a high school prom at a Brooklyn school comprised of recent immigrants.

Then again, if you want your kid to be able to name three or four Mesopotamians, this song may not be the worst way to do it. Witness:

There is a big connection between TMBG and UCSB for me since they played Santa Barbara the week of my 21st birthday. I saw them in a club somewhere in front of about 20 people. The next day some other friends took me to see them in a club in L.A. in front of a couple hundred people. They carried their own equipment out the front door of the club when they were done. We’d been obsessing over their first album for months and we told them “you guys kick ass”. They said “you do too”. Twenty years later I get a very special sense of parental happiness when I can turn my kid on to more of their goodness. Their two DVDs for kids are tremendous and their Friday night video podcast is awesome too. My two-year-old refers to the band simply as “Fwiday” because he associates them with Friday nights. “Mo’ Fwiday, Daddy! Mo’ Fwiday!”

Continental’s move, which equals a 16 percent reduction in its capacity, had been rumored in industry circles on Wednesday. The details came in a message to employees from Continental’s chief executive Lawrence W. Kellner and its president, Jeffrey A. Smisek.

“The airline industry is in a crisis,” the two executives said in the message to employees. “Its business model doesn’t work with the current price of fuel and the existing level of capacity in the marketplace. We need to make changes in response.”

It is about time that these airlines realize that charging for tickets is a horribly outdated business model. I’m looking forward to the airlines switching their business model to a pure CPC advertising model, where you click on a flight attendant when you see an ad you like, or perhaps a freemium model where you board the plane for free and can pay halfway through the flight if you like the service. If you choose not to pay, you must complete the rest of the flight while seated in the lavatory, or perhaps they eject you with a parachute (which is also sold onboard for a nominal additional charge).

Software is only allowed to display a dialog box like this once:

If you insist on displaying this dialog every single time your software launches, your software is officially “stupid”. Eventually I will want to stop using it. Consider placing a “Don’t show this again” check box at the bottom there, please.

Love,

Jeffrey

Update: Hey, it looks like a recent patch to Acrobat Pro fixed this. Hooray!