Flickr’s blog recently highlighted an amazing series of photos of lounging dogs.

Well, Charles can do that too. He just prefers to lie on top of someone.

After hearing all about the “Grip of Death” associated with iPhone 4 and its ability to bring network signals and download speeds to their knees, and ultimately inspired by Marco Arment’s own testing, I decided I’d try it out myself. Rather than seeing slower download speeds, mine seem to get faster when covering the antenna gap.

A few points:

• Clear’s wifi is at times awesome and at times horrible. It was horrible tonight.
• In my particular environment, the “Grip of Death” appears to be quite invigorating for my download speeds despite a one-bar drop in signal. The average DL speed was virtually unchanged from when it was sitting there untouched.
• It looks like the worst thing I can do is a) use my home wifi, or b) hold my phone other than how I would normally hold it.
• I am an antenna.
• While writing this post, I noticed my bars alternate between two and five simply due to AT&T’s network peculiarities. I wonder to what extent this GoD problem is exaggerated simply because of signal strength variations that happen on their own.

Note to presenters: If you use unqualified terminating phrases like “To summarize,” “Just to finish up,” “In conclusion,” “And for my final slide,” or “I’ll leave you with this,” and/or you put up a slide titled CONCLUSIONS or SUMMARY or both, you had better be pretty close to done with your presentation.

If these occur with 20-30 minutes left in your talk, especially if your talk was only supposed to be 15 minutes to begin with, even worse.

For the next month, if you bump into me or touch me in any way, I will fall to the ground, roll several times, and cover my face with my hands.

I will assume a fetal posture and will remain in this position for an uncomfortably long period of time, certainly for a longer period of time than a simple bump would warrant.

I will for all intents and purposes act as though I am dying or have already died, except to grab at my ankle(s) and make as agonizing a face as possible, in which case I will only use one hand to cover my face, or to scream out loudly.

I will cry real tears if possible. If not, I will simply look as though I am crying, but just assume that I really am because you have hurt me badly.

I will check my ankle, abdomen, nose, forehead, and abdomen again to see if I am bleeding or if I have sustained any fatal blows.

If you offer me your hand to assist me in standing up, I will not take it. If I am able, which will almost never be the case, I will wave you off with my one good remaining limb (failing this, with slight eye movements back and forth to signal that I am still conscious but only barely and that no, I do not wish to stand up at this time, and especially not with your help, you violent bastard who have just committed the most heinous crime against humanity that I have ever witnessed).

After an absurd amount of time, I will call into the vicinity of this incidental contact the training crew that I have temporarily hired, who will briefly assess me, be unable to calm me down, if uncontrollable, or rouse me, if unresponsive, and eventually carry me to an adjacent area on a flimsy cloth stretcher.

Then I will get up and go about my business.

Just so you know.

There are a few Starbucks locations I’ve found in Chicago that seem not to have the customary two-hour limit on their AT&T wifi internet connection.

Webster/Clybourn, Chicago
Roosevelt/Wabash, Chicago (Update, 6/9/10: Seems to be limited to two hours now.)
Jackson/Wabash, Chicago (Update, 6/10/10: Seems to be limited to two hours now.)

If you come across another location that gives free wifi internet access for longer than two hours—not just in Chicago, but anywhere—get in touch with me and I’ll add it to the list.

Ever since updating Chrome for Mac to v5.0.375.55 a few days ago, I’ve been getting these weird overlay boxes that show up on certain pages. They don’t scroll with the page, but the content appears to be functional underneath. Even weirder, when I do scroll to uncover the hidden content, clicking on the overlay itself, which stayed in place, invokes whatever was underneath it to begin with. When I go to click on the original content with the overlay displaced, the overlay pops back into its original position.

In other words, after I’ve scrolled (second image), clicking on the box itself brings up the attachment window; hovering over the actual Attach File link pops the overlay box back into place (reverts to first image).

Happens in Analytics too. There’s an annoying box covering some of the stats, but I can still see daily stats even while hovering over the box itself.

Strange. Anyone else? Appears not to have anything to do with any of my extensions, either—FlashBlock included—nor does it happen in Safari or Firefox.

Backstory: In high school, I had a lot of trouble getting up in the morning. I’m a legendary sleeper, and I regularly slept through whatever extra-loud alarm clock I was testing out that month, even when it was going off inches from my face. (In college, I even slept through a fire alarm in my fraternity house. It, too, was inches from my face.) I also have the extraordinary ability to get out of bed, walk across the room, snooze a sounding alarm, and get back in bed, all without waking up or having any recollection of any of it happening at all. (In college, also in my fraternity house, I was once found vacuuming the downstairs living room—my weekly chore—at 1am in nothing but my boxers. I have no memory of this; I was asleep.)

What did work to wake me up, though, was people screaming my name at the top of their lungs. Hiring assistants to yell at me every morning is not very sustainable, so for Christmas one year, my mom bought me perhaps the best and most life-altering gift I’ve ever received: a voice-recordable alarm clock, into which people could scream my name repeatedly, rather than having to scream into my ears every morning. I’ve used it, or some variation of it, basically every day since. The original has long since petered out, though it lasted well into medical school; I’m now using my iPhone to blare my own name, much to my wife’s chagrin.

Behold:
Download

Why we went to Paris, really. Also: This must have been a preset texting template in her phone, right? Given her track record?

Hôtel de Ville’s statue of Étienne Marcel, a Paris government official whose life, according to Wikipedia, “came to a sticky end, lynched in 1358 by an angry mob after trying to assert the city’s powers a little too energetically.” Apparently it was the right amount of energy, though, to have a statue erected in his honor.

Find a bank for me to rob! ON nD campus a H says”I can see mself going here”! Buds just coming out channeling Dad…..

Translation:

Find a bank for me to rob! On [Notre Dame] campus and Hannah says, “I can see myself going here!” [God, her father is such an asshole.]

See all issues here.