This weeks PhotoFriday is “Open” so as I usually do, I opened Aperture and typed in the keyword. Aperture helpfully came up with… all my pictures from Copenhagen. Sigh. So it took a but longer to find this picture of an open window in Tuscany.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Contrast.” I’m entry number 249.

• Christchurch earthquake – Shocking stuff, made all the more real by the great images.
• Why Last Week’s Solar Storm Was a Dud – “If the plasma’s magnetic field is parallel to the Earth’s, the incoming charged particles are effectively blocked from entering Earth’s magnetosphere. An identical flare with a perpendicular magnetic field would have triggered a much stronger storm.”

Seth Godin has had a couple of posts recently about how to treat your best customers. One of the thing that he observes is that the way you define “best” is not necessarily the most obvious. Is a customer that pays full price always better than one that recommends your service to five of their friends?

In defining the best customers, my mind wandered to the opposite extreme, the worst customers. This reminds me of something that happened a few years ago. It’s only fair to note that I heard this “through the grape-vine.” It could be completely true or mostly made up, but where-ever it falls I think it’s an interesting anecdote.

For this weeks PhotoFriday, I thought of a picture I took a couple of years ago in Stockholm. As I usually do, I searched to see if I’d used the same image for any other challenges. It turns out I had. For a challenge titled, “Contrast.” Well, at least I’m consistent.

The above image, of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, has pretty much the same idea.

• Apple’s Three Laws of Developers – The hidden link from sci-fi books to the App Store. Only funny because it’s true…
• Biting the source that feeds you – “Keller, a journalist of unimpeachable accomplishment and stature, just had to trash a guy whose organization has struck the most powerful blow against official secrecy in a generation, somebody who may yet be jailed for what he did, an eccentric but unquestionably transformational media player.”

Then I heard about GetLocalization (whose name needs localising!), a site which allows you to “crowd-source” translations. I honestly don’t know if it will work but I thought it was a good idea and something worth trying and supporting.

• The Mac App Store: It’s an honor thing – “Apple’s approach is simple. It’s an honor thing. The company believes that, given the choice, people will do the right thing. It also understands that anti-piracy techniques don’t stop pirates, but they do get in the way of honest users.”
• Nokia’s 15-year tango to avoid Microsoft – “[PC manufacturers] found it wasn’t worth the effort to differentiate their PCs from the competition, in what had become a commodity business.” The reason’s behind Nokia’s original decision not to licence code from Microsoft in the nineties hasn’t really changed, which makes today a sad day.
• Doctor Who Infographic – Everything you ever wanted to know about Dr Who but were too afraid to ask…

Even in December, with the fog, rain and setting sun, this view of the meeting of the European and North American tectonic plates in Iceland is pretty spectacular. Breathtaking you might say. And, for the sake of this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

• The rise and rise of the cognitive elite – “It seems unfair that footballers, bankers and tycoons earn more money than they know what to do with whereas jobless folk and single parents struggle to pay the rent, notes Mr Saunders. Yet it also seems unfair to take money from those who have worked hard and give it to those who have not, or to take away the profits of those who have risked their life savings to bring a new invention to market in order to help those who have risked nothing.”
• Jaguar E-Type turns 50 – Some designs can stand the test of time. The Jaguar E-Type is one of them.
• iOS Debugging Magic – Some great iOS debugging hints.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is one you’d think I have many possible choices: “Travel.” I note that a few of the earlier entries are pictures taken while travelling which I don’t think is quite the same thing.

My entry is about the process of travel, the open road, the destination being far away. This is also a sort of timely image, since it was taken in Egypt, a country that’s currently very much in the news.