Reading this New High-Water Mark in iPhone Jackassery on Daring Fireball made me realize something about the iPhone that I hadn't considered before.

Yesterday I watched The Art of the Start on Google Video. One of the points was to not be afraid of polarizing people.

When you create a product or service that some people love, don’t be surprised when others hate you. Your goal is to catalyze passion—pro or anti. Don’t be offended if people take issue with what you’ve done; the only result that should offend (and scare) you is lack of interest.

The iPhone touch screen is exactly that: polarizing. Some people love it because of its simplicity and beauty. Others hate it because you won't be able to type without looking at the screen (and perhaps it will be difficult even when looking).

The "Jackass" in question in the Daring Fireball article claims that Apple will be a target of class-action suits when some teen crashes his car while texting. He probably doesn't believe such a suit would ever get filed – at least one that doesn't get thrown out by the judge – but that it's something dramatic to say to illustrate why he hates the touch-screen concept. Or maybe he doesn't hate it but knows that such an opinion will get him some airtime.

Fans of Flickr and students of startups will enjoy this talk from Caterina Fake, the History of Flickr.

I'm amassing a Mozila and Apple based waredrobe. Today I wore my black Firefox t-shirt with color logo (not to be confused with my black Firefox t-shirt with grey scale logo) and had at least three comments.

The first was the guy–he was probably 19–working at Einstein's who wouldn't take my order without first saying, "Mozilla Firefox, my dad uses that." I replied, "Well, everyone should use it." But what I was thinking was, "God, I'm not that old." It brought back memories of that scene in Back to the Future II where the kid says his dad told him about video games.

The next was the semi-goth girl at Hibachi-San who said she likes my shirt and loves Firefox.

The third was Bernard who said even our desktop/server manager who is starting to like Firefox more than IE (hell's getting cold but not frozen over yet).

No more "Great OS X apps" posts on this blog because I'm maintaining my list of active and (of course) recommended applications at IUSETHIS. I discovered that site after Scoble switched to Mac and put out a request for suggestions. I'll add apps as I go so this will be the evergreen source of recommended apps.

Maybe you heard me tell you that the supposed problems with Wii wrist straps was a bunch of hooey. There's no way, I reasoned, after the strap breaks there would be enough energy left for the thing to fly across the room and break your TV.

I stand corrected.

Last week I was playing a game of Wii Sports bowling and bumped the controller into my leg, lost my grip, and the controller went flying…right at my new LCD Sony TV! Except it veered a little off course and landed in the cabinet inches from disaster. It certainly was going fast enough to do some serious damage.

I immediately ordered the replacement straps and put Wii playing on hold.

The replacement came quickly and with a new reminder to wear the wrist strap properly.

So for all the stalwarts, check your straps and order replacements.

I've started to have a real problem with comment spam. For a long time I thought I was going to get a pass because I use a home-grown blog system, not MT or WordPress. I was wrong!

In the last 6 months I have over 2000 comment spams. Until now my only protection has been a general ability to turn comments off on a per-post basis and single IP address banning. That's not going to be effective in the long term.

For now, I found lots of lists of other peoples IP ban lists and have included 7000+ addresses from Gloved.com.

The next step will either be moderation – which could become a torrent if the spammers hit and would need a way to deny a large list in a single step – or some hurdles to posting like a simple math problem. I hate the image-based validations and eliminating those too dumb to do arithmetic might be a nice bonus.

“What's really behind a Steve Jobs keynote”

I've noticed several of these old videos with Steve wearing a suit (with or without bowtie). When did he go all jeans and black turtlenecks?

The Cube announcement features the new-Steve. Sometime between 1996 and 2000? He seemed to be in transition in 1997.

Todd finally got Netflix. I've been a subscriber for almost five years and in that time I've never rented from another store—I hate Blockbuster's late policies and the whole traditional due date model of rental. We've also cut back on theater attendance, mostly because I hate people talking during the show and kicking the seats. It doesn't hurt that most movies, even the good ones, are out on DVD within 3–6 months and renting through Netflix is a lot cheaper.

They've had some recent bad press where terms of service allow them to slow the fulfillment of discs to very active customers but I haven't had that problem or see that as "evil." Perhaps Blockbuster's online service is equivalent to Netflix's but I've been with Netflix so long without a problem that I have no reason to bother trying anything else.

I wonder if Todd's been a pure theater goer until now or if he's yet to discover the benefit of subscription movie rental.

And if you are a Netflix subscriber, invite me to your Friends list! I only have five friends. What a loser I am!

Last night I had a dream that I had won a $500 million dollar lottery. Today B&H Photo, the best camera store in NYC, sent me an email newsletter featuring the new Hasselblad medium format digital camera:

The Hasselblad H2D-39 kit, which includes an 80/2.8 HC lens and related software retails for $29,994.95. The Bentley Continental GT retails for $164,995. Life is short. Enjoy.

I certainly thought about buying all the camera equipment I've been wanting but never considered buying a camera and car totaling almost $200K! Of course, I woke up before I could spend much of it. And in my dream I didn't get this great email from B&H.