The Old New Thing

A great articulation of one of the benefits of blogs – Six Log: Encouraging Accountability through Personal Publishing. I don’t always communicate enough about my own decision processes on my blog, but when I do I tend to get great thoughtful feedback, feedback that helps to keep me grounded.

Ok I previously mentionedRidemax which is software to optimize your time in Disneyland. We tried it out and I have to say it seems to be a winner. We hit way more rides than we normally have and never felt ourselves to be standing needlessly in line. We were kind of in shock about how well the day went. Definitely worth trying.

As one of the Amazon reviewers says, Passage is a “fascinating topic, so-so novel” which “seems bloated and frequently dull”. I liked the Doomsday Book by this author (who didn’t), but Passage was trying.

Saw this – Special Lockergnome Offer for Foldermatch – on Lockergnome, looks worth trying.

A fun read – Tech News - CNET.com

Dana is concerned about the US falling behind China and China becoming the dominant world power – he even calls them the “enemy” at points. I don’t know. From a nationalistic point of view I guess I can see his point, but as a human being, I have a hard time getting upset about the largest population in the world taking on a larger role in the world.

I of course installed – Greg Reinacker’s Weblog - NewsGator 1.3 released! – this is my favorite way to read RSS. One thing I haven’t tried is running newsgator simultaneously on multiple machines. I use outlook at home and work and both machines stay on all the time. I’d like to install Newsgator on both so that the full admin interface was available at either place. But I am afraid to do so as I think the machines will likely battle to download feeds and I will see some ugly races and duplications. Alternatively I’d like a web interface to all the admin operations so that I don’t need to install on two machines.

Ha, from my friend Tim. Probably a classic but I hadn’t seen in memory:

Who Reads What and Why

• The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.
• The New York Times is read by people who think they run the country.
• The Washington Post is read by people who think they should run the country.
• USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand the Washington Post. They do, however, like their smog statistics shown in pie charts.
• The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country, if they could spare the time, and if they didn’t have to leave L.A.to do it.
• The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.
• The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country, and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.
• The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country either, as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.
• The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country, or that anyone is running it; but whoever it is,they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are disabled minority feminist atheist dwarfs, who also happen to be illegal aliens from ANY country or galaxy as long as they are democrats.
• The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country, but need the baseball scores.
• The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

I’d guess Seattle is some amalgam of LA and SF, with maybe a little New York Post.

Hack the Planet points to a good article on Infoworld about Sun’s work to get a supercomputer on the desk. “…heat management is by far the toughest problem…” – i have this problem in spades now, we have 3 PCs around a table in my office at home, and two more in the closet + cablemodem + firewall + 2 printers + 3 firewire drives, and heat is a huge issue. Heat output will be a primary criteria in my next PC purchase.

Great set of pointers to security blogs and feeds – i’ll be subscribing when I get to my newsgator machine – SecurityFocus HOME Columnists: Blogs: Another Tool in the Security Pro’s Toolkit

Good pointer from Rob – Mnemo-zine

Rael hates the large pickups on the road and points to stats published by the NYTimes about their impact on others in collisions. I don’t love the system we have on our highways, but as long as there are large trucks and pickups on the highway, I personally am not going to put my family at a big mass disadvantage. I’d love it if we all rode bikes everywhere in our society but we don’t.

Bucknuts.com – The running back situation – damn we need someone to run the ball. This is pretty worrisome.

Boy a lot of this resonates with me – Joi Ito’s Web: Going P-time – rss feeds, blog comments are climbing in the priority list while email falls. Couple this with the effect of spam on the utility of email – email is taking a hit.