Sometimes, it’s the little things that make you happy. For me, it’s always been when Rainier Cherries make their debut in the local stores signaling the beginning of summer.

While I’ve always thought heading down to Pike Place Market and picking them up is a better deal (and more fun), having them available in the local QFC is just downright convenient. This summer, the contest will be to see which is more expensive: gas prices per gallon, or cherries by the pound.

Right now, cherries are slighty more expensive at $4.99/lb, local gas is at $4.41/gallon for regular.

I bet this flips by July 4.

Brought to you by Where the Hell is Matt?

Direct link to video

While I agree with the key points that Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design makes about presenting (knowing your audience, usage of images and fonts, etc), I feel that it’s my duty to point out that while I really enjoyed it, my wife fell asleep while watching An Inconvenient Truth.

Ya know, the new Clone Wars movie may actually turn out to be pretty cool.

[TV Squad] I’m convinced they were parodying the Legion of Doom’s methodology from the Challenge of the Super Friends which ran from 1978 to 1979 on ABC. Their simple goal was stated in the opening credits: the conquest of the Universe, with a subordinate goal of the destruction of the Super Friends. They failed every time, and I think that’s partially due to poor planning.

As I read through today’s headlines on Techmeme and Technorati, peruse my social networks and tweet my life away, I can’t help this overwhelming feeling that all of these Web 2.0 companies have business plans that are no more credible than the Legion of Doom’s plan to ‘travel back in time to prevent the most powerful Super Friends from existing’.

Where have all the software companies gone? Does anyone make products any more?

Perhaps Tyler Durden is right: “Only after disaster can we be resurrected“.

Coincidentally, my neighbor decided to put in a sprinkler system this week. I wonder if all that digging and noise (there was a concrete slab they jack hammered) in their yard sent those little creeps straight back into mine.

Looks like an early morning run over to Home Depot to pick up some weapons to help me in this seemingly never-ending fight is in order.

As usual, the pre-WWDC Apple predictions and hype is now in full force, so I thought I’d throw my own in.

Here it goes: I predict that I will buy whatever iPhone or iTablet is announced.

(Photography: ‘6strings‘, creative commons license)

I’m somewhat of a pack-rat when it comes to old email.

While I don’t keep every deleted and sent item (unlike others I know), I have a pretty good archive of email that dates back until early 1998 in several Outlook PST files. Over time, I’ve found that keeping interesting links, documents, conversations, etc., in mail is one of the best ways store and easily find information. Using IMAP, it’s also a great way to keep things automatically synchronized between my mail ‘access points’: phone, laptop, web.

Additionally, the folder metaphor for mail organization broke down for me a long time ago - Now I just keep everything in a folder by year, and keep my Inbox relatively empty. Who cares how messages are organized? Using mail’s built in search (especially Spotlight) enables me to find things way faster than just looking around for a mail in a specific location. David Gelernter wrote (thanks to Michael for the link):

“If you have three pet dogs, give them names. If you have 10,000 head of cattle, don’t bother. Nowadays the idea of giving a name to every file on your computer is ridiculous.”

While talking about file systems, the same applies to mail.

Now that I’m on a Mac, having all that data locked up in .PST files left me with only one choice to move them forward: Using Outlook under Fusion, I cracked open those old dusty archives and dragged them into year ‘folders’ on my IMAP server. The process was incredibly easy, now I have to deal with a few winmail.dat files (TNEF Enough looks like it should do the trick).

What am I going to do with all that data? Frankly, I have no idea. It’s nice having it around and easily accessible, and it makes interesting reading to see what you were thinking about 8-10 years ago. Although, I think it’s safe to delete that Costco renewal email from 2000…

[ValleyWag] Want to see Paris Hilton’s MySpace profile? How about Lindsay Lohan’s? Don’t worry about those pesky privacy settings. Thanks to “data portability,” a faddish technology movement that the Valley has been buzzing about for months, you can see any profile you want on MySpace.

Security between two endpoints is as only as strong as the weakest link.

While users should naturally demand and expect privacy, we live in a world of the social network du-jour. Now, I’m not saying that data portability shouldn’t be blamed or that users shouldn’t feel comfortable living in the world of the ‘cloud’, but users really do need to become more aware about the hazards of being online. They shouldn’t be so giving of their personal information and publishing private details to every social network under the sun. The only way to guarantee that it doesn’t go all over the internet is not to put it there in the first place.

For some odd reason, IT 24-7’s head reminds me of another famous Microsoft legend.

We received your application for an ISSN. The resource named on your application appears to be a personal blog. According to international ISSN assignment policy personal web pages and personal blogs are out of scope for ISSN.

For additional information, please go to the following website: http://www.issn.org/en/node/327

Thank you for your interest in the ISSN.

Bummer.

Besides the computer industry’s incessant need to version number everything (Web 2.0, Business 2.0, Economy 2.0, Email 3.0, Widgets 3.2, Spork 1.5, etc), I always find it fascinating when people proclaim that blogging is the catalyst for something more, something actually metaphysical: a conversation (ooooo! ahhhhh!). And it’s not just any conversation, mind you, but (get ready, here it comes..) a meme.

Sure, I get it, there’s lots of different reasons people blog. Heck, I’ve been writing down whatever random thought that leaks out of my skull here since 2001, but the reality is that I keep this thing running (even after a temporary hiatus) because I have this weird need to share information. It may be a joke, some random hack, an interesting link, a programming tip or just something completely odd thats going on in my life, but its a way for me to write my thoughts down and get it out of my system. Is anyone listening? Is it a conversation? I doubt it.

Basically, blogging is cheap therapy. There’s nothing “2.0″ about it.

While Ivan’s post is regarding the turmoil around the OLPC (a good read, IMHO), the same could be said for my own history with computers - both hardware ands software. This isn’t a pro-Mac or anti-Windows post, but rather a small observation of my own relationship with hardware throughout the years.

18 years ago (holy crap!) I used to get a kick out of getting Computer Shopper, going to the local computer show once a month when it came into town, and buying parts to build my own lightning fast 386sx/16 box. For some reason, maybe it was just the challenge, I never really wanted to buy a preassembled system like a Dell or a Gateway. Instead either me and my dad or a group of friends would truck to a random computer show that was in town to get a faster video card, bigger hard drive, CPU, tape backup system, etc. There was no Internet or Fry’s to run out to at any time to get stuff - you just had to wait.

And boy, putting those machines together was fun. You could also always tell right after I was in machine-assemble mode - my fingers had had little cuts all over, but there was always a great sense of accomplishment when things finally worked. Sure, sometimes (rare) things would just boot and be fine on the first try, but often there was hours of tweaking investigating involved.

Flash forward to 2008 - I’m 37 now, have 2 kids, and frankly just don’t want to bother with it any more. Sure, I feel incredibly comfortable in taking these things apart, working with embedded devices (still debating the Pico-ITX) and doing silly things like ripping apart a laptop to remove thermal grease on a CPU (much to my friends chagrin), but most of the time I just want to turn it on so I can start doing something.

Heck, I don’t even own a desktop anymore for my day to day computer usage. Ok sure, there’s a Mac Mini in the closet storing my media and an iMac in the kids playroom (would you trust a laptop that wasn’t a LeapPad to a 4 year old?), but I’m in a mode where I just want to be mobile - it’s laptops only for me and my wife for now on.

It’s interesting though, while Ivan’s post made me reminisce about those old days, I’m not sure if I miss them…

It’s been awhile since I’ve played with the EPIA line of embedded motherboards, but the new fanless Pico-ITX is just so freaking small, I just want one. I have no need for it, and no idea what I’d use it for, but the inner-hacker in me finds it so freaking tempting.

I may just have to pick up an Artigo Pico-ITX builder kit and start playing..