Today in NYC people are texting as they walk into you on the street. Talking into the air, paying attention to nothing but what's going on on their screen.

Sometimes you see a parent walking with a child in the park, the parent talking into the phone and the child looking into the eyes of any available adult as if to ask "Can you believe this asshole?" Maybe I'm projecting. But the kids don't look happy. That's for sure. I wonder what kind of therapy these kids are going to need when they grow up. Used to be when a parent took a kid for a walk, the kid could ask the parent questions, or tell him or her stories about what they did in school. These days quality time is spent with a hand-held device and a parent whose mind is anywhere but here.

So now you're going to have Google Glasses do you think the hand-held device goes away? I wonder about that. Maybe you'll multi-task! Check something on Google search while texting to someone on the Android device. There might not even be a reason to be anywhere at all.

Maybe it'll all work out. Probably will.

 6/27/2012; 6:35:16 PM.

On my lunch break I watched a little CNN.

They had a 10-minute segment on what happens if ObamaCare is overturned.

What was the substance of the discussion?

How does it help or hurt Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, both of whom certainly have excellent health care.

No mention of Americans who don't.

Maybe that's why they're losing viewers.

 6/27/2012; 1:40:19 PM.

Google wants to kill this and that.

And for the next hour that's all we're going to hear about on Twitter.

Do you think they killed Amazon?

How about Apple?

Who else did they kill?

Oh my god. All this killing. I can't take it anymore I tell you!

 6/27/2012; 1:08:09 PM.

Arizona is a figment of the US government's imagination.

It wouldn't exist without massive investment by the other 49 states.

The cities of Arizona are located in the southern part of the state.

It's all desert. Hot. Arid. Nothing grows there. It's uninhabitable without water. And it has none of its own.

So how do they get the water? Check it out. We built a huge dam to create an artificial lake, but even that isn't enough to get water to Arizona because there's a mountain range in the way. So our energy, not Arizona's, pumps the water over the mountains to water the lawns and fill the swimming pools and otherwise make it possible for millions of people who used to live in Cleveland and Pittsburg to move to Phoenix, Mesa, Tuscon, Tempe and Scottsdale.

So don't tell me Arizona is a sovereign state. It's part of the United States, and if they keep insisting they're sovereign, we should just shut off their water and see how sovereign they really are.

And their electricty.

 6/27/2012; 12:56:28 PM.

A new kind of CAPTCHA.

It asks you a question that you would only be able to answer if you read every word in a story.

When you do that, the ability to comment is turned on.

Otherwise, no comments allowed.

That way you would never have to say to a commenter -- "I'm guessing you didn't read the piece."

Which happens so often that it's pretty obvious no one ever reads anything.

I'm just kidding about patenting it.

PS: Most of the comments will be How dare you patent something!

 6/27/2012; 12:36:48 PM.

Some people don't like Bootstrap, but I do.

I knew I'd like it from the first moment I tried it, because I could get it to do stuff for me the first time.

Bootstrap is baked into the world outline, so now I get to see my users have fun with it. These people are very far from the types of people who build commercial websites. They don't care if their twipsies look like everyone else's. They delight in the fact that they can make twipsies by just typing a little macro into their text. We've known users can do that since WordStar days.

But there's another reason I love Bootstrap. (Actually many others.)

I was working on creating a log for one of my apps. Just something for me and other system managers. Nothing that has anything to do with branding or other commercial concerns. Highly functional. But it looks beautiful because it's just as easy to make it beautiful as it is to make it not beautiful. So there's a little more beauty in my life. And programmers are people too, and we like to look at beautiful stuff as much as the next person.

Usually it isn't worth the trouble to make it nice. But if it costs nothing -- why not?

 6/27/2012; 8:50:36 AM.