1. Launch Safari 4 or Chrome 4.

2. Drag Videotate to the bookmarks bar.

3. Go opt into the YouTube HTML5 beta.

4. Find your favorite YouTube video. Or maybe your least favorite. Here’s one of my favorites: Walk Don’t Run. Here’s another that’s not necessarily a favorite, but it seems like a fairly appropriate choice.

   Note: not all videos are available via HTML5, even when you’re opted in. If you get a Flash video, the bookmarklet won’t work.

5. Once the video has started playing, activate the “Videotate” bookmarklet.

6. Enjoy.

Thanks to Simon WIllison for tweeting the JS I modified, and Jeremy Keith for helping me realize it would be easy to do during the HTML5 portion of A Day Apart.

Example: “Wait, you wanted me to buy cheerleader pom poms? Oh. I totally cornpensated that one. …Awkward.”

But wait, hold it, never mind, cancel the panic parade: it was not, in fact, the perfect ringtone. Crisis averted! Still, the sinking feeling lingered, reminding me of what could have been, so last night I sat down and got it done. Now I bring to you the absolutely most perfect ringtone ever.

Feel free to preview it using that link, if you really feel that’s necessary, but frankly you should just charge ahead and download the .m4r AAC for instant ringtoniness. If for some reason you’d rather have the audio source and do your own ringtone conversions, you can get the same file as a .m4a AAC or a comfy old .mp3. And for all you completists, there’s a .zip archive of all three formats.

Go. Ring. Enjoy.

“Sure, sweetie,” I said. “What flavor do you want?”

“Banana.”

“Okay, sure. Go ahead and get a cup from the refrigerator.”

“Banana cake!” She started giggling.

“Wait, I thought you wanted banana yogurt. We don’t have any cake.”

“I know,” she said as she walked into the kitchen, “but I want some banana cake.” Judging from her tone, this was the most painfully obvious fact in the world.

“Um, okay.”

She came back to the table, yogurt cup in hand, and started wrenching back the foil top. With the way clear, she picked up her London cabbie spoon—a gift we brought back from one of our rare trips away from her—and splunked it in.

“This is banana cake,” she said gleefully.

“Wow, you got banana cake? Cool. It’s pretty handy that it comes in a yogurt cup like that!”

She leaned toward me and said, conspiratorially, “I’m just pretending it’s banana cake, but it’s really banana yogurt.”

“Ah, got it.”

“Banana cake!” she chortled once more.

I looked across the table at Kat and said, grimly: “The cake is a lie.”

“Oh, look, sweetie! Do you see the deer?”

“Deer!? Where?” I could hear her leaning out of her booster seat to peer through the front windshield. Within moments, the does made it off the pavement and bounded across the half-shoveled sidewalk to vanish into the subdivision. Brake lights winked off and cars sped up to reclaim the precious, precious seconds lost to this sudden intrusion of nature into late-afternoon suburban routines.

“Did you see them?”

“Yeah”, she said distantly, still craning to look. “Where did they go, Daddy?”

“They ran between those two houses”, I said, gesturing toward the driver’s side window as we passed the spot.

“Do they live there in those houses?”

“No, sweetie, deer live in the woods.”

“Then what are they doing in between the houses?”

“They’re probably looking for food in people’s yards.”

Silence fell for a moment. I spared a half-glance toward the back seat and caught a glimpse of her in my peripheral vision, a half-formed vision of intense concentration. In my head, I quickly ran through everything I knew about deer from my years of rural living, preparing for the expected questions about what deer eat and when they sleep and where their houses were.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“Why did the deer cross the road?”

I was reading yesterday morning that you bought 1.6 percent of Facebook for $240 million. Congratulations! I hope it’s not too forward of me, but now that you’ve had a chance to recover from the exuberant celebrations that I’m sure accompanied this latest coup, I’d like to humbly point out that you have the opportunity to make an even more amazing investment.

I hereby offer to sell you 80 percent of meyerweb.com for a mere $24 million. Think about it: that’s five hundred times better than your Facebook deal, plus you’d be getting a clear majority stake in one of the world’s leading web sites primarily focused on a three-letter web design acronym written by a tallish redhead living in a lakeshore city in the American Midwest. I know: wow!

After we seal the deal, I’ll just keep doing what I’ve always been doing to make this site as successful as it’s become, and you can just ride the wave feeling amazed that you scored such an amazing bargain. Sound good? Awesome. Call me. We’ll talk.

See, I had need to let loose a really good primal scream today. Uncharacteristically, I decided to share it with the online world. It seemed like the perfect method was to Twitter it. And for me, the correct form of a primal scream is “AAAAAAAAA…”, so that’s what I Twittered. Only, I filled the limit: I held down shift-A in Twitterrific until I’d generated 140 upper-case “A”s, no breaks, no punctuation. Just, you know, primal screaming.

What didn’t occur to me was the fact that browsers are really bad at word-wrapping big long chunks of unbroken characters. So my primal tweet seriously disrupted the layout of Twitter for me, and for all 768 people following me (at the time), as a layout table got super-expanded and the scream overflowed various and sundry other element boxes.

Oops. Sorry ’bout that, folks. Though I have to admit there is the part of me that’s secretly pleased: a primal scream should be disruptive. And in some cases, the effect is unintentionally funny and appropriate: like the individual display of that tweet, where the scream runs right out of the “text balloon” and just keeps going and going and going. The failure states become extra levels of commentary on what’s been said. Screamed. They accidentally reinforce the intended message instead of subverting it.

Honestly, that’s kind of cool. I find it all the more delightful because I didn’t intend any of that to happen. I was just blowing off 140 characters worth of steam.

As for why I felt the need to scream so primally, odds are very high you’ll hear all about it tomorrow.

What? Wasn’t this Talk Like A Pirate Day?

That’s right: Ratatouille opens today.

Oh yeah, and there’s some new cell phone coming out.

Oh, c’mon. You know it’s the first thing you thought of too.

Did u ever heard about CSS…? it will help your site.

Do tell, oh random anonymous stranger whose site URL crudely references the genitalia of older females! I wish to learn.

Guess what’s broken in my hotel room.

My last name is spelled M-E-Y-E-R. No trailing “s”; an “e” to each side of the “y”; no “a” anywhere within its bounds. Got it? Good!

Also, it’s “Eric” with a “c”, not a “k” or even a “ck”. ‘kay?

So how does your name get misspelled, and how much does it bother you?

“Daddy, what old is Bear?”

“Do you mean how old is Bear?”

“How old is Bear, yes.”

“I don’t know, sweetie. How old do you think he is?”

“Sixty two.”

“Sixty two?”

“One.”

“Oh, he’s sixty one, not sixty two?”

“No. Bear is sixty two one.”

“Sixty two one.”

“Right.”

Honestly, the most impressive thing is that she knows any numbers above fiveteen.