Robert Palmer is literate. Smoetimes.

Client Alert: Monday and Tuesday

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 16:52:00 -0700

Please note that I will be away from my desk with limited access to telephone and email after about 1 p.m. on Monday (Oct. 26) and all of Tuesday (Oct 27). I have a meeting out of town Monday afternoon, and I’m spending the day with family on Tuesday for my birthday.

Apologies for any inconvenience. I will be back at my desk Wednesday (Oct 28).

Happy Friday (via JKTrix and Neatorama)

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:08:14 -0700

Happy Friday (via JKTrix and Neatorama)

It's rather quite hypnotic

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 08:15:29 -0700

(Heavy lifting by Eric Spiegelman.)

TUAW: Pantone offers color libraries for iPhone, mostly

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:36:37 -0700

TUAW: Pantone offers color libraries for iPhone, mostly: While it’s been in the App Store for the last few days, Pantone is officially launching its color discovery and management app for iPhone today, called myPANTONE.

The Pantone Matching System,…

A note about a Twitter message (about me) you may or may not have received

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 05:50:00 -0700

On Twitter, someone by the name of @jlbc3 posted messages to about 85 percent of the users I follow, saying:

You know Robert Palmer? He’s one of the biggest arseholes you’ll meet. I’m going to call his boss & ex boss to say so.

The user isn’t following anyone, has no followers, and otherwise has no metadata (a location or URL, for example).

While I’ve grown accustomed to the level and tenor of Twitter spam, this appears to ratchet things up a notch. To the point, I have to say, where it might not be spam at all. Someone — it would appear — is deeply upset with me, and has decided to vent that upsettedness by posting anonymous Twitter messages to everyone I know.

For example, if it is spam, the very first message is curious:

@roberpalmer Still up the biz with Miriello? I’m not surprised, screwball that u are. You really ought to get a life before I tell your boss

While the majority of the messages were the same, sent around the same time, and were probably generated by a script, this first message (while addressed to a misspelled version of my username) knows enough about what I’ve posted online to name a place where I used to work. As an aside, I don’t think I’m really still “up the biz” with them, not that I really know what “up the biz” means. Taking into consideration the use of the Britishism “arsehole,” the messages’ author is perhaps someone in the UK. All the people I know there are really quite lovely.

Moreover, the message was sent to everyone from personal friends to Stephen Colbert, which would suggest that an automated script went and processed all the Twitter people I follow, rather than picking and choosing individuals for maximum hurting. In fact, one current client that I follow (and who follows me) was omitted from the distribution list.

The threat in the message, overall, is benign. Still, it’s bothered me enough to get me up early to write this. Since I work for myself, my boss is me. My “ex boss” is Ron, whom I enjoy a genial relationship with. In either case, I’m actually very comfortable with this individual making these calls, since I know at least I’d like to talk to this person.

Hopefully I’m the only one affected by this quirk of the Internet. In any event, I feel like I should apologize for this happening. I don’t want to be a bad person. If someone thinks that I am, I’ve no idea what I’ve done to deserve this sort of publicity. If anyone has any problem with anything I’ve said, done, or posted, I hope they feel comfortable enough to talk to me about it, or at least post something with a name or email address attached.

Sorry, everyone. I’m happy to listen, happy to talk, and happy to put this behind me.

Update (Sep. 12): It looks like Twitter has removed @jlbc3’s account, so the Twitter links in this story will take you to an error page. If I had to guess, this means the whole thing was just a scripting exercise for someone, and I made a mountain out of a molehill. Still — I’d rather have made a mountain out of it than dug myself into a hole by doing nothing. Hopefully it’s not the start of a spammy trend.

Just say no to Socialism

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 07:27:48 -0700

(Pasting in an anonymous post on 4Chan [I know, but bear with me] that I first saw here. -RP)

This morning I was awoken by my alarm clock powered by electricity generated by the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy. I then took a shower in the clean water provided by the Municipal Water Utility. After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the National Weather Service of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration determined the weather was going to be like using satellites designed, built, and launched by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. I watched this while eating my breakfast of food inspected by the US Department of Agriculture and taking the drugs which have been determined as safe by the Food and Drug Administration.

At the appropriate time as regulated by the US Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the US Naval Observatory, I got into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to work on the roads build by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issed by the Federal Reserve Bank. On the way out the door, I deposited the mail I needed to send out via the U.S. Postal Service and drop the kids off at the public school.

After spending another day of not being maimed or killed at work thanks to the workplace regulations imposed by the Department of Labor and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, I enjoyed another two meals which again do not kill me because of the USDA. I drove my NHTSA car back home on the DOT roads, to my house which had not burned down during my absence because of the state and local building codes and Fire Marshal’s inspection, and which has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the local Police Department.

I then logged on to the Internet which was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration and posted on Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

TUAW: Retrospect 8.1 brings back PowerPC support, improves performance

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:16:44 -0700

TUAW: Retrospect 8.1 brings back PowerPC support, improves performance: EMC announced today an update to its popular Retrospect network backup software; version 8.1 brings back support for PowerPC-based workstations and improves performance for Intel-based Macs.

…

TUAW: Behold! My Mac mini media center

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:36:35 -0700

TUAW: Behold! My Mac mini media center:

I know! A media center!

I had cable service, a DVD player, and a TiVo Series 2. My goal was to combine all of those things into one set-top-box — the Mac mini — and maybe even unsubscribe from…

In case you haven’t seen my response to John...

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 15:04:00 -0700

In case you haven’t seen my response to John Boehner’s terrible healthcare chart.

TUAW: Developer Color Picker: For your pickiest developer

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 15:19:07 -0700

TUAW: Developer Color Picker: For your pickiest developer: Wade Cosgrove, code ninja over at Panic, has released a freeware Developer Color Picker that helps developers of all stripes pick and paste color declarations for a variety of languages.

Any…

TUAW: Apple distributes 1.5B apps in App Store's first year

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 10:09:39 -0700

TUAW: Apple distributes 1.5B apps in App Store's first year:

Apple announced today in a short press release that it had ~~sold~~ distributed 1.5 billion iPhone and iPod touch applications during the App Store’s first year of existence.

Despite the slow…

"Make something intended not for your own use, but for use by dummies, and you’ll usually wind up..."

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:37:55 -0700

“Make something intended not for your own use, but for use by dummies, and you’ll usually wind up creating something dumb.”

- Daring Fireball

TUAW: Byline, others offering anniversary sale prices on Saturday

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:24:13 -0700

TUAW: Byline, others offering anniversary sale prices on Saturday: Saturday! Saturday! Saturday! One day only! You may buy the whole app — but you’ll only need the edge.

Sorry about that. Nevertheless, Byline — Phantom Fish’s flagship Google Reader app and…

TUAW: TUAW Tip: Paste without formatting by default

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 19:40:39 -0700

TUAW: TUAW Tip: Paste without formatting by default:

Here’s something I know affects plenty of users out there. Have you ever pasted text in a document or email message, only to have it formatted differently than all the text around it? Irritating,…

TUAW: VLC 1.0.0 released

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:41:56 -0700

TUAW: VLC 1.0.0 released: While being a useful tool for several years now, VLC has finally reached that first pinnacle of software development: 1.0.

VLC is an alternative media player for Mac, Windows and Linux that…

TUAW: From Firefox to Safari (and back again)

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:35:06 -0700

TUAW: From Firefox to Safari (and back again):

I realize I may not be your average browser user. As a web developer, a browser to me is two parts daily use, two parts testing, and one part challenge. Since 2005, I’ve been using Firefox in some…

TUAW: Spell it out with your Dock

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:23:20 -0700

TUAW: Spell it out with your Dock:

For your early-afternoon entertainment, I have the story of Mike Giepert, who happened one day to spell something clever with the icons in his dock.

His website, in fact, has a whole raft of…

TUAW: Apple: Paranoid

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:41:40 -0700

TUAW: Apple: Paranoid:

Do you remember the teaser ads for the iPhone 3G? Two uniformed guards carried a locked metal crate through a labyrinth of secure tunnels, keycard points at every door, and monitored by…

TUAW: 3.0 is here, but where's the free security update for iPod touch 2.x?

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:24:52 -0700

TUAW: 3.0 is here, but where's the free security update for iPod touch 2.x?:

Jim is worried that security updates made available via the iPhone OS 3.0 updates last week will only be available to iPod touch users through the obligatory $10 upgrade. “Please use your power as…

TUAW: Dell cites Apple's 'green' claims in Better Business Bureau complaint

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:08:10 -0700

TUAW: Dell cites Apple's 'green' claims in Better Business Bureau complaint:

In a display of environmental posturing on both sides, Dell lodged a complaint with the advertising industry’s self-governing oversight board: The National Advertising Division of the Council of…