Over the past few months there have been a number of protesters spotted at various local Apple store locations, but I have to give it up to these guys (MTD Drywall, from Gilroy, I believe). Not only did they go to the effort of building out a full-on disgruntled union-protest iPhone costume (with near-accurately placed “proximity sensor” eye-hole), they also came up with the snappy phrase, “No service… for workers!” Clever. Full size version over at my Flickr stream.

It’s kind of funny how this guy — like so many bloggers — just kind of breezed in and rattled the cages of both piss-taking tech journos and high profile tech moguls. And his dealings with Forbes should be taught in journo school: during the day he was asking his editors for a long overdue raise and promotion (which he was denied), at night those same editors were courting the still-anonymous FSJ over email. Dan does seem to get that FSJ has a half-life, though. Forbes has a year deal with the blog, but it didn’t sound like he’d want to carry on with it forever — which is probably for the best (although I know a lot of people hope he will). Sometimes you need to end things before it’s over, you know?

Me? Some self-inflated part of me likes to think I gave Fake Steve his big break (and started the whole stupid “Real whatever with Fake Steve” meme — here, here, here, and here, and so on). But let’s face it, the wit and humor that hooked all the early-reading tech insiders was pretty irrepressible, and classic satire needs no help.

They want to deliver vast amounts of commuters over the Bay Bridge. And again, the Bay Bridge is not something you just explode something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of roads. And if you don’t understand those roads can be destroyed and if they are destroyed, when you put your car in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that road enormous amounts of cars, enormous amounts of cars.

Instead it’s the same spin they try and put on all these stories. (And I should know, I’ve shown up on Valleywag more than once.) They know they totally screwed up, crossed the line, and committed a completely sickening cardinal sin of “citizen journalism”, but instead they fire back with an ad hominem attack. At best, they’ll give a totally disingenuous public apology that’s so sarcastic you’d think it was a teeth-gritting four year old paying lip service — and maybe, just maybe, they’ll fire-but-not-fire Megan.

What happened is defamatory, slanderous, and strictly nauseating. It sets the entire blog community back. These are peoples’ lives, this isn’t a joke. And it’s exactly this kind of stuff that makes it hard for professional blogs and bloggers to get taken seriously. I think if Kevin wanted to legally pursue this, he’d probably find he has a case on his hands. For all our sake I kind of hope he does.

Myself? I like to think I represent the Fortune 50 crowd of coffee shop drifters. It might be a little more pro to sit at home surrounded by gear and papers and such or — god forbid — report to AOL’s downtown offices, but I’ve been working virtually since 2002 (with a stint in 2004-2005 working in an office, I quit for Engadget in 2005) and man, sometimes you really just need to get out of the house and be among the peeps!

Today I was at a local florist where the conversation, oddly, turned to the draft. Mentioning the shooting that occurred just a few steps away from my apartment, one rather corpulent white man mentioned to his two pals that he had his iPod had been robbed by a black youth a couple blocks away, and that laptops are routinely being stolen from the coffee shop around the corner; his disenfranchised middle-class white pal started in under his breath: this generation needs a draft to thin out its numbers, get the dregs off the street. Both cronies agreed. Having some small background in cultural studies and liberal arts — and still being of prime drafting age — I bit my tongue and flashed a dirty look as I left, seething.

Was I really at a florist in the Lower Haight in San Francisco? Is this really how people feel? That my generation’s “wasted youth” would be better served in Bush’s war(s) in the middle east? I… I don’t even know how to end this post, but I should probably do that now before I really fly off the handle.

Not surprising at all, but Niall and Om managed to sell out their Widgets Live! conference, at which I’ll be moderating the hardware panel featuring Michael Maia (PortalPlayer) and Steve Tomlin (Chumby). Should be lots of fun, hope to see you there!

Well, it’s all over — a month of planning, finagling, sacrificing small animals to my MacBook Pro, and begging our techs to please, please not let us go down this time. We stayed up for the first Jobsnote ever (I’m definining “up” as available 100% of the time with absolutely no lag, delay, or indication that we were at abnormal traffic levels). I know that sounds absurd, AOL firepower and all, but let’s put it this way: the last Jobsnote I covered back in February, we actually melted and destroyed an enterprise-class router. But not only did we stay up, we had probably the best Jobsnote ever; teams, coverage, content, it all just coalesced. (Can you tell how much I’m glowing?) Our readers seemed to think so too, rewarding us with millions of page views (thanks everybody!). But if you thought today was fun, just wait until later this month — we’ve got some real fun stuff planned. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to nap, and when I wake up I’d really rather not think about frickin’ Apple.

• LA is still hot and you have to be silly to live there (but good people keep me coming back).
• Surprise birthday parties are fun to plan, but way more fun to watch go off.
• I’ve switched to a Mac full time — and yet I somehow found a way to max out my 2.16GHz / 2GB RAM MacBook Pro to the point of total doggedness. (Who would think blogging is so demanding? Am I doing something wrong?)
• If you’re in a movie theater and there’s a bomb scare, don’t expect to be evacuated. At least if you’re watching that movie at the Metreon. And to think I might have died watching a Kevin Smith movie… for shame!
• I learned I probably have way too much monoamine oxidase A in my body.
• Engadget is going to start watermarking images. We’ve only done it once in the past, but since literally dozens of sites thought it would be cool to rip off our Zune photo, it’s got to be done. I promise we’ll never do it such that it detracts unnecissarily from the experience.
• Digg is suffering major bloat. After V3 launched search, for example, became almost unusable, but I’m also seeing another strange side effect of the site’s success. Yesterday the Zune was officially confirmed, and no fewer than 50 Zune-related stories were submitted to Digg. Only one story made it to the front page; it was not the official announcement, but a bit of information on the project that was leaked and posted hours before. People are trying to so hard to get their name on the digg front page they’re forgetting the point of pushing up the news.
• Good people are hard to find. Seriously. Ever consider a career in gadget blogging?
• I’ve personally been victim to new Bayestian “literature” attacks, which I highly advise you watch out for if you ever get spam.

I am sincerely humbled that my pals Michi and Emily are throwing me a going away party this Friday, and additionally humbled by the awesome invite Michi made (number and address erased to protect the innocent!). How wonderful are they? Anywho, shoot me an email or something if you’re gonna try and make it, I’ll get you in touch with the event’s fantabulous coordinators.

Man, it’s been a few weeks, hasn’t it? Well, they’ve been busy. E3 was crazy, hellish, and fun; somehow Paul, Joystiq, and I all managed to make it out alive, which is a real bonus consider the fact that for a few nights there I thought I might keel over from exhaustion. Interviewing Shigeru Miyamoto was absolutely wonderful — totally got to tick that one off from my 100 things to do before I die list. Afterward V and I drove up to NorCal; a week after I came back, Engadget’s Senior Editor and my good friend Marc Perton made his planned departure to his awesome new job (though I see he hasn’t yet written about it on his blog, so I won’t spoil the surprise as to where that is). We’ve also brought on a bunch of amazing new writers in the great summer blogger hunt of ’06 (whose names you’ll be seeing a lot more of on Engadget in the coming weeks). So yeah, things have been busy around the office.

See, I told you lots of crazy stuff was going down at work; at home, too. Yes, the rumors are true, I’m moving my ass out to San Francisco. Why? No, it’s not some Web 2.0 renaissance thing; chalk it up to five long years (and a few days) spent in New York, the coming deadly humid global-warming-enhanced summer, the certain charms of a particular lady, and the ever constant pressure from the fam to move closer to home (that’d be SoCal). I may yet come back to the Big Apple, we’ll see, but I’ve been wanting to get out of New York for the past couple of years now, so it seems like it’s time. And yes, I’ll still be the Managing Editor of Engadget. Date: June 16th. See you on the west side! I’ll miss you New York, and New York peeps!