BananaSlug – adds a random word to your query. Surprisingly interesting results.

Cooking with Google – enter the ingredients you have on hand, see what recipes match.

Ouch – Mike Sax: Passport support for an arm and a leg – $11,500 to be a Microsoft Passport ISV. Compare and contrast with the expense to become an Amazon affiliate or a Google affiliate. Hmm.

Engadget Exclusive: Your phone is obsolete - AT&T Wireless requiring customers to replace their phones - Engadget - www.engadget.com – crap i just got the moto smartphone. They better make me a good offer.

(As an aside, I love the fact that engadget and gizmodo are now trying to beat each other on the gadget news front – twice as much news now!)

Pointers to this all over the blogosphere – Berkshire Hathaway 2003 Annual Letter (pdf) – and articles in the WSJ and local papers, I wonder how many hits this is getting this weekend.

NBC.com > The Apprentice > Prot?g? Corporation – and good riddance. Maybe now you can get the medical attention that your “concussion” demands.

Ok i borrowed ideas from Adrian’s Weather Station and now I can view my webcams at home from any WAP device – notably my blackberry. Very cool. Adrian talked about the next step a little with me today – wire up my doorbell so that, when it is pressed, I automatically get an SMS including the link to my webcam so I can see immediately who is at the door. Ultimately I want to be able to talk to anyone at my door and see them. Really all the pieces are there today – I’ve got an intercom and camera at the door, i just need to be able to route their I/O realtime over IP to my blackberry.

I tried Twin Tracks : The Unexpected Origins of the Modern World. Gosh was this boooooring.

The premise – start with a historical event, follow a set of ?six degrees of separation? links to a modern event, and show the strange connections along the way. I am sure this is a work of some scholarship. To research and find these connections is time consuming.

But so what. There is nothing causal about these chains. I know bill gates, he knows the premier of china, does that mean that I have any influence over the government/culture/society of china? No. Throw in 2 or 3 more degrees of separation and it is just absurd – my grandmother spent a night in the White House during the Harding administration, can we tie Harding to current events in China. And the stories in this book have 10-15 links, if you’ve played the ?six degrees? game at all, you see quickly how trivial it is to link anyone to anyone, there is nothing statistically surprising about these links.

The booh has 25 narratives of this form, I gave up on the 2nd. Worse than reading someone’s blog.

Add Your Own Background Noise – very cool. Back in the day when the NetMeeting team worked for me, I always wanted to add custom background noise and video to a conference – bluescreening without the bluescreen. We needed more generations of Moore’s Law on our side to make this happen, but looks like we are on the way there.

Thanks to DUH BLOG :: 2004-01-08, I’ve been reading a paper by Yochai Benkler on the economic basis of open source development – Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm by Yochai Benkler http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html . Very good stuff – the abstract: For decades our understanding of economic production has been that individuals order their productive activities in one of two ways: either as employees in firms, following the directions of managers, or as individuals in markets, following price signals. This dichotomy was first identified in the early work of Nobel laureate Ronald Coase, and was developed most explicitly in the work of neo-institutional economist Oliver Williamson. In the past three or four years, public attention has focused on a fifteen-year-old social-economic phenomenon in the software development world. This phenomenon, called free software or open source software, involves thousands or even tens of thousands of programmers contributing to large and small scale project, where the central organizing principle is that the software remains free of most constraints on copying and use common to proprietary materials. No one “owns” the software in the traditional sense of being able to command how it is used or developed, or to control its disposition. The result is the emergence of a vibrant, innovative and productive collaboration, whose participants are not organized in firms and do not choose their projects in response to price signals. In this paper I explain that while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

Economic Scene: U.S. Is a Case Study in Free Trade – interesting article. Basically says that we have had free trade within the US for a century+, and that the primary effect has been to pull the income levels of the poorer regions up. The richer regions have not suffered significantly. And that we can draw a lesson from this as we consider globalization.

Amazon.com: Books: The Winter Queen : A Novel by Boris Akunin – a great detective novel, the first translated from a best-selling Russian series. A great character and a great story, makes me sad that I am not fluent in Russian, I have to wait for the rest of the series to be translated. I wonder how much other great reading I have missed because I am mono-lingual?

Nice list at Neil’s World - Pinging service run-down of all the services you might want to ping. I’ve updated my list, I also ping the folks at http://seablogs.hellbent.org/. You’d think someone would do a ping mirv service so I would just have to ping one thing, and they could distribute the pings out.

I’ve seen several pointers to Lookout email search for Microsoft Outlook - Lookout Software, most recently from Marc’s Outlook on Productivity. I’m mostly interested to see if it will help me navigate thru the thousands of RSS feed items I gather each week thru Newsgator – I need a faster way to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’m impressed with the team’s responsiveness – I reported a minor bug this morning and they responded right away.

Great Observations from Tom Peters on offshoring. The ones that especially resonated with me:

* “Off-shoring” will continue; the tide cannot be reversed.

* Service jobs are a bigger issue than manufacturing jobs, by an order of magnitude.

* We are in the middle of a once every hundred years’ (or so) productivity burst – which is good for us … in the long haul.

* Americans’ “unearned wage advantage” (Born in the U.S.A.) could be erased … permanently.

* The wholesale, increasingly upscale entry of 2.5 billion people (China, India) into the global economy at an accelerating rate is virtually unfathomable. Unfathomable = Unpredictable, exceptional challenges, amazing opportunities.

* Free trade works. Period. It makes the world a safer place … in the long haul. The process is not pretty at times. (Sometimes long times.) Those who dutifully followed yesterday’s rules yet are displaced must be helped when the “rules change.” Such help must not be in perpetuity – it demands a sunset date.

* Big companies do not create jobs, and historically have not created jobs. Big companies are not “built to last;” they almost inexorably are “built to decline.”

Thanks to Scoble for the pointer.

Lost Remote: Super DVRs in the pipeline – these start to look like whole-home media servers. Are we going to end up with one media server in the house driving all our tvs, or a federated network of many of them?