The single most notable phenomenological residue of spending a few hours with the iPad is what it does to my perception of the iPhone. The minute I picked up an iPhone back in 2007, other smartphones that had seemed remarkably capable (Treos, Blackberries) suddenly felt dated and limited. To my great surprise, the iPad does, for me, the same thing to the iPhone. Whereas before today the iPhone felt like a capable, if diminutive, computer, suitable for web browsing, email, composing text, and running all sorts of applications, it now seems more like, well, a phone. A phone that can do lots of cool things, to be sure, but nonetheless, my perception of its primary identity is no longer “computer that also makes calls” but simply “phone that runs some handy utilities.” As of today, when I picture the “thing from the future that I take with me to do almost everything I can do with a laptop except write code,” I picture an iPad, not an iPhone — until, of course, the inevitable release of the device that changes my perception of the iPad.

One my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, rendered in Lego (via Brick Brothers).

Blade Runner – Tears in Rain (in LEGO) from Zach Macias on Vimeo.

As we bid ambivalent riddance to 2009, let us take care not to get trampled by the many impending surges of 2010. And for those of us who love small-to-medium-sized glowing objects, an insightful pre-analysis from Gruber on the mythical tablet/slate/unicorn to come.

It’s a hell of a thing to find one’s president on the front page of the Financial Times (above the fold, no less) kicking ass in the manner of something written and directed by Melvin Van Peebles and John Woo. I’m impressed.

My gut instinct is that if they could have given the Nobel Prize to the American people for electing somebody other than George W. Bush, they would’ve done so.
— Stewart M. Patrick

It was 1984, and we didn’t care. We burst out of the preview screening of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo into the crazy streets. The energy poured off the walls and into our brains like the United Colors. We were high on paint, spray paint, and we thought we’d live forever…

Oops, sorry. That picture isn’t of spontaneous and illicit street art from the 80s at all; it’s a picture of a very earnest photo shoot on Stillman Street from just last week. Microsoft appears set to launch yet another lovably tone-deaf and embarrassing campaign touting, I assume, the ineluctable hipness and freshness of Windows 7.

And if you look closely, you can see that all the black folk who were photoshopped out of other Microsoft ads have generously been re-hired for this one, because it’s, you know, urban.

Damon Darlin’s elegy for serendipity perfectly captures what’s wrong with the state of “discovery” on the web and on mobile.

And there is just too much information. We can have thousands of people sending us suggestions each day — some useful, some not. We have to read them, sort them and act upon them. As we pay for them with our time, the human need for surprise presents an opportunity for new businesses. Can someone sort the information and provide the relevant thoughts to the specific person who doesn’t yet know he needs it?

Yes, someone can. We’re working on it.

In fact taking on oneself too much of anything is indicative of inflation because it transcends proper human limits. Too much humility as well as too much arrogance, too much love and altruism as well as too much power striving and selfishness, are all symptoms of inflation.

— E.F. Edinger

If you need extra mental discipline or tool support to get the focus you need to do what you have to do, there’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But if none of your work is pulling you into The Zone, quite possibly you have a job problem not an Internet problem.

—Tim Bray