When Daniel Jalkut blogs, I usually agree with him and/or learn something, but I disagree strongly with his praise for the new Microsoft ads featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates. I disagree so strongly that I briefly wondered whether Daniel was being sarcastic.

For my taste, the ads fail at the level of basic comedy. The timing is off and there is no chemistry between Jerry and Bill.

In the latest ad there is something deeper and uglier that bothers me. The premise is that Jerry and Bill need to get back in touch with regular people — people who don't live in a "moon-house" or own a fleet of cars — and so they've taken up residence with a suburban family. From this I would expect self-deprecating humor that shows how out of touch they are.

But many of the bits of business in the ad make fun of the family, not Bill and Jerry. The father wonders if Bill has ever had something as humble as scalloped potatoes. The mother thinks celebrities need fancy mustard (an impression Bill and Jerry actually confirm). The granny is a wacko. In the end, Bill and Jerry's experiment fails because a family member sabotages them.

The ad starts out pleasantly enough, with the father taking a very reasonable attitude about the car in his neighbor's driveway. After that, there are maybe two moments I liked: Bill showing the kid the top-secret app, and the recurring bit at the end when Jerry says "If it's yes…" For the rest of the time, I found all the characters — Bill, Jerry, and the family — pretty unlikeable.

[Minor update, 2012-07-10: The YouTube link to the ad is now "private", so I replaced it with one that works.]

I noticed the speeches from the Democratic and Republican conventions are available on the iTunes Store.

Click on the Democratic icon and you get a nice list of "selected" speeches. They're all available in audio, and the major ones in full video. You can double-click any speech to start it playing immediately. If you want to put the speeches on your iPod, you can either download them individually or download the entire collection by subscribing to a single podcast.

By contrast, to watch or listen to the Republican speeches you have to first subscribe to one or more podcasts. This strikes me as a gratuitous extra step, especially annoying since you can't start playing a given speech until it downloads completely. Offhand it sounds like the audio quality is poor compared to the Democratic audio. On the other hand, the Republicans provide a larger number of speeches.

Lonely Planet's free Mandarin Phrasebook for the iPhone tells us how to say "This is my boyfriend" in both a woman's voice and a man's voice. The phrase "This is my girlfriend" is also spoken by both a man and a woman. But the phrasebook's apparent gay-friendliness only goes so far: "This is my husband" and "This is my wife" are only spoken by the woman and the man respectively.

What's odd is that most of the other phrases are spoken by a single gender. I've only skimmed the app for half a minute, but the dozen or so phrases that I checked were almost all spoken by the man, including "My handbag was stolen" but not "My jewellery was stolen," which is spoken by the woman. The phrase "I've been raped" is the only other one I've found that is spoken by both voices.

Note that the exact same words are spoken by the man and the woman. It's not like there's something that has to be pronounced differently. Why do they assume it suffices to have one person pronounce most phrases, but that other phrases need to be heard in two different voices?

I just read Scott McCloud's comic explaining Google Chrome, and I found myself reacting much the way I do when Steve Jobs reveals something new and amazing, like the iPhone, in one of his famous keynote presentations.

I was excited by the content, which had some of the best attributes of a "Stevenote" announcement:

• We decided to rethink an old problem from scratch.
• Here are some of our developers to talk about it.
• How do people use this thing?
• What are the biggest problems with the way it's been done traditionally?
• Innovative solutions.
• Sometimes less is more.
• It's available now (okay, in beta, and only on Windows, but Google betas aren't really betas, and they're working on the Mac version).

I was equally excited by the medium — the comic format used to present all this information. Back in the 90's, McCloud's Understanding Comics revealed aspects of comics as a storytelling art form that added a whole new dimension to the graphic novels I was reading. I remember being fascinated by the concept of the "gutter" — the space between frames of the comic — because in that space are the implied transitions between frames that your brain fills in.

Years later, I saw that McCloud was still doing interesting stuff. I particularly liked his autobiographical comic, My Obsession with Chess.

How fitting and clever it is for McCloud to use his particular talent for communication to explain Google Chrome. I am sure every page was as meticulously thought out as a Steve Jobs slide show. I wonder if other companies will try to use comics in the same way, and I wonder if this will create a whole new category of job opportunities for talented comic artists.

UPDATE: the comic URL I gave above doesn't let you jump to a specific page, or get a URL for a specific page that you can send to someone. I just noticed you can do those things here, but the graphics are not as sharp.

Once in a while, just for grins, I like to browse the apartment listings on listpic.com, which bills itself as a "visual classifieds browser." As far as I can tell it's basically a wrapper around Craigslist (though not affiliated with it) that presents a convenient user interface for browsing listings with photos.

Today, for extra grins, I decided to browse the apartment listings in Honolulu instead of New York. The first hit for apartments under $1000 was a furnished two-bedroom for $800 a month. In New York, you couldn't rent a coffin for $800 a month. And the kicker? This place is in my old building in Waikiki. I used to have a little studio there with a lanai and pretty blue tiles in the bathroom.