While it is purely unsubstantiated opinion, I do have an answer to why people tend to synchronise their steps. Observing a group of children walking in a park recently, supervised by two adults, I noted that the adults synchronised their steps and direction, while the children walked, ran and skipped apparently at random, running ahead, lagging behind, and deviating from the common course.

Perhaps these children, unpolluted by society’s emphasis on conformity, have not yet learned that it is unacceptable to march to your own drum.

— Todd Collins, New Scientist

Well, I’ve tried several times to write about Annette’s and my experience this last weekend, but I’m just not a narrative writer. I’ll leave that to my friend Daniel.

Anyway, here are the lessons learned, instead:

• Aimee Mann concerts are really, really, really good. Go see her if she comes to your part of the world.
• It’s good for artists to own the copyright on their own works.
• Being first in line to an Apple Store Grand Opening is very cool (if you’re a Mac geek). Except, in our case, it wasn’t so much cool as it was cold — we got there at 6:30 AM and had to camp out in windy 36°F weather for 3½ hours.
• If you and three other guys show up to the Apple Store at 6 AM but decide to go spend an hour at the Starbucks down the road, don’t be surprised if you come back and Annette and I have taken your place without even knowing it.
• 76-year old ladies standing in line for an Apple Store Grand Opening can be fascinating. Best line: “All my life I look at walls — I sit in a chair and look at the wall and then I go look out the window and look at another wall. When I die, I don’t want to be looking at a wall… I want to be doing something else — like painting a picture.”
• The new 12″ PowerBook G4 is the coolest small notebook in the world.
• If possible, do what I did and marry a Mac geek.

Welcome to the new site!

This has been Publishing Day in the Haynes household… Annette put up some pictures of our Saturday morning trip to the Apple Store Grand Opening in Dallas. The pictures have already gotten 1,200 hits and that doesn’t seem like it’s going to stop anytime soon, especially since her page is now linked from MacSurfer and MacMinute.

While she’s been watching her hit count, I’ve been finishing up this new version of wordparts. It’s now running on Movable Type, so there are some cool new features. There are some rough edges, too, but I’ll be smoothing them out as I get time.

During the entire episode, Spongebob had a tub full of water! That isn’t possible, since you can’t pour water any where, since he’s underwater! Couldn’t he just put soap on Gary and rub it on him? And why is Gary afraid of water? HE’S ALREADY UNDERWATER!

— Spongyblob22

Just some of the wisdom you can find on Pineapple Under the Sea’s Page of Spongebob Goofs.

Hi there.

I haven’t had a lot of content lately; and, yes, I’ve been busy. But at least this time it’s because I’ve been busy with the site.

I’m converting wordparts to Movable Type to get all sorts of new features, like archiving and comments. But I’m not a web developer, so it’s taking me a bit more time than I’d have liked to get all my styles applied and my pages set up and all that. I’ve never worked in a web content management system before, but I’m finally getting a good feel for how to tie in Movable Type with PHP to get the functionality I want and then host that all from my iMac.

So bear with me, I should have the site up in the new format by early next week at the latest. I’ll have some new content by then, I promise.

Thanks for reading… I hope you enjoy it.

Some beautiful and astonishing photos of Africa and India by photojournalist Ami Vitale.

(via Metafilter.)

Don’t be shy
Touch my bum
This is life!

— The Cheeky Girls, The Cheeky Song