The Kennebec Journal has a story this morning on Steve Jobs' impact throughout the state of Maine. 

http://bit.ly/n8ZQM5

The Guardian's reported that Steve Jobs will materialize at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Fran next week. Cool! We wish him the best of health. Here's the story, but a spoiler alert: The story explains some of the things Jobs will show off, in addition to himself: 

http://bit.ly/jlNUsL

We don't know if Microsoft or Adobe has more frequent updates to their software, and this mini rant is probably an extension of our annoyance with Growl we posted a couple of weeks ago, which granted is like centuries in Internet Years, but it's annoying. To be prompted for updates. Every freaking time you turn on your computer. Or try to use it.

Too frequent updates are the new Clippy by our reckoning.

Message to Adobe and Microsoft, and for that matter Apple, though it's not our experience that Apple are as egregiously update crazy: Group the updates together unless the update you need to push out for Acrobat Reader or Silverlight is going to save my life or bring immediate and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians. Then stopping everything, or in the very least slowing everything down t-o   a   c-r-a-w-l, is ok. Really. Please. It's not like your software doesn't crash anyway. And we have stuff to do besides updating your software. Like using it.

Good, short article in Forbes on design. Less is more. It's what makes Hemingway's writing really awesome. 

http://onforb.es/izbkUe

Of course, some people will not read the article beyond the headline, and they'll say (a) "Nike and Apple are great, but I can't afford Nike's sneakers or Apple's computers, so I guess I'm stuck with my crappy stuff," or (b) "Jobs is so Zen saying such a plainly true thing." Zen here not being Zen Buddhist specifically but a generalization for a non-Western religion religiosity Westerners, mostly upper-class Westerners, have liked to think they identify and have even tried to identify with since The Dharma Bums was published.  

But yeah, less is more. 

Yeah, I know Thursdays are supposed to be when we go ga ga over Apple. But yesterday the Packawhallopites gathered round the tube and watched an episode of Scottish comedian Bill Connolly's good Journey to the Edge of the World where Billy meets with a bloke in the Klondike who's gone slightly bonkers running what we would deem to be a rather elaborate one man gold mining operation with his only company for unimaginably long stretches of time being some pretty formidable-looking heavy gold mining machinery.

By "bonkers" we mean in the sense that the bloke's social skills – and, yes, no one's social graces or utter crash-and-burn clumsiness should be judged while being on-camera and being addressed, even extremely good naturedly, by a comedian talking thick Scottish – are kind of gone. Billy jokes and wants to touch the little flecks of gold collecting in the washer. The gold bits looked spectacular on TV. If we were there, in the Klondike, surrounded by the huge rusting machinery of what realistically should be a 10-man gold mining operation, seeing these bits of sunlight we'd really want to touch the gold too.

So, Billy makes, or jokes, like he's going to touch the gold and that wouldn't it be sensational if one or two crumbs stuck to his fingers the way batter from fried Mars Bars breaks off and sticks to the fingers when you're trying to eat that weird confection. The gold miner, who'd been joking up to this point too but who we suspect was not really quite able to follow all of the rapid fire Glaswegian, immediately gets defensive. Bam! Change! Jeckyll and Hyde, night and day, Lennon and McCartney. No, Billy. It's pretty clear you shouldn't even joke about touching the bloke's gold dust. After doubtless tough calls in the editing room to make the scene look a little less awkward and to show the gold miner in a more sympathetic manner, the bloke's on-camera change still makes Billy look like he's just been tossed into the cold Yukon.

And today we see that Apple has sailed past Google as the world's most valuable brand. Good for Apple. But our dreams, like the dreams of a lot of other people, of buying into the Apple gold rush (buying stock, that as) are kind of gone. We'll throw ourselves in to the cold river and enjoy it.

http://bit.ly/mS8oxr

Though we've been doing Blogawhallop for a little over a week it is nonetheless a tradition that Thursday's news are Apple-related. We just decided it! Traditions have to start somewhere! And, to be perfectly honest, it gives us Packawhallopites a respite from whatever bat s**t crazy thing our current governor has been up to... we want to say "this week," but the guy and his band of merry men are on a roll, it seems, and usually the antics come each and every day.

Back story: Packawhallop is based in the great state of Maine, and unless you've been like the poor saps in the funny Geico commercial living under rocks you might be aware that Maine's biggest export right now is a seemingly endless stream of material for Comedy Central courtesy of the state's executive branch. It's good stuff. In an "ah geez ess", teeth grinding, hand wringing sense. 

So... Apple. The first news bit is Apple's response to their saving user location data in their mobile devices (a.k.a. iPhones). Here 'tis: 

http://bit.ly/l7UEHZ 

And here is the story, tiny by more objective - it not coming from the Apple Battlestar, from NYT: 

http://nyti.ms/jgPRdG

Because if you do you're not alone. According to Apple's financials there are more and more (and more and more) of you. Check it out:

http://bit.ly/ggYVym