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The internet makes our lives harder sometimes, don’t it? If you’re cheating on your wife, for instance, you’ve got to come up with not only a plausible explanation but also one that isn’t easily debunked with Google.

See, a wife suspected her husband of cheating on her. She sneaked a peek at his iPhone and found an e-mail to a woman with an attachment. That attachment was a picture of him, uh, having a good time dancing with himself. He swore up and down that he went to the Apple Store and the Geniuses told him it was a known issue that random pictures show up as attachments in the sent mail folder but that the e-mails aren’t sent.

She posted the query to the Apple Support forums.

Whoops.

I was really hard on Automattic and the launch of WordPress 2.5. I went so far as to install the Fluency Admin plugin so that I didn’t use the admin panel unless I had to (using IE at work). I even installed Movable Type and Textpattern on my Macbook (using the indispensable MAMP) to see if they were suitable replacements, which they weren’t.

When I heard that Automattic was messing with the admin panel again in 2.7, I had a certain sense of trepidation. I decided to go ahead and bite the bullet and see what it was all about. I installed the 2nd beta of 2.7 locally, and you know what? I fell in love with WordPress all over again. Most importantly, gone is the circa 1999 admin panel. Halleujah!

The admin panel is gorgeous. You can see screenshots on the official WordPress blog. Most importantly the write panel has been fixed. The amount of scrolling has been drastically cut down. Tags and categories are back to the right of the writing box rather than below it. There’s even a “Quick Press” function on the main home screen that allows you to knock off a quick post without even going to the full “Write” panel.

Though, the coolest functionality may be the automatic update. Basicallly, if you’ve used the automatic plugin update functionality, Automattic has applied it to the “trunk”. I got a notification this morning that the Beta 3 version of 2.7 was available. I pushed the button to update the install, and within 30 seconds I was running the 3rd Beta. It was really that simple. It even goes through an “update database” step, so there isn’t an extra click for that (like my current host’s automatic install and upgrade). You can see if your host will support the auto-update here.

Given that I was so hard on them for 2.5, I wanted to thank the team at Automattic for hitting a home run in 2.7. I can’t wait until it is released in full so I can update this site.

One of the reasons I love the Wall Street Journal is the thought provoking non-business news that it provides. Today’s installment is on the science of migrating rubber duckies.

Basically, a scientist that used to work at NASA designing space robots decided he wanted to know how fast glaciers were melting in Greenland. He couldn’t find funding, so he released 90 rubber duckies on top of a glacier with an e-mail address and reward information taped to their backs.

Apparently, it’s just one example of what they call “flotsam science”. Basically, you take any piece of flotable junk, put it in the ocean, and track it. There’s even a trade journal for this branch of science, though it only has 600 subscribers.

It’s a free article and it shows how little we really understand the planet.

• Thank you vets for doing what you did so I didn’t have to. #

Yves Smith (of Naked Capitalism) has a fantastic article on the latest AIG handout at the new TBP Cafe. Take 10 minutes and go read the article. If you’re not furious at the end…well, I really don’t know. I can’t see how this “new deal” is anything but bad, but I’d be glad to hear rebuttals.

• @moogleworld wow, am I glad we dropped XM. That lineup bites. #

On Whaddya Know?

-The bad news is that unemployment is at a 14 year high. The good news is that President Bush is on the list.

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are