Maybe it’s because I’m getting older and pay more attention to the news than when I was a kid, but it seems like every year there’s a report of someone getting trampled or getting into a fight over this year’s must-have item. This year is no different.

In New York, a worker at a Wal-Mart was trampled to death after the crowd of 2000 people outside pushed their way in through the locked doors. When I first heard the story, I thought it was probably some elderly greeter at the door that couldn’t get out of the way. It wasn’t…

It was a 34-year-old temporary employee. 34! That’s my age. Insanity.

The first thing that came to mind is what in the hell is wrong with the people who gathered outside the store that couldn’t act like normal human beings and wait until the doors were open? What was so important that they had to bust through the doors and crush this poor guy trying to pick up some cash over the holidays? Perhaps the most telling part is this quote from the article linked to above:

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’” she said. “They kept shopping.”

Seriously? Your shopping is more important than this man’s life? You should all be ashamed of yourself. I know it will never happen, but I’d like to see all of these people rounded up and arrested. The fact that people stepped over the guy as he’s on the ground dying infuriates me to no end.

Get over yourselves, people. While you were rushing to get the gifts your family “has-to-have”, this guy was on the floor dying. His family is going to spend the holidays completely devastated while your kids will plant their fat asses in front of the big screen TV you had to have for $400 off list-price. I hope what happened today haunts all of you selfish assholes for a very, very long time.

• AIM (Free)
• Air Sharing ($6.99)
• AroundMe (Free)
• Classic Tic Tac Toe ($0.99)
• Cro-Mag Rally ($1.99)
• Elevens Balls [1]
• ESPN Cameraman (Free)
• Facebook (Free)
• Flick Bowling ($0.99)
• Fuzzle ($0.99)
• Goodrec (Free)
• Google Earth (Free)
• I Can Has Cheezburger (Free)
• iDrops ($0.99)
• IGN Game Reviews (Free)
• Kiwi ($0.99)
• Last Call (Free)
• LED Football ($0.99)
• LocalEats ($0.99)
• MLB.com At Bat (Free now that baseball season is over)
• Mobile Fotos ($2.99)
• MySpace Mobile (Free)
• NetNewsWire (Free)
• Panolab (Free)
• PDX Bus (Free)
• Play-By-Play Football ($1.99)
• Remote (Free)
• Rooms ($0.99)
• ScoreMobile (Free)
• Shazam (Free)
• South Park Imaginationland ($1.99)
• Tweetie ($2.99)
• Twitterrific (Free)
• Urbanspoon (Free)
• WhitePages Mobile (Free)
• Word Up! ($0.99)
• WordPress (Free)
• WordSearch ($2.99)
• YPmobile (Free)
• 300 Bowl 3D ($1.99)
• 1337pwn Xbox Live Friends (Free)

[1] - No link because Elevens Balls appears to have been removed from the App Store.

What do you have installed?

Tiff and I after the ceremony., originally uploaded by jmock.

I can’t believe I forgot to post this before, especially since I put the pictures up right after the wedding. Anyway, here’s a collection of wedding photos from Tiff’s family.

We haven’t got the “official” pictures back from the photographer yet, but when we do, I’ll post those too.

AP Photo/Morry Gash

In what turned out to be a landslide, tonight we elected Barack Obama to become the next President of the United States. Tonight, we decided enough is enough. We decided that we want a fresh start, and we decided that we don’t want more of the failed policies of the current administration. We decided that we want change.

To everyone who voted and volunteered, no matter who it was for, thank you. Thank you for being part of history. Thank you for supporting what you believe in, and for exercising your right to make your voice count.

To Senator McCain, thank you for a very thoughtful, gracious, and respectful concession speech.

And, finally, to President-Elect Obama, thank you. Thank you for giving myself and countless other people hope that things can actually change. Thank you for proving to everyone that what matters isn’t the color of your skin, but the values and vision for this country that you hold. Thank you for inspiring millions of people to share their voice and, most of all, thank you for inspiring me and giving me hope that all isn’t lost when it comes to the state of our country.

Tonight, we—together as a country—made history and, for the first time in my life, I’m proud to call myself an American.

Happy Halloween!, originally uploaded by jmock.

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t seem to get it to track any downloads. After fixing some permissions issues, I was able to download the files in question by going directly through the wrapper that the pepper uses, but it still wasn’t working from the projects page. After searching Google for a while and finding no help, I was becoming extremely frustrated. Then, I remembered something…

I had configured Mint to not track my own visits.

As a test, I turned that setting off and tried again… and it worked! Since I didn’t come across this information anywhere in my search as something to check, and since I completely forgot I told Mint not to track my visits (it’s a checkbox in the Mint preferences), I wanted to make sure I documented it for myself and others. So, if you’re having problems with downloads displaying in Mint when using this pepper, make sure you’re not ignoring your own visits like I was :-)

After doing some research, I decided to use YUI for the implementation. Why? Why not :-) Here’s what I came up with…

By the way, for those of you who want to jump directly to a working example, you can find it here. View the source and it should have everything you need to make it work. For those of you who’d like an explanation of what’s going on in the sample, read on.

The HTML

The first thing you’ll want to do is come up with the HTML you want in the different tabs. You can have as many or as few tabs as you’d like. Here’s a snippet of code from the example (it builds two tabs):

<div id="demo-tabs" class="yui-navset">
    <ul class="yui-nav">
        <li class="first selected"><h3><a href="#tab1">Tab #1</a></h3></li>
        <li><h3><a href="#tab2">Tab #2</a></h3></li>
    </ul>
    <div class="yui-content">
        <div id="tab1">
            <ul>
                <li><a href="#">Foo</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Bar</a></li>
                <li><a href="#">Baz</a></li>
            </ul>
            <p>Don't you know about the bird?  Well, everybody knows that
            the bird is the word!</p>
        </div>
 
        <div id="tab2">
            <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
            Fusce non sem tincidunt dui consequat ultrices. Quisque ipsum
            eros, varius at, porta nec, egestas et, justo. Proin ut odio
            ut neque dictum mollis. Fusce augue. Duis dictum semper risus.
            Phasellus vulputate malesuada turpis. In quis nunc eget nisi
            lacinia tempor.</p>
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

The javascript

Once you’ve got your HTML in place, you’ll need to add a few lines inside the <head></head> of the document. These include a stylesheet and the javascript needed to make the whole thing work. Add the following to your document:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/tabview/assets/skins/sam/tabview.css" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/yahoo-dom-event/yahoo-dom-event.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/element/element-beta-min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://yui.yahooapis.com/2.6.0/build/tabview/tabview-min.js"></script>

Now you’ll need to build a tab view. Since the id of the div in the example is demo-tabs, you’ll want to use that. Add the following code below the javascript you added above:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var myTabs = new YAHOO.widget.TabView("demo-tabs");
</script>

Styles

When it comes to styling the tabs, you’ve got a few choices. You can either use your own like I did in the example, or you can use the built-in styles from Yahoo!. To use the built-in styles, use a class of yui-skin-sam on the body:

<body class="yui-skin-sam">

Conclusion

That’s about it. Don’t forget to check the example to see how things work. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

For more information on YUI and TabView, see the Yahoo! Developer Network.

Note: Please let me know if you have any issues with viewing the syntax highlighting above. I’m trying out the WP-Syntax plugin.

The screen

Originally, I had a few reservations about “downgrading” from a 15″ MacBook Pro to the 13″ MacBook, with the big one being the size of the screen. After using the 13″ for the past week, I think I’ve adjusted pretty well. Some of my desktops (I use Spaces… a lot) are more cluttered than they were on the 15″ with the same windows open, but that’s to be expected with the smaller size. Overall, going down in screen size turned out be much less of a deal than I thought it’d be.

Another concern I had with the screen was that the matte option was no longer available—even on the Pro models. I don’t do much work while outside in the sun, but I do have a window to my back while sitting in my home office, so I was worried that the glare would be pretty bad. It took a few days to get used to the glossy screen—that’s for sure—but now that I’ve used it for a while, I don’t really mind it. On the upside (at least as far as price is concerned), the lack of a matte option on the Pro models helped me decide to go with the MacBook instead of the MacBook Pro since I couldn’t get a matte display on the Pro either.

The body

I don’t have much to say about the new “brick” manufacturing method, but it definitely does feel like the machine is more solid compared to the older, multi-part chassis.

The keyboard

I’m definitely liking the single-key-per-hole chicklet keyboards the new models have (the previous MacBook models and the MacBook Air had them, but the previous Pro didn’t).

The trackpad

This is the only place where I’ve had some issues. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like the new no-button trackpads don’t always respond to clicks (the pad definitely clicks, it’s just not recognized). That said, it definitely seems more responsive if I click in the bottom-center of the trackpad versus the bottom-left where I’m used to clicking. I’m still getting used to it, so it could just be the positioning of my hand when I’m clicking. The problem seems to come and go, so I may end up taking it in to the Apple Store this week to get them to check it out to make sure that it actually is me and not the trackpad itself.

On the upside, the new gestures work as advertised and I’m really liking being able to bring up the application switcher by putting 4 fingers on the pad and swiping.

Lack of firewire

This is a huge deal-breaker for some people, but the only firewire device I have is an external hard drive that also happens to be USB 2.0-compatible, so it’s really a non-issue for me. If you absolutely need firewire, you’ll need to get the new Pro model (and if you’re doing any serious video-editing or audio recording, you should be using the Pro anyway).

Final verdict

Overall, I’m definitely pleased. Everything feels snappy with pre-installed 2 GB of RAM vs the 4 GB I had in the MacBook Pro, and the brightness of the display is stunning. These machines are definitely gorgeous looking. With the exception of the trackpad issue I mentioned above, I’ve had absolutely no problems at all and would definitely recommend looking into the MacBook if you’re in the market for new laptop. If you’re looking for a decent, well-taken-care-of used machine and are in the Portland area, drop me a line… I have a 2.2 GHz 15″ MacBook Pro for sale :-)

Voting for hope, originally uploaded by jmock.

My vote has been cast. Has yours?