Following a Jobs keynote there’s always a ton of complaining about Apple, along with a lot of lusting over the new goodies. For my part my complaint with Apple is one that has been growing since the release of OS X – I’m sick and tired of Apple trying to make me buy stuff through them. In fact, this started with the introduction of QuickTime Pro and the nagging to upgrade.

Dave Winer complains about Apple’s photocasting RSS being broken and while I’ll agree that it’s a shame Apple didn’t put more effort into interoperability, it’s also a shame Dave had to end with: Assuming their intentions are good and they’re not trying to kill RSS, why don’t they put some of us under NDA and let us help them get the bugs out before they ship. As if Apple have any reason to kill RSS when they’re going out of their way to leverage and promote RSS.

I’ve been subscribed to Digg’s front page RSS feed for a few months or so and more and more I’m just skipping over all of its articles. It seems that as Digg’s popularity grows, the quality of the content drops. This probably shouldn’t come as a surprise – as more people enter the community, the community’s interests vary and the signal to noise ratio for a given person probably drops. Even when the community’s interest doesn’t spread too wide, just the increase in the number of articles is likely to mean that readers skip articles more often.

It’s amazing how unobservant people can be at times. A while back Technorati notified me of a new link to my blog from “Pete the programmer from the sink”. I didn’t have time to investigate but figured I didn’t know a Pete from the sink so wasn’t too concerned. As I passed by the WordPress Dashboard again today though it was reporting that link to me again so I decided to check it out.

Rich Bowen has been posting podcasts of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Simply brilliant! Sadly it doesn’t look like we’ll get to the final stave by Australian Christmas so I’ll most likely have to wait until I get back in the new year to hear the end. All the same, it is a very entertaining reading of one of the classic stories and I can’t recommend you listen to it enough.

Scoble: I would love it if my blog tool could tell me more about the things I link to. For instance, how much traffic did it send to that person? How many people linked to it after my link (that would tell me the viralness of an idea)? How many times have I linked to Graham? How does that compare to the number of times I’ve linked to Dori Smith or Dave Winer?

Queensland Transport provide an online form to allow you to change your address details: +5 brownie points The form pops up in a new window: -2 brownie points The new window expands to be full screen: -4 brownie points The new window hides the location bar and all other window decorations: -10 brownie points The SSL certificate is self signed: Do not pass GO, do not collect brownie points. Go straight home and tell your mother what you did.

I’ve caught up on the backlog of stuff to write about from the past couple of weeks where I’ve been preoccupied with moving house, mostly by dropping it off the list because it’s just too old to be worth commenting on now. So now I’m off to the Gold Coast for christmas holidays with my darling fiance and her family. It’s a tough life sometimes. Anyway, that means I won’t be posting much here for a while again, possibly until the new year.

The Boston Globe: AT&T Inc. and BellSouth Corp. are lobbying Capitol Hill for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where the telecom carriers’ own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors. Why does that not surprise me? In the end though this is very bad for consumers who are paying for internet access and deserve to get the best speeds possible for the best price possible for whatever services they want to use it for.

Berin Loritsch: I’ve discovered why I’m lacking motivation for our Software Design Document at work. It’s tedious. It isn’t the creative part of the effort. It’s boring! The trouble with boring design documents is not just that they’re boring to write, they’re boring to read as well – so noone does. In our most recent round of design documents at Ephox, we took some advice from Joel on Software and started injecting humor into the docs.

Ben Laurie: …because it actually affects peoples lives, and not in a positive way: studies have shown that if people believe they are being observed, then they tend to alter their behaviour to match what they think the observer wants to see. I want people to be able to do their thing without fear of consequences from bigots or The Man or even “ordinary people”. None of us are ordinary and the world will be a poorer place if we were made to be.

There are just so many elements to this story that seem so wrong. First a teacher brings porn to school on their laptop. Secondly that students were suspended for accidentally coming across it but mostly that they were suspended for hacking because they answered an obvious question when prompted: “The hacking involved a dialogue box coming up on the screen which asked which car do you drive,” one of the boys’ parents told the paper.