Here's a little something for the Blown-Eyed-Blodger meet down in Austin. Me and the little lady would've loved to be down there with you maniacs, but we couldn't. So she made a cake.

View the video.

Enjoy!

By the way, you can subscribe to the YouBitch video podcast. Or, if you've got iTunes, just click here to get that Sunday Evening Zen fix you've been craving.

Now here's a great blog. On the downside, it's over 40 years old. On the upside, it was written by Arthur C. Clarke, during the conception and filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey. An excerpt:

December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.

Man, what I wouldn't give to sit at a table in 1964 New York, drinking beer with William S. Burroughs, Arthur C. Clarke, and Alan Ginsburg. Maybe I could've talked them out of Naked Lunch, the last 20-minutes of 2001, and being such a flaming little jew homo, respectively.

I haven't lived in the States for a while, now. I moved out in the late '90s; sometime in 1997, I think, but I don't really remember anymore. I do have vague memories of childhood, though, where we were scared to death with stories of The Future. The Future would be a rocky place, we were told in the '70s, where the twin dangers of explosive overpopulation and International Communism would conspire to destroy our freedoms, and deny us access to the things we held dear, like Kristy McNichol movies and The Band.

This, of course, stood in blatant contrast to the earlier optimism of Star Trek, which taught us that not only was the International Communist Conspiracy bound to win, they were also in no way planning to ban the mini-skirt in military uniforms, as we'd been told. In fact, it would bring unending peace to our troubled race, except for a spate of conflict in the late 90s, when a gang of genetically-engineered Supermen with shaved pecs would try to bend mankind to their will with the crack of their rich, corinthian leather whips.

Luckily, Star Trek never happened. The population bomb was a dud, and now we're even faced with the dreadful specter of underpopulation. The Earth will be a fiery ball of superheated carbon-dioxide and sulfuric acid by the end of lunchtime, and there, at the end, will be Dick Cheney, laughing maniacally while poking the buttocks of human history with a trident made of iron.

So, then. And what did you guys dream last night?

If you were wondering what a great blog looks like, look ne further. My ne, that gut.

I declared myself done with the desktop metaphor 10 years ago. It bores me, almost as much as the browser metaphor.

For my younger readers, let me explain. "Folders" are those bizarre little yellow things that are depicted next to the plus/minus sign in Windows Explorer. The whole "Folder" thing was invented 30 years ago, by a company called Xerox, to ease the transition from the paper-oriented office, which was at that time the dominant type, to that of the digital variety. They decided that normal office workers could never be expected to visualize the arrangement of bits of data on a hard drive in any meaningful way, so they figured they'd represent them with little pictures of "folders". Folders were, at the time, the way people organized their pieces of "paper", which is a sort of thin film made out of "tree", upon which things used to get "typed".

The "Folder/Document" metaphor has no meaning nowadays, of course. People born after 1980 will have no idea what a "folder" is used for in the real world. When confronted with such a beast, they'll no doubt grope around for 7 or 8 manila folders, label them "To Sort," "Unsorted", and "Stuff", then try to find a way to nest them, as users do. Nor will they have any conception of the "typewriter", or why such fonts exist as American Typewriter, other than making films like Seven. So isn't it time, at last, to ditch the 1970s metaphor that controls computers today? It broke down long ago.

Hilariously, the Apple Macintosh, which is widely considered the ideal user experience, actually has a metaphor for the Computer inside the computer itself:

That first link, "ericbook", is an icon on my computer representing, you guessed it, my computer. A recursive metaphor? The mind boggles. I realize that noone's perfect. Windows 95+ also has a "My Computer" link, for example, presented, strangely, on the same logical level as the "My Documents" link.

"To xerox", in my youth, was a synonym for "to copy." 30 years later, it seems that everyone has forgotten what the original point of the whole thing was, and has settled on copying Xerox. Recursion, squared.