Goodnight, sweet Freehand, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

No-Spec.com.

Because you're not a charity, you're a professional.

This article on Slashdot about the excessive amount of LED lights on PC's and assorted peripherals made me realize just how LED-free all my Macs are. Aside from one on the front that gently pulses only when powered down, both my iMac and iBook are LED-free (although the iBook has additional one that shows the status of the power cord connection).

That's one of the hallmarks of good design: Don't throw out useless information in unrecognizable formats. Does the average PC user really know what all those LED's really mean? Do we really need to know 24/7 how often our PC's hard drive is spooling up and down?

Keeping the main thing the main thing is what seems to be lacking in the PC design world.

The Strobist points out another reason why you should always read the fine print:

"If you happened to catch the first version of the Microsoft photo contest post earlier this week (before it died a grisly death in a hail of comment fire) you saw the now infamous "Rule Number Five. This little paragraph basically demanded all rights to all entries, forever and ever, amen."

Sadly, this is a fairly common practice. Beware of ANY online photo contest: Make sure you read the rules very carefully. For instance, stuck inside the rules for a Kentucky Tourism photo contest is this little gem:

"13.All entries become the exclusive property of the Kentucky Department of Tourism and will not be returned to the photographer. The Kentucky Department of Tourism reserves the right to use the photographs in printed materials promoting Kentucky tourism without paying compensation to the photographer or the subjects."

So even if you don't win, they get to use your stuff in their ads.

Umm, thanks, but no thanks.

Happy 50th, Helvetica.

Count me among those who like it's clear, easy-to-read functionality.

Ok, so the Microsoft - Yahoo! buyout thing looks like it might be a non-starter.

That's not stopping Google from going after the users of Yahoo!'s popular My Yahoo portal page with their new "iGoogle" personalized homepage.

Nice.

The Boston Globe picks over the corpse of MTV, and it ain't pretty.

The money quote:

"The fact that Viacom has a billion-dollar lawsuit pending against Google for using Viacom properties on YouTube, and the fact that it let News Corp. buy MySpace in 2005, only reinforce MTV's lagging reputation. Shouldn't MTV be out in front, rather than the Jan to YouTube's Marcia?"

Ye-ouch.

I'm way ahead of the curve on this one, because I stopped watching MTV in the early 90's once Nirvana made the term "alternative" irrelevant. At one point, MTV was the leader in exploiting what's cool, but now the users of social network sites like blogs, MySpace, FaceBook, Digg (and in some ways, American Idol) are determining what's cool, not a focus group.

The deer now have guns, and it looks like the stuffed head of MTV may soon be up on the mantle.

So Microsoft is trying to buy Yahoo! (again).

One company's hopelessly stuck on selling platforms, and the other's hopelessly lost in an old-media mindset.

How will this help them against their common foe, Google?

And not only is he good at panoramic VR's,

he's a fairly well-known actor, too.