Ezra Klein, the Washington Post wonderkid who thinks the Constitution is hard to read and stuff had this snarky, gotcha question for the Republican debate tonight on twitter:

Question for #Econdebate: “If we had the prime minister of Slovakia on the phone right now, what would you tell him? You first, Mr. Cain.”

Ahh, the classic stump-the-Republican-dummy question. Not really relevant for an “econdebate”, but no matter. Klein then completely wins the internet for the week with a very quick follow-up:

Correcting last tweet: PM of Slovakia is a her.

Absolutely priceless.

I downloaded Mac OS X Lion the day it was released, but held off on installing it since I was traveling and far from my backup disk (yes, not smart, but also not the point). I’ve never been one to install a new OS on day one anyway. I usually wait a few days/weeks to see if there are any major issues. Let the fanboys be the lab rats, I say.

Well, it paid off when I came across this post at Ars Technica about many users of 2010 MacBook Pros having major video issues and “black screens of death.” The article points to this thread on the Apple Support forums, that as of this writing is a whopping 104 pages, all filled with posts by very frustrated users complaining about the issue. Most people had little to no problems under Snow Leopard and now the only explanation/recourse path given by Apple is to swap out the logic board.

I have a 2010 MacBook Pro and it is the best computer I’ve ever had.[^1] I haven’t had a single problem with it under Snow Leopard and there is nothing new in Lion that makes want to get anywhere near this issue.

One thing I did learn was that the Mac App Store did update my Lion installer to 10.7.1 when it was released. We’ll see if a future update addresses this.

Update (25 Oct): Apple acknowledged the issue with an article here. And according to CNET, they have issued a software update for Lion users. Unfortunately, Apple’s KB article says that if this doesn’t work, users need to get in touch with Apple support for a diagnostic test. A problematic course of action for me since I live overseas. The original forums post is up to 129 pages now, with results for this patch being mixed. Still holding off for now.

I’m a big fan of the bookmarking site Pinboard and I often peruse the ‘popular’ page to see what links other folks are squirreling away. I would venture that a majority of Pinboard users lean towards the nerdy/web developer type, until recently that is. The Pinboard developers explain why in a recent blog post, and I won’t ruin it other than to quote this gem:

If you wanted to read a 3000 word fic where Picard forces Gandalf into sexual bondage, and it seems unconsensual but secretly both want it, and it’s R-explicit but not NC-17 explicit, all you had to do was search along the appropriate combination of tags (and if you couldn’t find it, someone would probably write it for you). By 2008 a whole suite of theoretical ideas about folksonomy, crowdsourcing, faceted infomation [sic] retrieval, collaborative editing and emergent ontology had been implemented by a bunch of friendly people so that they could read about Kirk drilling Spock.

That’s one of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.