WTF indeed.

Personas was launched a couple of weeks ago, and it’s been received well. On the Personas add-on page on addons.mozilla.org you can already see 1.3 million downloads with 922,000 of those coming in the last seven days. Wow!

The response to Personas is great, and I hope we can find more ways to get people excited about the extensibility of Firefox. I thought about some of the key factors to its success:

• Easy to install, fun to use
• Unique and personalized but not intrusive
• Easy to create your own
• Makes an obvious change to your browser

It’s awesome to see what’s going on with Personas — congrats to Mozilla Labs and the Personas team. Looking forward to what’s coming up next!

Ever have a hard time finding your damn bag at the airport? It’s probably because there are a bunch of morons standing in front of you. And guess what? None of them are actually grabbing their bag — they are just making it impossible for you to find yours.

Fortunately when I travel I usually don’t have to deal with this since I don’t have a checked bag. But every once in a while I do have to check a bag (like last week). When this happens, I inevitably find myself standing behind 15 people, unable to find my bag. Right about then I tell myself, “I need to write an angst-filled blog about this to add another post to my airport rage series.” Well, here’s a diagram for you:

A few things I want to point out:

• All the cool people are behind the line
• Don’t be “that guy” standing right next to the carousel expecting his bag to come out faster because he’s standing closer (wtf?)
• Everybody wins

Any questions?

Yesterday I got into an argument with someone over whether or not you can catch your own airball. Guy on my team threw up a layup and it barely missed the rim. He picked it up and layed it up. Traveling?

Surprisingly, no, it’s not traveling anywhere except the NBA. Though in most games at Rucker Park I’m guessing they’d call it a travel.

So this made me think of other rules that I commonly get into arguments with people over. Here’s the top 5:

• Catching your own airball is allowed if it was a legitimate shot unless you’re playing your pickup game according to NBA rules, which makes you a douchebag.
• The top and side of the backboard is not out of bounds, only the back-facing plane of the backboard is.
• Step-throughs are not traveling. An initial jump-stop with two feet makes either foot eligible as a pivot foot. Therefore the act of jump-stopping with two feet, choosing either foot to pivot and stepping through with the opposite foot is a totally legal move even though it may appear to be traveling to an idiot.
• The playground hesitation dribble is a fucking carry. You know that move that “all-star” ballers use on you? They bring the ball back, turn their hand over like they are going to shoot it and when you crowd them them resume their dribble and go around you. Well, that’s bullshit and it’s double dribble because they already picked up their dribble.
• A player can’t touch the ball until they’ve established legal position. If I’m out of bounds and I jump back in, touching the ball before my feet hit the floor, I’m still out of bounds and I just turned it over to the other team no matter how much I complain.

Of course, none of this matters, because in pickup games the person willing to be the biggest bitch about something usually gets their way. Doesn’t make them right, though.