Pets are Superheroes is a new project Chris Piascik and I put together (check out our sweet domain, petsaresuperhero.es). Pet owners love their pets, and now they can give them the superhero treatment in an original drawing. We're really excited about getting this off the ground, thanks for helping us spread the word!

In September, I made the mistake of upgrading my iPhone 3G from OS 3.1 to OS 4.0, making the phone a lot less useful and losing visual voicemail as a feature. (I had a big event coming up and Eventbrite told me their app would allow me to scan tickets with my phone. I said, "Really? It will work on a 3G running 3.0?" They said, yes, really. The event was looming and I needed to test the app ahead of time and so when it didn't work with 3.0, I upgraded to 4.0. Come to find out, the scanning didn't work on a 3G at all. Thank you, Eventbrite.) Since I upgraded, my 3G has been beset with some minor and major issues that make it much less useful than before. Some tasks, like browsing are usually OK, but Safari sometimes takes a while to load, other tasks like using Google Maps go from horribly slow to completely useless. Foursquare check ins can take minutes. The phone app stalls a lot when trying to make a call and, most importantly, visual voicemail does not work at all. I can still get voicemails, but there is no notification of their presence.

Yesterday, at Tim's suggestion I decided to try downgrading my phone. It did not go as planned. Recboot didn't work the way it was supposed to, and at one point, my phone was a brick for an hour. Immediately after downgrading to 3.1.3, I was left with a phone that didn't have any of my data, but did give me visual voicemail. The back up I made before starting was gone so I used a back up from 9/17 running 3.1.3.

The phone functions as it did then, much faster on Foursquare and Google Maps, and tethering works again. This would all be wonderful except I again don't have visual voicemail. I'm opposed to wiping it clean and starting over because I don't think I'll be able to download working versions of the apps I use.

I'm going to try to hang on for the iPhone 5, which will hopefully come out in July. Any ideas? Would jailbreaking the phone give me visual voicemail back?

+++
Update: Visual Voicemail is back after 4 months. After trying to reset the settings, I removed the AT&T Profile in the Profiles section of the Settings (I think Settings ---> Network Settings ----> Profiles). I restarted the phone after that and some test VMs I'd been leaving the last couple days showed up. I guess I don't have an excuse for not calling you back now.

Continuing a tradition from 2008 and 2009, here's a look back at 2010 featuring some of my favorite posts on Unlikely Words and other stuff I did. Consider clicking through to see some things you might have missed.

This year, I had the incredible honor of guest editing Kottke.org (TWICE!), and that's about all I've ever wanted to do on the internet. With Scott, I created 815 Sentences About Lost, a project where I got 108 people (some of whom you've heard of), to write a total of 815 sentences about Lost. I made 2 Keep Calm posters: Fried Clam and Curry Prawn and Keep Calm and Fuck You ooo ooo oooo. Here's my offering to the Miracles meme: Fucking Beignets. Chris and I recapped Mad Men all season with original drawings and thoughts. Lastly, I stepped up my food game by producing and promoting some events like, Ice Cream Showdown!, the 2010 Boston Bacon & Beer Festival, and Guacaholics Anonymous. Here's an I Write Like Analysis I did before I Write Like fell off the face of the earth.

Even though it was 2009, I'd be remiss not to mention the Jersey Shore Nickname Generator, which continues to bring in a lot of visitors, and the success of which was a giant surprise. Thank you, Snooki. To celebrate the final season of Lost, I watched Season 5 and transcribed Everything Hurley Said, Everything Sawyer Said, and in my first piece for Esquire.com (WHAT?!), Everything Locke Said. Later in the year, I did Everything Tracy Jordan Said.

I loved this picture of a guy biking upside down, this infographic showing Mars' failure at the Olympics, this picture imagining an after-school brawl between Calvin & Hobbes vs Christopher Robin and Pooh, and this picture of Kermit and Jim Henson.

Remember: Don’t Be Diculous, Kitten Thinks Of Nothing But Murder All Day, and
anything unrelated to elephants is irrelephant.

Someone took the time to calculate Charlie Brown’s Baseball Statistics, while someone else compared Massachusetts voting data to Netflix rental patterns to find that Cities That Voted for Scott Brown Like Paul Blart.

I liked The Pig & The Butcher, a video of Vadim the butcher breaking down a pig. The Red Sox traded for Bill Hall in a salary move more often seen in the NBA. Remember how big curling was at the Olympics or the I Can Walk Like A Penguin commercial from when you were growing up? "No, wait, there's an invisible monkey" was my favorite commercial this year, even though I'm not sure it even aired.

You know who impressed me this year? Surprisingly, Jimmy Fallon. The History of Rap with Justin Timberlake, Jimmy Fallon, and the Roots was really well done, as was this trailer for an imagined movie where Boo Boo kills Yogi for the reward money.

The Humpty Dance turned 20, Matthew Wilder's Break My Stride is even older, and my street flooded again.

Peyton Manning’s Interception Quote was great, and so was this Randy Moss Remix, this trailer for the fake Commando: The Musical, and this soccer save.

I liked, and posted, a lot of biking and skateboarding videos this year, this one of bikers jumping into a pond was fun, while this video of a 23 Year Old Guy Learning How To Ride A Bike was exactly what you would expect.

Manute Bol may or may not have had a hand in popularizing the phrase, "My bad", and 3 new new dinosaurs were discovered.

This video of the little kid from Back to the Future III is creepy, as is this death spiral of ants. This dad telling his son he wasn't a single lady was hilarious, and why Saturn has a ring is related. Did you know Mexican Coke might not actually be made with real sugar?

Here's a picture of Bears Riding Horses, an Investigative Look at the Nitrous Mafia (you should check this out), a picture of Danzig carrying kitty litter, a list you don't want to be on, and Bill Simmons’ List of Comedy MVPs Since 1975.

Happy New Year, everyone! What did you like?

Mike Champion with a really smart look at the problem of Twitter as "information network". Basically, it's difficult to find Twitter accounts that Tweet only about subjects that interest you, which then creates a lot of noise. I think this might be one reason celebrities and brands are so popular; people are more inclined to find the non-basketball related musings of their favorite basketball player interesting because it's their favorite basketball player! Mike uses the example of being less interested in the non-Ruby related musings of Ruby hackers... Until Twitter makes it more possible to follow interests, rather than accounts, it'll face this challenge.

Twitter is increasingly being described as an "information network" rather than a social network or "fun-like-ice-cream" novelty. That seems accurate, but the challenge is that Twitter is currently designed like a social network. Even with its innovative asymmetrical following relationships what you follow on Twitter are accounts [1] not "interests". As a result, it is difficult to consume information effectively and to tweet for disparate audiences.

PS Congrats on the baby, Mike and Sam.

In general, moralizing sucks. It gets especially annoying when cultural commentators talk about how much society has changed, for the worse, with the advent of technology and the internet. Ezra Klein:

So if you're someone who likes to spend Saturday in a quiet room with a good book and a long time to think about it, you might find Facebook unnerving. And Zadie Smith and Ross Douthat do. Sometimes, I'd guess, we all do. Conversely, if you're someone who likes people but has trouble meeting them, or gets shy in unfamiliar social settings, you probably don't think the Internet has made you less human.

Yesterday, I wrote about the lack of smartphone/internet/Facebook use by the main characters in contemporary movies and books (I may not have mentioned internet or Facebook or movies, but I meant to). In a discussion that followed, Nick mentioned the idea of a story told entirely in Facebook updates. Almost as if on queue, this video from Maxime Luere. An entire story told through status updates. Well done, too.



Via TDW.

Tom Scott recently gave an Ignite talk at with an extremely disturbing, but not surprising parable on the power of the internet. In Flash Mob Gone Wrong, information spreads quickly to create a flash mob outside a London apartment leading to a riot. It's the best video I watched this week.

Via Urlesque

You have let me down, internet. Earlier in the week, a to do was made about the artist Sally Davies and her series of 137 daily photographs of a McDonald's Happy Meal. The upshot is that McDonald's Happy Meals when left out on the counter don't really change much (as most food wouldn't in a low humidity environment). There's supposed to be a big shock.

Let me tell you, reader, there was. The first time I saw this story. On March 3rd of this year, BabyBites.info posted a photo of their year old Happy Meal (2 weeks later, BoingBoing posted via Consumerist). Three weeks after that, Sally Davies started her daily photo project. I don't know if Sally Davies was inspired to start her project after seeing any of these stories, but even if she wasn't I can't be the only one who remembered we saw similar pictures 6 months ago. It's not even like this was last year. I'm going to go take a minute, you get back to me when you want to share original stuff I won't care about 5 minute from now.





Updated:
OK, OK, people have been leaving McDonald's burgers out forever. Jason reminded me of this, while Hubs reminded me of this Supersize Me bonus. And we must never forget one of the original internet experiments, the stinkymeat project.

I saw Click Track refer to Cee Lo's Fuck You as the song of the summer. I'd agree, but on the other hand, I don't remember the last Song of the Summer I liked. Maybe it was that Kevin Costner song from Robin Hood.

Also, I finally had a reason to make a Keep Calm poster.

In the latest issue of Fast Company, there's a profile of Alex Bogusky, the advertising genius behind some of your favorite viral campaigns of the last campaign. Bogusky, not surprisingly, didn't like the the profile and annotated the article on his Posterous. This is the one of the better uses of the internet, publicly responding to exactly what you don't like in an article. On the other hand, I can't tell if the original article or the response makes me want to throw up more. The profile makes Bogusky come off as something of a douche, and the annotations makes him come off as a defensive douche. Maybe he's nice in person.