Amid all the hubbub around Steve Jobs's stepping aside for a few months, I finally see a reference — albeit a one-word reference — to his skills as a negotiator:

Jobs is widely viewed as Apple’s chief innovator, dealmaker, leader, deeply involved in minute decisions, inextricably tied to Apple’s brand.

The iTunes Store and the iPhone are widely recognized for technical and design excellence, but I doubt they could have happened without Steve's ruthless negotiations with the music companies and AT&T, respectively.

The above quote is from an Edible Apple article that quotes RBC analyst Mike Bramsky, who lowered his target price for AAPL to $70.

In John Carpenter's horror movie The Thing, the main character is called Mac (short for MacReady) and a supporting character is named Windows.

The movie was made two years before the first Mac was announced, and three years before Windows 1.0 was released.

I noticed this a few years ago, and was reminded of it today when I watched the movie again on Hulu.

I just found out how to drastically shorten the delay between closing my laptop and seeing the pulsing "sleep" light:

[W]hen my Mac goes to sleep I have to wait for it to write most of the 4 GB of RAM to disk. A fellow engineer just showed me a faster way to make the Mac sleep […].

Like Mike, I like to be sure my laptop is actually sleeping before slipping it into my bag so it doesn't run down my battery or dangerously overheat. I just did a quick test, and this tip reduced my wait time from over 40 seconds to about five. That long wait really detracted from the feeling of having an on-the-go machine.

I save frequently and compulsively, so I'm not worried about losing data if I accidentally let the battery run down, which is pretty rare. It usually happens precisely because I didn't didn't have the patience to check that the laptop was really sleeping, though a couple of times it was because I had unknowingly jostled the lid open while it was in my bag. The biggest pain about losing my RAM state would be waiting for my dozens of browser windows to reload, but I seem to be doing that regularly anyway when Firefox suddenly decides to get flaky.

I also plan to check out SmartSleep, mentioned in the comments.

(Via Ranchero.)

The subway station near my office is almost completely filled with these "I'm a PC" posters — I'd say twenty of them at least:

It seems to me they're just begging for someone to do this:

(I did this with Create. No actual ads were harmed in the making of this blog post.)

Everyone's voice needs to be heard.