Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

Brent is off to an early start on Report-an-Apple-Bug Friday ... so I'd better get on the ball.

This week's bug is inspired by the recent interview with John Gruber. He mentions that Lucida Grande, the system font on OSX, needs an italic version. (Well, technically, an oblique version since it's a sans-serif font.) What he said! It's crazy how Safari substitutes Helvetica Oblique for it, too (see below). I have been lamenting this for years, but it didn't occur to me to submit it as a %#$#$# bug report until now! So now I have .. bug 4223632.

Lucida really needs a true oblique variant, not Helvetica!

So why don't you, dear reader, do the same. (Use this if you don't have an Apple Developer Account.) (Hopefully, John will too.... he may never be Chief UI designer or Chief UI Critic at Apple, but he, like you, can have some impact.

(By the way, I will miss next Friday for this exciting series. If all goes as planned, I will be nowhere near a computer then. So please carry on without me — don't let me down — and I'll resume the following week. I have some great ideas about difficulty deleting songs in iTunes and photos in iPhoto to report...)

When I was a kid/teenager, I was an avid stamp collector. Years later, postage rates are almost triple what it was, all stamps seem to be self-adhesive, and the topics on the commemoratives rarely seem that interesting.

But I've noticed some nice new geeky stamps. At the post office, I found this quartet. Von Neumann? Richard Feynman? Coooool.

And let's not forget last year's stamp of Bucky Fuller. Probably the weirdest stamp I've ever seen!

And now, the geekiest, available end-of-September: Muppet Stamps! I'm going to have to get hundreds of them!

(Note: Never buy stamps online through the mail; get them at your post office. When you buy them through the mail, they are individually packaged in cardboard and plastic. Just about the most wasteful packaging I've ever seen. Harumph.)

Take a look at the link at the bottom of this page ... it's abuse@your ISP. Cool, it's a spam trap. The email conversation on the aforementioned page, about somebody mistakenly thinking that they were being linked to, is amusing....