Joel on Software - Rick Chapman is In Search of Stupidity – According to Rick Chapman, the answer is simpler: Microsoft was the only company on the list that never made a fatal, stupid mistake. Boy there is a lot of truth in this. During my tenure at MSFT I watched competitor after competitor blow their own foot off – Lotus, Novell, Netscape, AOL more recently, IBM, etc. MSFT pushed these companies hard in the marketplace but more often than not, it seems like the competitor did themselves in.

Halloween Products and Kits – I’ve used some of these before. Good stuff.

Michael Winser points to this great site – Social Security’s Office of the Chief Actuary – all kinds fo tables and data about baby names. I am sad to see that “John” seems to be in freefall over the past century – It was #1 in the first decade of the 1900s but is slowly trending downward over the last decade. I hope that I have not been a negative influence on new parents.

ESPN.com: NCF - Clarett says he inflated value of stolen items

Cool, everyone at Jupiter has a blog – Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs

Why We Don’t Need QOS: Trains, Cars, and Internet Quality of Service – a pretty lucid statement. Basically it is far cheaper for us to just keep adding capacity to solve the root issues behind the requests for QOS.

Potentially another strike against farmed salmon – The Seattle Times: Local News: What’s safe PCB level in salmon? Study renews debate – tho if you read down thru the article, there is contradictory evidence about PCB levels in wild salmon.

After reading an interminable number of posts about FOAF at Marc’s blog, at Gary Turner’s blog, at Joi Ito’s Web: Technorati talks FOAF, I finally added my FOAF file and informed Technorati of it, using Joi’s helpful steps. Apparently I run in a dull crowd because none of my friends have foaf files, so I am not sure what the point is, but i was feeling shamed into creating it.

ESPN.com: NCF - NCAA probes theft from car driven by Clarett – this guy is a magnet for trouble. At least our opening opponent, UW, is distracted as well.

I have recently been hearing a lot of positive word-of-mouth on Vonage DigitalVoice .::. The BROADBAND Phone Company…. People seem very enthusiastic about. I personally don’t quite get it – within our extended family, everyone has a cell phone with a huge bucket of minutes, they’ve moved their long distance usage to the cell phone, and so their local phone bill has dropped to the basic $20-30/month level. Thus Vonage has little draw for them. Maybe the excited users are people with a lot of overseas calling?

Just finished a fast read of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. A solid, reasonable business book with good lessons for all size companies. I especially liked the first step that companies took – getting the right people on board. You don’t start by figuring out the strategy, you start by having a great team, and then build from there. Don Bradford recommended this book to me a couple years ago, thanks Don, worth the quick read.

Cam is taking some interest in bionformatics. Of course there are some blogs covering the space – A bioinformatics weblog - nodalpoint.org; Bioinformatics-India; fernan aguero’s site. Then if you want news beyond blogs, you can try Bioinform or Bio-ITWorld.

B@$tards at AOL spammed my desktop with all kinds of ad links for AOL Broadband, during a minor version upgrade of AOL Instant Messenger. I got a link to AOL Broadband promo site stuffed into my start menu, slammed unto my links toolbar in IE, placed on my desktop, all pointing to some new exe on my machine – GtAOD.exe. I specifically said during intall of the AIM upgrade that I didn’t want any AIM icons spewed onto my system; does AOL really believe that, if I don’t want any AIM icons slammed onto my system (icons for a program that I am agreeing to install and that has real utility for me), that I am somehow OK with AOL Broadband icons slammed everywhere (which are just advertisements, for a service for which I have indicated no interest)? Dorks.

Wallflower has WIFI picture frames. If only they could get rid of the power cord…

The New Scientist reports on discovery of an enzyme that can destroy prions. Good news, let’s have a steak and celebrate!