I'm sorry. I know I let you down. You were counting on me, on my last ditch effort to help prevent the sorry state we're now in. The buck was supposed to stop here—or, rather, not stop here.

“The most charitable thing I can say about holiday sales is that they were mixed.”

I tried. I went to the mall on Friday, the big one in these parts; I even got up early to do so. But I . I've spent perhaps more than my fair share of time in that outlet mall out west, the one with the passable entertainment attractions but no bookstore worth speaking of at all? And it felt too much like that, even though it's the big name local mall. I mean, it's nice and all, but all the clothing stores? And the Disney Store I might have considered entering had the outmost ten feet of the store not been all pimped out in princess regalia? And the mall proper doesn't actually have a bookstore either, at least not until the B&N moves from the conveniently located strip with the Circuit City, Old Navy, and the other orthogonally targeted big box into that new anchor space in Q1. I even went in the Best Buy in the other conveniently located strip, spent quite a while, and only left with the arrangement of items minimally satisficing my dad's request for what he wanted to give. I admit I did go to the new Five Guys, though, which seems to me most like the east coast's answer to In 'N' Out, bar the many differences.

Anyway, my monetary situation relative to the folks whom I would owe presents is complicated, so they're having to settle for mostly non-monetary compensation this holiday. Some people think that's fine, that the holiday doesn't need to be about gifts at all, and even if you'd call them hippies or worse, I think I would agree, if I had the luxury of imbias on the subject. And, of course, if doing so didn't let you down in your time of need.

So, unfortunately for me and especially you, I'll be spending tomorrow without the joy of either end of socioemotionally loaded non-monetary exchange of goods, but rather enjoying the company of family and perhaps some leftover turkey.

But don't worry, America. 2008 is a brand new year.

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When I said Southland Tales was beautifully flawed, I was thinking of what Nathan Rabin said when laying out his My Year of Flops series on The Onion AV Club.

To an extent “My Year Of Flops” is an extension of an A.V. Club sidebar called “10 Notorious Flops Worth Seeing”. The point of that piece was that movies that belly flop on a historic level often do so because they took huge, admirable risks that didn’t pay off. I want to defend movies that dare to dream big. I think it’s important to herald the ambition, conviction and audacity of truly epic failures while at the same time acknowledging their shortcomings.

So of course his review of Southland Tales is great.

Southland Tales is many things: a pop art glimpse into a looming apocalypse, a dark sci-fi comedy, pop-culture-damaged surrealism, and a passionate plea for the de-criminalization of teen horniness. It’s a film of rare courage and audacity, a one-of-a-kind trip through the looking glass and a surreal meditation on uncertain times and the sins of the Bush administration. It’s also a bloated, gargantuan mess—disjointed, leadenly paced, and filled with half-baked, undernourished ideas.

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So awesome: somebody finally made the mileage.info site I wanted (by accident, I assume). They called it My Mile Marker. It only took two years.

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Oh, huh, that's kind of a cool treatment for the area around the buttons. It really matches the design of the form fields.

Form-buttons

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Show us a magazine to which you subscribe.

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So I was reading news* and saw this article by Niall Kennedy about how Facebook has removed some of what they call “Pages,” profiles for non-personal entities, as “fake”—a right they reserve under their TOS—as they were unable to confirm that these Pages were created by the people and companies they claimed to represent. Some may find this an abuse of power on Facebook's part, that they can unilaterally silence someone with only a post facto opportunity to respond.

Luckily for those who may feel Facebook is overreaching, we in the larger Web community are developing a system by which regular people and companies can represent themselves to their fans and customers beyond the reach of Facebook. In fact, you may be using this cutting-edge technology already and not even know it, as many companies have been silently rolling out parts of it for quite a while now. It builds on many past innovations in the computing and internet communication space to provide a standard platform on which anyone can provide their own completely custom rich content, including images and other media, document files, and the latest page sidebar widgets from a vast array of content partners. When used in the most popular browsers, these documents can act and react with rich embedded behaviors, while preserving readers' security with an elegant domain-oriented sandbox solution. We believe the mostly-decentralized design of the system—combining pure edge-routing techniques with core concepts from DNS—will allow it to scale easily to full internet capacity; similar technology has been used in the past to rapidly provide information to vast numbers of internet users, even under extreme usage scenarios during political events and natural disasters.

I suppose it's rather brazen of us, but we in the Web community are even co-opting Facebook's own terminology for this feature. Hopefully they don't see it in their best interest to pursue this in court, as we have full and combined support behind this effort from Google, Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, Apple, Amazon, Oracle, Dell, and Sun; a wide range of publishers, creators, and advertisers; and many others in the Web space I am unfortunately forgetting.

Yes, it may take a while for these “Web Pages” to catch on, but I think we can agree that there may really be something to the phenomenon. We hope you'll like them.

* And yes, I'm reading feeds at 2AM. No, I can't recommend it; you might half-read an article and write something like this too.

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Solution to yesterday's conundrum: copy the .cpan/Metadata file from a development class machine with the same version of CPAN.pm instead of trying to build it on Slowy McSlowerson.

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• The bookmark folder command Open All In Tabs inserts the tabs into the tab set instead of replacing the tabs you have open.
• The “Would you like to remember this password?” prompt is no longer modal; it's one of those drop-down bars, so you can conveniently confirm or dismiss the option while the next page loads.
• One other thing I forgot. But it's totally awesome.

Sucks

• Selecting Copy commands like Copy Link Location doesn't fade the menu out like in Firefox 2, so it feels like the menu disappeared instead of taking your action.
• Firefox uses a lazy copying technique instead of copying content to the clipboard immediately, so if you select and “copy” something from a tab, then close that tab, when you go to paste it you find there is nothing in the paste buffer. This completely breaks my ent shortcut. (They could still use the lazy copying technique if they hooked into object destruction so it does a real copy when the content would become unavailable.)
• Earlier I saw some weirdness where I couldn't ⌘-L into the location bar until I closed a secondary window I had bookmarkleted open.
• The Recently Closed Tabs menu and shortcut weren't working for me earlier, but seem to work now.
• The ironclad rule that you should not blink a cursor at me unless you have the focus continues to be broken as it was in Firefox 2.
• As with all major version betas, you'd have to hack your add-ons to get them to work.