As of July 1 it is illegal to drive holding your cell phone in California. As much as I yell “hang up and drive!” from my car (only when the windows are rolled up) this video makes a really good point.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my experience with American Express customer “service” that lead me to end that relationship. Seth Godin has had a recent customer “service” experience with Verizon and makes some key points.

Here’s the big lesson, I think: The person calling in is a person, a customer, potentially a blogger, potentially the CEO of a company you might want to sell to tomorrow, and yes, the person you’ve spent all that time and money marketing to.

Told you it wasn’t scalable

Techcrunch reports that twitter is scraping ruby on rails to rebuild with another platform based in PHP or java. (what, no python? its 2008 after all)

A framework on top of another framework puts you in a hole real fast. An airplane that had two frameworks would be really hard to get flying. One framework, one skin, and engines baby…lots of engines.

Amazing - Biggest Hard Drive Crash of All Time

When the space shuttle Challenger blew up on re-entry, one of the fragments recovered was a hard drive that housed data from one of the on-board experiments.

You would think that a massive explosion followed by a hard fall of several miles would render the hard drive useless, but amazingly they were able to recover it.

You can never go wrong with a Seagate drive. I managed to burn one up one time when I was young and stupid. It was completely my fault though.

Link to Story: http://blocksandfiles.com/article/5056

Not So Amazing - BSG Prequel Details

Details are emerging about a pilot for a potential BSG prequel series. They started to bait this during the BSG “Razor” feature. The style and writing will translate well but much of the magic of the current series is around the colossal genocide and religion themes that will just not be possible to match in the setting that they are talking about where there are no humanesque cylons.

Link to Story: Battlestar Galactica Prequel Lands Esai Morales

Handier than you’d think

Flash on linux has a problem. It is always the top layer. These days many web sites - including my bank and my airline, have flash windows that overlap their design boundaries in the style sheet and they rely on flash being cropped behind the other layers. Its bad design of course but I found a way to solve the issue on my own.

Out of desperation I sought out and found This Firefox extension that disables flash until you click on it. Originally I just needed it to access the Delta site as their flash was blocking the login box - but surprisingly this add-on has proven to be a real improvement - even on Windows.

You should install Flashblock and take it out for a spin. No more flash ads - everything is in its place. Your computer fan doesn’t kick up when you go to a web page that’s overburdened with flash. You really don’t even notice its there, but your browsing experience improves dramatically. If there is a flash thing you want to see (like a YouTube video) you can add YouTube to the whitelist or just click the “f” logo and watch.

You can grab it here.