meyerweb.com

When I saw a couple of people link to “the perfect iPhone ringtone” last week, I had that sinking feeling that comes from being beaten to the punch. I knew I should have stayed up an extra hour that one night and just gotten it done!

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.

As dinner came to a close, Carolyn asked if she could have yogurt for dessert.

“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.”

As we drove from preschool to dance class, a gentle snowfall blurred the more distant houses and cars like a thin fog. Jack Johnson was quietly serenading us when up ahead, without warning, two white-tailed deer appeared from a treeline on the right and darted into the street, their hooves skidding slightly on the slick pavement.

“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?”

Dear Microsoft,

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.

It seems that Twitter just can’t handle the display of primal screams.

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.

I think it’s pretty much obvious to anyone with half a brain that information wants to be free—both free as in beer as well as free as in speech. If it weren’t for huge soulless megacorporations imprisoning content behind unreasonably high paywalls and fascist licensing terms, we’d already be collectively a lot richer than we are today. Anyway, it’s not like people would pay for most of their crap anyway, and since they never would have gotten that money, then it’s not like they’ve lost anything. Hell, chances are that by being able to preview merchandise in full, sales are actually improved.

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

The big day is finally here. It’s a day for which so many of us have impatiently waited for so long, almost writhing in anguish as we were denied all but the smallest glimpses of the object of our desires. It is a day that will demonstrate as never before the possibilities inherent when the relentless march of technological progress is matched with a singular vision and a dedicated team of world-class technoartists. It is the day that is, in many ways, the culmination of all the magic and wonder that Steve Jobs has brought to the world over the past two decades.

That’s right: Ratatouille opens today.

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