Rachel and I went to San Juan Island last week and shot the 4th of July fireworks. Though this is an annual tradition, I think this year’s photos were better than usual. If you like these three, check out the full set!

Hope you like ‘em!

An excerpt from a message sent this morning from a friend of 13 years:

I found it interesting that you felt that friends were pressuring you to help out with their projects. I’m on the horns of a dilemma: either hard-selling you on helping me with my company and endangering our long-held friendship, or respecting your wishes and leaving you alone.

I decided to go for the hard sell, since I’ve never really liked you that much anyways. And I’m pretty sure that none of your other friends are showing any kind of scruples whatsoever.

Sigh and grin.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest contains a great explanation of the social challenges of video chat, but in one sentence he nicely sums up the reason video chat will never supplant simple telephone conversations:

Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her.

No doubt there will be many specific tasks (and demographic pockets) where the feature will be very popular, but Wallace’s logic rings true for the greater use case.

(via Kottke)

At the beginning of 2008 I left Google to start fresh, working with a tiny and brilliant startup team at FriendFeed. The last two-and-a-half years have resulted in so many good times, the opportunity to design for a site and community I love, and the privilege to work with yet another team of world-class designers, PMs and engineers after the Facebook acquisition.

But Spring has sprung and I’ve decided that it’s time for the next adventure. FriendFeed has taught me that entrepreneurship is what lifts my heart and so I plan to go in to private practice developing some ideas of my own while pitching in with the startup community here and there. I couldn’t be more excited.

But before all that I’m taking my first real Summer vacation in 16 years!

Omni Group happily blogged today that they’ve sold 5,000 copies of their $50 OmniGraffle for iPad app and are one of the highest-grossing iPad apps to date.

That’s it? 5,000 copies? I was really surprised when Omni set such a high price point for their app, admittedly one of the few really desktop-level apps out for the iPad, alongside Apple’s iWork apps. These are the kind of apps that new iPad owners are begging for to help justify their belief that the iPad could be a notebook replacement for most tasks. $50 is just too high a price for most users to spend on an iPad app in an arena where most cost $10. I wonder what percent of buyers are already avid users of OmniGraffle for Mac? I’d guess over 80%.

Every day I get someone asking to see my iPad and they ask me to show them my favorite app. I don’t show them OmniGraffle because, at $50, I haven’t bought it. I’d bet that if Omni lowered their app’s price to $19.99 not only would they get well over 3 times as many customers (most of them would be new business) but those customers would be evangelists, showing off the app to their friends who are deciding whether to buy an iPad.

I understand that OmniGraffle is trying to break the mindset that iPhoneOS software should be inexpensive, but I can’t see them fighting the tide much longer, press releases or no.

A compelling blog post on Flightglobal’s Flight blog discusses the political history of piloting the President Kaczynski, and the role it may have played in the crash.

Two years ago the President wanted to make a last-minute change to his flight plans and fly to Georgia, which had just entered hostilities with Russia. The flight captain refused the President’s request/order citing safety concerns and was later decorated for his sense of responsibility.

This is where things get interesting:

Archives from Poland’s parliament, the Sejm, show that Law & Justice party member Przemyslaw Gosiewski subsequently asked the defence minister whether a pilot had the right to refuse an order from a superior in the armed forces. He also demanded to know whether, by awarding the medal, the minister intended to show that “insubordination, cowardice and disobedience” would be rewarded in future.

…

Investigators probing the loss of the Tu-154 at Smolensk have yet to determine why the pilots opted to pursue an apparently hazardous approach rather than accept a safer alternative. None of the conclusions will matter to parliamentarian Gosiewski who – having questioned the courage and discipline of crews that take such decisions – was among the 96 victims of the crash.

I encourage you to read the original article and the linked sources. The Polish government has indicated that information from the flight recorders, which will hopefully make the cause of the tragedy much clearer, will be released tomorrow.

[Deep in the heart of Redmond, WA]

Hello, Foot? You’re looking well today. I see you’re wearing the nice new Windows Phone 7 Series shoe we designed for you. It looks very nice. I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but we’re going to have to shoot you.

Don’t sound so surprised, you knew we couldn’t make a forward-thinking product without making it too forward thinking, right? We want to put our best foot forward, and that’s you. You’re a step ahead of Windows Mobile 6.5, and when you’re forging into new territory you can’t waste time dwelling on the past. We all understand that Windows Mobile had several chances to win more people over to it, but now that we’ve moved on we need to start with a clean slate.

And yes, that means we’re going to have to shoot ourselves in the foot. In you.

You’re all about fresh thinking, Foot. Your clean Segoe UI font says loud and clear: “I’m not a phone, I’m an experience.” Where Windows Mobile 6.5 was hampered by information density and static screens, you’re fluid. You’re lush and colorful and everything these kids want nowadays. You can tweet and ping and ‘book and Bing like nobody’s business. Because you’re not about business. You’re about the fun.

And what fun kids don’t want is copying and pasting. That’s what their parents did. Folks today think and write in 140 characters or less, Foot, and the closest they come to copying is hitting the re-tweet button. Copying is so unoriginal.

So we’re leaving it out of you. No, more than that. It’s not like we’re just skimping on ingredients. We’re excising it, like decaffeinating coffee. We’re carving copy and paste functionality right out of your being, foot. We’re doing it with a bullet. The bullet we’re going to shoot. In you. Foot.

Seriously though, don’t worry about it. You’re designed for fun and style. You’re the party phone to make iPhone people jealous because you’re Tufte-er than thou. Don’t worry if things like Word documents and spreadsheets feel as foreign to your style as Ashton Kutcher itemizing his deductions. He has people for that, and anyone boring enough to need to do stuff like quote an email or copy a URL has tools for that too. They can wait until they get to a desktop computer, or they can use the phone their work issued them. Heck, they’ve probably got our other foot running WinMo 6.5 in their other pocket, so we’re all good.

The idea that people need one device that will do everything hasn’t played out. We tried stuffing everything into 6.5 and people told us they want less. They want iPhones and Prëi and we’re listening, so forget about copying and pasting. Nobody really uses that stuff, and if they do, well, they should get a Windows Tablet. It does everything you don’t, if people want that kind of thing.

Oh, while we’re on the subject, that iPhone App Store we hate? We don’t hate it anymore. We love it. We think it’s great. Except their app review process is too draconian and mercurial. So we’re going to do that, but we’re not going to be draconian or mercurial. We’ll only reject bad apps, and if we do we’ll tell you why, unless we find out that we’re only helping bad app makers learn how to get bad apps through the approval process. But it’s okay, there will be a committee to stop that from happening, if it starts to happen, which it won’t.

But seriously, foot, you look hot in that Windows Phone 7 Series shoe. Nobody’s going to be copying you any time soon, because we’re not going to let them.

Oh, by the way, have you seen baby Pink around? I can’t seem to find her after leaving her soaking in that bathwater…

Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter conducted an interview and photo shoot with GQ magazine and wasn’t happy with the result:

I cried for two hours after seeing those repulsive pictures.

Is that enough for a river?

Turns out that Windows Phone Series 7 users can only load apps via the Windows Phone Series 7 marketplace, where developers submit apps for approval and publication. This explains why last week Steve Ballmer did an about face and said “Apple’s done a very nice job” with their App Store.

Lest Microsoft be caught imitating or lauding Apple too much, they claim their store won’t have any of Apple’s approval ambiguity, with all approval/rejection decisions being very straightforward and transparent. Sounds easier than it is in practice, I suspect. Just a few months ago Microsoft was making videos poking fun at the Windows Marketplace approval process:

In the category of ’speculation’: The three weeks between when iPad pre-orders start and the April 3rd delivery date sounds like just enough time for Apple to gauge what proportion of iPads to make in each of the 16/32/64GB configurations.

In the category of ‘wild speculation’: It would be interesting, given a high enough proportion of buyers opting for the higher-margin 32 and 64GB models, if Apple were to decide to order the build with cameras included since, if they’re not currently slated for inclusion there seems to be plenty of evidence that they were at one time, and may simply be a drop-in part at build time.