Doug's Blog

Apple is going to buy Yahoo! At least that’s what I tweeted earlier this month and tried to convince smart guys Dan Wallace and Tim Elliott Wednesday night after a few glasses of wine. BusinessWeek this week reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are in talks to make Bing the default search engine on the iPhone. My take is Yahoo! would be a better fit for Apple because it competes with Cupertino on fewer levels than Microsoft.

Add to that all the rumors swirling around next week’s Apple product announcement. Assume for a second Apple releases a tablet and that, technologically, it’s an absolute knock out (that would require at least solving the battery life and user interface questions). In order for the tablet to succeed it also needs content, just as the iPod never succeeded until the iTunes Store was born. Yahoo! is essentially already a content company, one that has contracts with many other content companies. Google recently pulled Associated Press content from Google News. What if Yahoo! (i.e. Apple) became the exclusive online portal to AP content? There are already rumors Apple has worked out a deal with The New York Times, albeit not an exclusive one.

Some people say Apple is a technology company. But that discounts the fact that they’re already the largest music retailer in the country.

And then there’s advertising. Apple’s recent purchase of Quattro Wireless shows the company knows it needs to have a holistic approach to wireless, but it’s going to take more than some herbal healers for Apple to really compete against Google and AdMob. In might just take Apple getting into the search ad business in a big way; buying Yahoo! and it’s ad network would certainly be one way to do that.

Last but not least among the reasons the two companies are a good fit is the cloud. Apple has been struggling in cloud computing for a long time. When it relaunched the stagnant .Mac service as MobileMe it was with many hitches, and a year and a half later MobileMe still underwhelms. Google’s numerous cloud offerings all serve as additional points of advertising presence. Apple’s best bet could be to buy Yahoo!’s data centers and network infrastructure knowhow if it want to compete seriously in the cloud.

Nick Bilton at the Bits blog just put together this great chart showing where Apple, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! compete. Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Nick?

The trailer for David Simon’s “Treme” is up and it only serves to heighten my excitement about the show. Too bad I don’t get HBO — I might just have to do something about that.

Are you feeling a little blasé this Monday? Shit got you down? Kick off your week the right way by installing the new Jason DeRusha Bobblehead on your Facebook profile.

Thanks to my colleague and artist-extraordinaire Gerardo Obieta for drawing Jason. I’d like to add a punching bag function to this, but that might hit a little too close to home for Jason.

I have a tendency to complain about first-world problems on Twitter; it’s not something I’m proud of, but I’m certainly not the only one with the problem.

Lately I’ve been complaining about Facebook’s “Suggestion” box, the intrusive little widget of the right side of the main stream page. I won’t spend anytime explaining why it infuriates me so, but suffice to say it was really pissing me off.

Today I wrote a Greasemonkey script — my first-ever Greasemonkey script — so I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. It’s called No Suggestions.

If the “Suggestions” box irritates you as much as it did me, I welcome you to install it from Userscripts.org or my project page. Just remember you’ll need to install Greasemonkey for Firefox first. (I was informed via Twitter that No Suggestions apparently also works with Opera.)

As of this writing, Userscripts.org shows nine installs of No Suggestion, so I’m apparently not the only one who hates that box.

More on Greasemonkey

No Suggestions is an extremely simple script. Anyone with some basic JavaScript experience can get started with Greasemonkey, and that was certainly my only qualification this morning. I read a top-level summary of what I needed to know from Dive Into Greasemonkey and got started; about four minutes later, I was done.

After some testing, I noticed the script was only working about nine out of 10 times. Turns out Facebook loads the contents of the “Suggestions” box with JavaScript, and Greasemonkey was occasionally firing before the box had loaded. That was fixed easily enough by adding second method for hiding the box (adding a CSS declaration). Ten minutes total. I suspect it won’t be my last Greasemonkey script.

If you have any other good Greasemonkey scripting resources or ideas for what I should script next, please leave them in the comments.

Last night I dreamed of a better world where we could all watch “Jeopardy” whenever we wanted. I dreamed of a simpler time before The Clue Crew. It was a world where Jeopardy.com let us watch every episode of “Jeopardy” that has ever been made, and we could search them all by question, answer, category and off-hand comments Alex makes. And we never had to be bothered with an episode of “Kids Jeopardy,” “Teen Jeopardy,” “College Jeopardy,” or, the most terrible one of them all, “Celebrity Jeopardy.” In this world, there was a way to play along at home without annoying all your friends.

Make it happen, Merv Griffin. Make it happen, Merv.

(Full disclosure: I did not dream of “Jeopardy” last night, but doesn’t this sound like a great world to live in?)

On paper The Lyndale Tap House looks like it would be my kind of place: a dark but welcoming neighborhood gathering spot with an ample selection of tap beers and a dedication to better-than-your-average-pub food. The Lyndale was on my list of places to visit anyway, but with Emily and Conner coming to its defense recently after a half-star review by The Heavy Table, stopping in became a higher priority.

The first thing you’ll notice if seated at one of the many high-top tables is the lack of places to hang your coat; there are no coat hooks and most of the stools don’t have backs. Come on, this is Minnesota, and it’s getting cold outside.

I was ready to forgive this oversight when the sound system pumped out two Bowie songs in a row (“Fame” and “Suffragette City”), but the music quality went south after that. It was looking like The Lyndale would have to be judged on its food alone.

The legs and thighs came covered in an habanero barbecue sauce. The sauce was tasty enough, but I was woefully underwhelmed by how spicy it was; if you’re going to make a big deal about your habaneros, I expect them to light my mouth on fire.

Next up was the pit beef, which Emily said she thinks about “all the time.” This is a apparently a Baltimore classic, and just one of the “pit” items on The Lyndale’s menu.

Probably the nicest thing I can say about the pit beef is that it was tasteless, which is to say it didn’t actively offend my taste buds, but instead, eating it was akin to biting into a flavorless stack of protein set lovelessly between two halves of a soggy kaiser roll. Emily described the beef as “amazingly tender”; my experience was quiet the opposite, with medium-rare beef that was far too chewy. Even the onions and horseradish sauce didn’t give the pit beef much of a kick.

The fries, too, were soggy and unimpressive. If this is what passes for regional comfort food in the Charm City, then the dystopia of “The Wire” suddenly makes sense to me.

I have to agree with The Heavy Table on this one, but I’d be ready to give The Lyndale a second chance in a month or two if they’re still open. In the meantime, if I’m hankering for really delicious roast beef, Whitey’s is still my spot.