The folks picking stock photos at Yahoo! are getting lazy.

Look, water makes you skinny!

No wait! It makes you fat!

Okay, I’m sure that part of what makes this awkward is a bit of cultural difference between East and West. But, seriously, try to watch this without making at least a little bit of a “WTF Face.”

My favorite part of this next one is the fact that, not only are the screens on the device simulated, the hand that interacts with the screen is also fake. Classy and very convincing. I also really can’t wait until we are past this era in videography where shots of people delivering monologues mix a sort of “wandering focus” effect with handheld, weirdly cropped close-ups of hands, faces and other body parts.

Oh dear…

Do your own search.

via Neven Mrgan

“I can tell you very candidly that when May 21 came and went it was a very difficult time for me, a very difficult time,” said Mr. Camping, 89, a former civil engineer. “I was truly wondering what is going on. In my mind, I went back through all of the promises God has made, all of the proofs, all of the signs and everything was fitting perfectly, so what in the world happened? I really was praying and praying and praying, oh Lord, what happened?”

via Harold Camping Predicts October Date for the Apocalypse – NYTimes.com.

I’m really not even sure what to say about someone being so upset that the world didn’t end.

I’ve been getting LinkedIn “Friend Requests” in my inbox on a regular basis for weeks now. Ordinarily, I would just ignore these. But seeing as how I’m actively looking for work for the first time in my career, LinkedIn seems like it might hold some value for me for the first time in my career.

But here’s the problem. These requests end up in my Gmail account because that’s the email address most people have for me in their address books. My LinkedIn account is old and uses my old Yahoo! address. Trying to add my Gmail address to my existing LinkedIn account is an exercise in futility, despite the fact that multiple email addresses is a supported feature (and a recommended practice!). For weeks, I’ve been getting the following error when I try to add an email address:

Until this is fixed, I can’t really use LinkedIn. I’m not going to start a new account using my Gmail address. I’d lose all the work I did on my existing profile and I’d lose all of my “friends.”

So don’t feel bad if I’ve been ignoring your LinkedIn “Friend Requests.” It’s really not my fault.

And even better is the fact that I’m unable to send a support email to LinkedIn using the form in their Help Center. What an amazing waste of time. Come to think of it, it’s probably best that LinkedIn doesn’t have a current email address for me.

I was working on getting this Autodesk project into my online portfolio and was having a problem: The videos wouldn’t play back from the server. Everything worked fine when testing locally on my machine. But from the server, the videos wouldn’t load. But then I got a clue. One of the groups of videos did work! Score! But why? Were they different file types and maybe my web server refused to recognize one of the types I was using? I’ve run into issues before where a server didn’t recognize a file type and simply changing the extension fixed the problem. But that didn’t make sense. I had a couple dozen of these videos and I created them with the same settings. So why did some of the videos work but most didn’the

Then I saw it, as I compared the file info.

See that at the bottom? Why the heck are the permissions for these files different? Let’s see if changing the permissions of the offending files fixes things. (Yes, of course it does.)

Extra hint: There are a few ways to change the permissions of these files on the server. I could change them locally and upload the new files. But that’s a waste of bandwidth. I could connect to the server directly and edit the permissions with the command line. That’s what a real geek would do, but I’ll use a GUI whenever I can. Thankfully Transmit (you have Transmit, don’t you?) gives me a GUI to do just what I need to do.

I can’t imagine an easier way to change permissions of multiple files. Finder won’t even let you change permissions of more than one file easily. Path Finder probably could. And you can certainly do it with the command line. But I really like the way Transmit handles it.

Extra extra hint Transmit isn’t just for FTP. Use it as a local file system explorer. For a number of things, it’s better than Finder.

People love Chrome. I really couldn’t care less. People love it because it’s so fast. Maybe it’s because I hardly use web apps, but I don’t notice any real (read: not benchmarks) difference over Safari. People love how you can search and type in URLs in the same field. For me, I really see no benefit and have absolutely zero problem hitting the TAB key when the cursor is in the address field if I want to search. ⌘-L then TAB. I’m searching. I guess that makes me a glutton for extra keystrokes. I often just use Launchbar to search Google anyway, since that keeps me from having to switch to a browser in the first place.

But the 1Password support in Chrome vs. Safari is what keeps me rooted firmly in Safari. I have my blog’s admin section behind HTTP authentication. It’s one of the measures I took after my blog was hacked into about a year ago. I have no idea what my login info for HTTP authentication is. But I don’t need to know it. Why? Check out the login panel in Safari:

Now compare it to the equivalent screen in Chrome:

The only difference that matters is that 1P button in the Safari version. 1Password, baby. You can use it when logging into a site behind HTTP authentication. I just hit the magic ⌘-\ keystroke and I’m presented with the standard wp-admin login screen (where I can also just hit ⌘-\ to log in). Simple. Easy. There are other reasons I prefer Safari over Chrome, but if this was the only one, it would be enough reason to stick with what already works just fine.

UPDATE: Monday, May 16, 2011

I should mention that I am using 1Password with Chrome. It just doesn’t integrate with the HTTP authentication login window in Chrome

UPDATE: Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Another area where 1Password doesn’t work quite as nicely with Chrome: Even if 1Password is already unlocked, you need to re-unlock it with Chrome. Annoying.

Yup. Totally. And as I refill my glass of water, the volume of liquid in my drinking glass is getting closer to the volume of liquid in the ocean.

Can’t delete Finder sidebar items in Snow Leopard 10.6 or Lion 10.7? You can no longer drag them out of the Finder sidebar to get rid of them?

Same problem here. But the fix is simple. Try holding the Command key as you drag them off of the sidebar. Do they vanish in a poof of smoke now? Good. I’m sure that’s new. Right? You used to just drag them off. Right? Maybe? I dunno.