Why is it that my stupid “smart” phone doesn’t have the brains to dial my own area code when I ‘m outside Verizon’s coverage circle? I work in an office that somehow lies about 100 yards outside Verizon’s coverage, and whenever I try to call a number in my contacts list that I didn’t enter an area code for because it’s the same as the one I live in, my phone replies with a recorded message about dialing a one followed by blah blah blah? Shouldn’t phones now have the ability to know where they are, know that they’re not in a covered area, and then append the area code to any number that doesn’t have on in my contacts? I mean really, it’s only 2010, what should it take to get this right? I hate my phone and I hate cell phone companies. every time I run up against this obstacle first I curse, then I hang up, then I redial. This has gone on for longer than I can remember.

Moving on, today is the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man. Shit I feel old. I grew up on Pac-Man. Google acknowledged this by adding a sweet Pac-Man game to their generic home page so check out google.com (don’t use the personalized version) for an awesome JavaScript version of the game. Here’s a tip, hit “insert coin” twice to add ms. pac-man to the game and have two players clear the board.

Oh and in case you missed it, Google unveiled a sweet step forward in the web fonts arena with a simple way to use non-standard fonts in your site. Check out http://code.google.com/webfonts for the full run down and some examples. If you ask me, while this is cool and could be quite helpful, I still think that this whole web fonts thing is still too open ended. There are far too may way to try and get fonts to render properly in most browsers and all these solutions and workarounds just fee like they’re skirting the real issue which is being able to use any font on the web. The font foundries fear that they’ll lose money from designers and developers using fonts on sites and visitors being able to download them and then publish their own magazines with them without paying for them. The whole thing just feels kludgy and unnatural and that includes Google’s solution.  There’s got to be a better way.