Kim Flournoy

I love companies with a personality and sense of humor. It’s something that I need to aspire to in my own business dealings - I tend to fall back on bland and corporate, perhaps due to many years of working in Washington DC where everyone is always being proper and trying to avoid standing out in any way.

For example, I just upgraded to the latest version of BBEdit, and was reading through the features list, when I noticed this item:

Ponies.

That’s it, just “Ponies.” There were some other fun comments in the list, such as:

You can now review and apply sub-line differences individually in the results of Find Differences.
Yeah, you heard that right.

I sent in this message to support:

These two features made it totally worth the price of upgrading:

- You can now review and apply sub-line differences individually in the results of Find Differences.
- Search and replace history is now persistent across runs of the application.

Thank you!!!
-Kim

(PS - am unable to find keyboard shortcut for Ponies, please advise)

A few hours later, I received this message back:

Hi Kim,

Thanks for writing in, and for you very kind words about BBEdit. We’re glad you’re so pleased with the upgrade!

(As for the ponies, they broke free from the corral before we could assign a key to them, but we’ve sent out some TextWranglers to bring them back. :-)

If you have any further questions or comments, or if we may otherwise be of assistance, please let us know.

Nice!

From The Chron:

“…toward the end of Prohibition, The Chronicle estimated that 6,000 speakeasies sold beer and liquor illegally in San Francisco. Enforcement of the liquor laws was so lax in the city that Shanty Malone’s bistro on Turk Street occasionally staged phony police raids to keep the customers amused.”

(Can’t believe I spelled that right on the first try…)

Imagine if Al Bundy, while going through an acrimonious divorce from Peg, decided to conduct a series of bitter Photoshop tutorials - you’d have something akin to “You Suck at Photoshop”.

This morning I learned to use paths, and I feel great about my marriage!

Amy Poehler and Will Arnett had a son this week, and one of the articles linked to this video from the ‘Blades of Glory’ DVD with the two of them talking about (among other things) how funny their kids might be:

I don’t know how much good ads like this do, but they do help lighten up this increasingly depressing campaign cycle:

I actually have no idea how my parents are voting this year, but they live in a heavily blue state and thus it doesn’t really matter one way or the other…

“I don’t usually bikini-wax my comments, but I will!”

(Thanks to Maggie):

I watched the first 15 minutes or so of the VP debate, and then just couldn’t take it anymore (I started shouting the first time Palin winked - winked! - at the camera, and just got more steamed the longer it went on). Eventually I found a few minute-by-minute commentaries, which allowed me to skip ahead to the important points and ignore most of the blathering.

Anyone else think these debate broadcasts should employ Pop-Up Video technology? Especially during the McCain/Obama debate last week, I really wished for running citations or some other method of fact-checking - perhaps a scroll at the bottom of the screen, or some kind of picture-in-picture with the debate in the top corner and the facts presented in a slideshow.

Otherwise, it’s really difficult to make an informed decision when two candidates are calling each other liars about who voted for what, and how many earmarks their district received. If you don’t feel like waiting until the next day and then wading through multiple articles trying to find something relatively unbiased, then all you’re left with is to try and read body language and listen for who makes a more persuasive argument. This unfortunately tends to reinforce any preferences you already had, so if you were leaning towards Obama, you’ll probably give his statements more credit (whether or not they are factually correct).

I think Jamie has the right idea - save yourself two hours of annoyed viewing, and just read a summary article about the debates the next morning and then go on with your life.

I am so lucky that Jamie is a stoic:

If things were really this funny, I might ever consider working there: The Microsoft Office (with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant)