I went to do laundry today, and I saw a tiny, reddish-brown speck sitting, right on top, on a shirt. And it moved.

I took the shirt upstairs, grabbed my camera, and started taking pictures. Well, it was lively, and it was determined to get down, underneath that shirt. And eventually, I let it, and it crawled around on the glass of the table, and I could watch it from underneath.

I took the shirt away, and took more pictures as it edged closer to the edge of the table. I shouldn’t have been surprised when it dove off, down into the thick carpeting. And I shouldn’t have been surprised when it burrowed in.

And I must have looked ridiculous with the vacuum cleaner hose in my hand, with the shirt stretched over the nozzle, sweeping the carpet, trying to catch that little guy. I must have sounded crazy, muttering to it that if only it would let me catch it, I’d take it outside, let it go, and never bother it again. But after a few minutes, I had to let it go, and go put my clothes in the laundry.

And I started thinking about how we’re a race of beings who have a deep desire to impose order on the world, who gain deep satisfaction from looking around at our homes built to our specifications, and seeing everything where we mean it to be. And it sucks, because the world isn’t like that. There are other creatures living in our houses, and when we see them we try to kill them, or move them, or keep them out. But there’s a limit to what we can do — there are still creatures too small to see, living in our houses, living in our clothes, in our hair, on our skin, and even inside us. And we get so uncomfortable when we see something new, which was always there but we were better off not seeing, because there’s nothing we can do. And that’s OK, becuase it makes the world so damn interesting.

The word “free” appears five times on the iTunes Store’s App Updates screen, plus once per app.

In episode three of Dan Benjamin and John Gruber’s podcast, The Talk Show, Dan Benjamin discussed some iPhone users’ first impressions of Android (emphasis mine):

I had a fun conversation with Dave Nanian, the SuperDuper guy … he was saying that he’s gotten together, I guess, there’s a whole bunch of these cool Mac users up in Boston where they are, and he got together with them and said, you know, they were all trading around their phones, and Dave has like one of every phone that comes out, cause he’s, I guess he’s [Gruber: He's a real junkie.] yeah, he’s wealthy too, he just buys phones. [Gruber: It's kind of awesome.] Yeah, and he basically goes out there and buys whatever the phone is, and so he brought he cache of phones with him, and I guess he was saying that the people at the table, who were, for the most part, iPhone, Mac people, the way they would evaluate the phone, they pick it up and they page through the different pages of the screen, and if it wasn’t fast enough, then the phone sucks. Like, that’s how they evaluate the phone: “I move my finger and it didn’t keep up with my finger, so I can’t use this phone, this is horrible.” And that’s like saying, “Oh, this amazing plasma TV is unusable because, you know, it doesn’t change channels fast enough for me”, or something. And there’s all kinds of things that people place importance on.