Last week I logged into my blog admin to see links coming in from a site I hadn’t seen before. It seems that some random blog* was using the Zombie Hand Puppet picture from my blog as their Picture of The Day.

I’d be flattered except the blogger:

• was displaying the image without uploading it to their own server (thus usurping my bandwidth)
• didn’t bother to credit my site, myself or the photographer
• didn’t even have a link back to my main site (just a direct link to the jpg)
• was too lazy to send me a note asking permission (come-on! I have a easy to use contact form)

I went to the site itself and left a comment noting that he should have asked permission, but he could keep the image up as long as he added a caption crediting myself, my site, and the photographer.

So instead of doing this he decided to remove the image and my comments without any email or any form of apology. Which frankly is fine by me — I don’t need traffic from his blog. The is blog itself is just a random collection of mostly rather lame stolen web images. Frankly the quality of my zombie picture took his blog up a notch.

* I’m not going to link to his blog as I don’t want to give it any traffic. However, I will link to his photobucket account, where if you want to bother you can see his collection of random stolen images. It should give you an idea of the insipid “content” of his blog.

p.s. if any one else out there in the interweb wants to use my content or images, just ask. I’m usually more then happy to share most of it, but a bit of courtesy is nice.

Internet Explorer 7 came upon the scene with uproar for us web developers. Oh Nooz! What will happen to our precious site designs!?!

Frankly however, it didn’t really effect many people as long as they designed for standards, avoided messy css hacks, and didn’t use Active X. Ok admittedly there were probably several web managers who had to overhaul their active x css hack-job of a site. Luckily, I was not one of them.

Instead, I was hoping that IE7 smash like a meteor wiping out almost all instances of crappy IE6. I so dearly wanted to never have to code for IE’s bugs ever again.

I watched my UCSF web stats and at first it seemed promising, but then it hit around 30% and has just stagnated there for the past 6 months. Firefox’s browser share is around 10-12% on and Safari around 3.5%. (on CatCubed Firefox use is around 68% and Safari 11%).

Ugh it seems like I’ll be stuck designing for IE6 for a quite a while.

Seth reported problems with sending through their IMAP account do to the email in the header being different. This was mentioned in the comments section of my Gmail, IMAP, and iPhones – Part 2 – The Tutorial post.

I’m assuming that some ISPs allow this and some don’t. Fortunately, as Jared mentioned, there is an easy way around this by using Gmail as your outgoing SMTP server. This also has the advantage that you don‚Äôt need to CC yourself on all emails, and as such you might want to set it up this way anyway. However, it has the disadvantage that sent mail is not also stored on your IMAP account‚Äîthis is not a big deal as it is stored in gmail.

I’ve updated my old post with this option.

The subject line quotes a recent twitter made by a friend of mine and I couldn’t agree more. Neil deGrasse Tyson, is the exuberant astrophysicist who is the host for NOVA Science Now and the director of the Hayden Planetarium. He explodes with a passion for the mysteries of the universe in a way only an atheist could. His cheerful enthusiasm for science is contagious and in that way many have compared him to the late Carl Sagan; however, Tyson is really a unique figure.

One of my favorite blogs One Good Move recently posted a great video clip from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s recent interview on the Daily Show. He was also previously interviewed on the Daily Show in January of this year for his book Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries.

Neil deGrasse Tyson was also a speaker at the Beyond Belief 2006 conference. I know I’ve mentioned this conference before, but I feel the need to mention it again. I seldom watch many things more than once, but I find myself going back and listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson the most. His rebuke to Dawkins (short and poignant), his connection between art and the love of science (16min speech that is absolutely amazing and energizing), and much more on YouTube are all worth watching.

In my book, he’s right up there with Buckaroo Banzai.

This being San Francisco—which is if not the heart at least the aorta of the intertubes—one would expect all its candidates to have web savvy campaigns. I mean come on this is 2007! If the little town of Medicine Park, OK (pop. ~400) can have a blog, shouldn’t we expect our politicians to be a bit more internet-slick?

Recap of Round I

In Round I, I covered the web campaigns of Chicken John and Gavin Newsom. Neither of them got very many style-points for their web presence, but Chicken John was the winner of that bout with his more personal and direct internet campaign.

The judges reconsider

However, it seems that the judges missed something in their review: as it turns out, the Gavin Newsom campaign, Act Locally SF*, has a flickr account, and they have an active YouTube campaign. Mostly it’s just a bunch of long rambling unedited boring meetings, but I love his Pet Peeves on the Streets series!

The Pet Peeves on the Streets video series have Gavin Newsom himself interviewing random people on the street and in barbershops asking what their pet peeve is with San Francisco. The series is a few months old at this point, but they are a good attempt to reach out to people the way that this new social web is meant to. We need to see more campaign ideas like this.

So with this revelation, I gotta give the YouTube Stardom category over to Gavin Newsom, and I’d say the Web 2.0 Social Aptitude category is now a tie.

With this turnover, Gavin Newsom is now in the lead as the top 21st century political candidate of San Francisco!

A scrappy new contender

However, Gavin Newsom shouldn’t get too cocky. He only won that one by a nose and as Scott Beale of Laughing Squid reports, Josh Wolf seems to be coming out with both guns blazing. He’s got a new blog, Josh Wolf for Mayor and a campaign video. The judges have yet to completely review but they did have this to say:

“Please please next time get a tripod and don’t ever sit in front of a nauseatingly bright greenscreen!!!”**

So stay tuned for Round II where it’s the stiff backed experienced politico Gavin Newsom against the slouched over activist Josh Wolf!

* I gotta say though that Act Locally SF is a terrible campaign name. It sounds more like a generic NGO then a campaign. Why not just Gavin Newsom 2007?

** Bonus Points go to anyone out there who takes Josh Wolf’s video and remixes it using the greenscreen background for something Dumb. Note: that’s Dumb with a capital D—ya know the kind of Dumb that’s actually funny and creative.

I noticed yesterday that iPhone safari is making my top image bar go all wonky. The rest of the page looks fine just the header is messed up (the background image appears stretched strangely). It works fine on the desktop safari (and firefox, and IE, etc) so I don’t know what’s causing it.

Before I begin to dig into the problem does anyone out there in the intertubes have any idea why it’s doing this?