Take a listen to some of these awesome sounds from the ALMS Long Beach race this weekend (watch in HD for best quality).

I feel woozy.

My 2008 unibody Macbook Pro has a loose screen. Loose and wobbly and drunken at times. It’s been chugging along loyally for over three years, and in Internet time, it’s like a Regis Philbin. But as we all know, old folks can get wobbly. No shame in that — but it happens.

The whole screen/monitor (the part that flips up) developed about 2 cm of back-and-forth play, and it felt like perhaps the hinge was loose. Still usable, but definitely putting a dent in my Macbook’s sexy. Google didn’t proffer any good solutions, so I decided to dive into the unknown and try exploratory surgery on my Mac.

It turns out the fix is pretty straightforward. You just need the right tools and about an hour.

HEY: Attempt this at your own risk. Don’t try it if you suck at fixing stuff.

1. Remove the screen using the iFixit guide

The first step is to remove the screen from the Macbook body. It might sound morbid, but don’t worry: There’s a great guide for doing this on iFixit.

Before you start, make sure you have these tools:

• #00 Philips screwdriver
• T6 Torx
• Spudger (optional but handy)

I found a cheap hobby kit that has both the tiny screwdriver and Torx bits you’ll need.

2. Tighten the hinge screws

Once you’ve separated the screen from the body, we can get at the little bastards causing the wobble.

Check out the black plastic sleeve that covers the hinge stuff. You don’t need to remove it completely, but to loosen it, slide it to the right. That sort of unlocks it, and you can then pry it up a little to see the hinge screws.

The two silver Torx screws you’ve exposed love freedom and have worked themselves loose in an attempt to escape the burdens of life inside a hot-ass laptop. With your T6 Torx, show them your oppressive nature with a good tightening. For extra credit, terrorize those screws with some thread lock.

On the other side of the hinge thingy, there is an identical pair of Torx screws that will also require tightening. Pull up the black plastic sleeve and crank those down, too.

3. Replace the sleeve and reassemble

Replace the black sleeve  by working it back into place, and sliding it left so that it locks as before. You’re now ready to replace the screen and reassemble your laptop. Follow the iFixit instructions in reverse to put Humpty Dumpty back together.

4. You got your sexy back

BAM! Your Mac feels tight and sexy again, like when it was in its Internet twenties. Good job (unless you screwed something up).

Kill me

Last night, I went to a great talk with a funny title by Janice Fraser. Lean UX design is an emerging concept that incorporates high-quality, high-velocity UX design into agile development processes.

“Kill Your Darlings” implores us to not fall in love with our designs — or even assume they’re good — until we’ve properly validated them. Rather, the UX design must go through rapid cycles of prove-improve as you dial-in to what actually works in the real world.

Janice’s presentation is on Slideshare, for the curious. Unfortunately, you won’t get all her great commentary, which is why you should see her speak if you can. Even better, sign up for one of her workshops.

A more team-focused article + presentation is by Tim McCoy at Cooper.com.

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With Facebook’s new Open Graph initiative, they’ve made it easy for me to stick Like buttons all over my personal Web site, too. When you click one, a little man will carry your display of approval through some tubes to the Facebook, whereupon a trained monkey transcriptionist will bang away at a typewriter until something makes sense, finally sneaking into my house late at night to glue your message to the inside of my monitor.

Amazing stuff. Get your Like on.

Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances.

So would waging war be considered a “serious purpose”?

New York Times: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

Apparently the Pentagon didn’t get the memo on chart junk. Good times!

Further reading: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science—and Better Techniques for Technical Reports

It’s available here: http://github.com/subtleGradient/Java-Velocity.tmbundle

“An eBay company”, it says. They have to be pretty legit, right? Well, I thought so.

Security Problems

Today, doing some tune-ups for the client, I happened to notice that their store login page is susceptible to a really easy Javascript injection attack, or XSS attack, or whatever teh hax0rs are calling it now. I’m no hacking pro, but this is Web security 101. Actually, it’s remedial Web security. To have that kind of vulnerability on an e-commerce site is awful, and on an eBay-branded site, is downright embarrassing.

So to the layperson, all of this this means a customer could easily get duped and have their info swiped, and perhaps their:

• store wrecked
• merchant account hijacked
• customers’ personal data stolen

Deal-breaker!

Clueless Support

When I called their support today, the poor girl on the phone had no idea what I meant when I asked if my ProStores account could be hosted on a subdomain of an existing domain, i.e. store.awesome-company.com. (This is not a highly technical question in the hosting world). I had to explain everything to her about five times and the resolution was to file a ticket. No, the advanced support guy she had just conferred with was not available to talk to me. Like, duh.

And if you were wondering, oh wayward Internet traveler: it turns out you can’t host your Prostores site on a subdomain. It’s a pretty common, useful feature; this, too, is a deal-breaker, ladies. Ess that dee.