Firstly, don’t make fun of my music tastes.

Secondly, I think this is the ideal iTunes Browser view.

I basically live in iTunes DJ, and I still love listening to whole albums. Grid view is my favorite view in iTunes because I can see more albums all at once.

The problem with Grid view, especially if you have a large collection, is that you can’t really filter it well. If I want to filter by genre I can only do one genre at a time.

What I really want is a way to have this genre column in grid view. You can’t do that now.

There’s a lot of excitement, but I think this part is huge news:

“Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, said Portal 2 project lead in the press release. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.”

Sounds like what Valve is going for is something like: Steam is to Games as iTunes is to Music.

And if that’s the case, if you’re a developer why would you use any other game engine?

I think Valve is about to sell a lot more Source licenses.

• Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service To Mac
• SOURCE

If every American went to one of these doctors regularly, health-care costs might come down as much as 5.6 percent a year, saving $67 billion, according to one estimate. Yet we don’t have nearly enough doctors to make that happen, and fewer are being produced every year.

…The reason behind America’s doctor gap is a matter of money. The average income in primary care is somewhere in the mid-$100,000s, which sounds like a lot but is less than half what specialists such as radiologists and dermatologists make. Given that doctors may graduate with as much as $200,000 in med-school debt, it’s easy to see why primary care started hemorrhaging recruits more than a decade ago and why radiology and other well-paid, high-tech specialties took off in popularity.

• Newsweek: Primary-Care Doctor Shortage Hurts Our Health

In exchange for a Daily Deal promotion on a new album, Amazon has been asking labels to provide it with a one-day exclusive before street date and such digital marketing support as a banner ad on an artist’s MySpace page and messages on label and artist Web sites and social network feeds.

“When that happened,” the executive says, “iTunes said, ‘Enough of that shit.’ “

I question how this is a good idea. I’ve found myself delaying purchases of new albums simply because there’s a possibility that it may appear on Amazon’s Daily Deal. Amazon has been quick to cut prices on specific albums, even providing a selection of albums available for $5. To me this seems like a dangerous game and only teaches the marketplace that the value of digital music is less than $9.99.

However…

One of the few albums to participate in an early-street-date Daily Deal promotion so far this year is Vampire Weekend’s “Contra,” which Amazon made available for $3.99 Jan. 11, a day before it was available anywhere else. The promotion played an obvious role in powering the album’s No. 1 debut on the Billboard 200, with first-week U.S. sales of 124,000, of which 60% were digital downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

• APPLE AGONISTES

It’s more that there’s always been in [Super Metroid director Yoshio] Sakamoto-san’s head a big story and a big background for Samus. You can take a look at some of the manga, which isn’t necessarily related to the games, but there’s clearly more story to Samus than has ever been shown in the games.

I think it’s very appropriate in this case. I think Samus, more than anyone else, is someone whose story we’ve always wondered about, whereas, for various reasons, you don’t really wonder about Mario’s past all that much. And with Link, there have been so many Links over the years, you can get lost looking at all those.

Metroid M is scheduled for release on June 27.

• Metroid: Other M — Humanizing Samus Aran

Must be hacked.

This was a lot easier to do on previous designs. The difference is that Apple moved their keyboards to a scissor mechanism similar to notebooks. It makes the keyboard thinner and requires less force to press a key.

I love it. I think the latest Apple keyboards are the best I’ve ever used.

The problem is that taking the keys off is a real pain, and if you detach a key’s scissor mechanism reattaching it as an aggravating, time consuming experience. It could be the closest you ever come to defusing a bomb Macgyver style.

Everything was going well…until:

For some reason it appears that Apple redesigned the aluminum keyboards in a way that makes it impossible to switch some keys around. In this example it’s the F key.

After seeing that I returned the keyboard back to QWERTY.

So I give up. I’ll just buy some stickers or something.

On developing ConnectU, a similar project, alongside Facebook:

Mark and this friend also had the following IM exchange about how Mark planned to resolve the competing projects:

Friend: So have you decided what you’re going to do about the websites?

Zuck: Yeah, I’m going to fuck them

Zuck: Probably in the year

Zuck: *ear

It’s no secret that some of the most admired companies and CEOs were created out of building on existing ideas. Ideas aren’t worth much if you can’t make them into something.

But what’s more striking about this is that the same person who’s asking you for as much data as you can provide also has this history of douchebagery.

It’s no wonder that the same people who claim that information wants to be free, specifically your information, also stand to profit from it.

• Business Insider: How Facebook Was Founded

Windows Email Software

You might think Outlook, or maybe Thunderbird, but instead you get:

Operating System Company

Surely Microsoft would be at the top of the list, right?

Really Awesome Music To Dance To

!!! doesn’t come up, neither does Crazy P (the UK’s best kept secret, btw)

Incredibly cheap web hosting and stupid commercials

Hmm, this one is spot on.

If being number one was the most important thing when making these decisions we’d all be checking our GoDaddy email with Eudora running in WINE on Linux while listening to The J. Geils Band.

There’s what Google knows and then there’s what everybody else knows. Search engine optimization helps, but it does very little to make you a market leader.

Instead plain text emails look the same as rich format emails in Gmail. So when you write an email like this in plain-text in a way meant to convey a quote:

And resize the window:

It gets all messed up.

I think it’s because they know most of their customers don’t do this much, if at all. But that’s the kind of thing that leaves room for things like Letters.app.

I want to think it’s because they don’t want to confuse people, but this is the same company that has tons and tons of Labs features.