Rumour has it that Yahoo! are looking for a new CEO. Some people have been putting their name forward for the role, or at least offering suggestions for Carol Bartz’s successor. This post is in response to Joe Stumps list of ideas.

To be clear, I know that list is not completely serious. I know that he’s not really angling for the CEO role and I understand that many of the options would not be achievable even if they were the best thing for Yahoo! That’s not the point I’m trying to make.

I want to like ebooks, I really do.

I like that the Kindle is smaller than a real paperback but can store dozens, hundreds even, of novels. I like that you can lose the hardware device and just download the books again. I like that I can read the same book on my iPhone as well as my iPad. It doesn’t even bother me that there’s no physical product. I’m not going to re-read most of my books yet they continue to take up the limited space in my London flat.

When I travel I don’t normally take a laptop with me¹. Too big; too heavy; too fragile; too expensive; too inconvenient.

But the iPad is different. It’s smaller and lighter. The fact that it’s limited compared with my MacBook wasn’t going to a problem as I only had two main use cases for it: reading and downloading my photos.

I’m not sure if this is close or abstract enough to count as a “Macro Shot,” which is this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, but I thought that it was close enough to be a contender. It’s a picture of the dead hard disk from my MacBook.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Unforgettable.” I’m entry number 198.

It’s nearly four years old now, so I do expect the odd beach ball occasionally. When my MacBook is doing something hard or complex or just opening iTunes, it often shows its “I’m too busy to respond to you right now” indicator. But this time it was different. The beachball appeared and didn’t really go away again. Sure, it occasionally hid but as soon as I instructed the machine to do anything it would return.

• June 22, 1783: Icelandic Volcano Disrupts Europe’s Economy – It’s not just 2010 where this was a problem…
• WWDC – The Acceleration – “But at one point everything exploded and there was no way to keep up with all the new API:s and all the new things Java was attempting to do. I feel that we’re approaching that point with iOS (formerly known as the iPhone OS).” As someone who does this in my spare time, this is certainly something that I’m feeling right now!
• I’m Comic Sans, Asshole – Your favourite font responds to criticism…

• No sense of humour at all – “Personally, I’d love to see the Pope in a debate on abortion, where he would actually have to address difficult questions and defend his own ideas. Best idea yet would be a debate on various controversial topics, like birth control, abortion, the role of women in the church, and homosexuality…with the Pope on one side, and Stephen Fry on the other. It could be perfectly respectful, and it would be hilarious.”
• Audio slideshow: Hubble’s first 20 years – Amazing. Beautiful.
• Do liberals read only liberal blogs? – The dangers of the “long tail…” I deliberately go read Daily Mail headlines on a regular basis just to check that I’m sane. The moment I start to agree, please shoot me.

I just realised that there are two anniversaries this year. Neither would be worth grabbing a bottle of champagne for but they are vaguely connected and it does give me a chance to reminisce about some neat, old technology.

I forget the exact dates of both events but they were fifteen and ten years ago. Back in 1994 I first installed Linux on my 386SX-based PC. At this point in time my exposure to Unix had been only on “big” computers, the Sun (Solaris) and HP (HP-UX) machines in the Universities labs. It seemed incredible that you could even get something approaching a full version of Unix running on my little home computer.

• News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – “Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google.”
• The night the Berlin Wall fell – “For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better.” Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
• OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – “The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It’s easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It’s easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you’ve got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing.”

I normally try to be pretty positive here. Most reviews you’ll find here are of products that I’ve bought with my own money and that I’m broadly happy with.

That makes this post the exception.

You may remember that ZX81.org.uk went off-line for over twenty-four hours last month. Shortly afterwards I switched away from Adept Hosting, but it’s not only, as you might expect, because of the reliability.

I posted the following review at Review Centre: