matt at chasing coffee blogs on the finer details of alarm clock use, one of those details is the problem of shutting if off without realizing it or going back to sleep afterwards. there's the good old "move it across the room so you have to get up" trick. i'm thinking that it might be a good idea to make an alarm clock that CAN NOT but shut off for X minutes. so that you just have to get up and get on with your morning because it's not going to die until you have a headache or you're already in the shower/on a jog/whatever.#

at inluminent, john takes on the new 'mac-centric' blog site, sparkpod. points: get a /.+mac.+/ name, publish your own weblog. this makes sense. i think "we"'re going to see a lot more 'branded' weblog sites, like the AOL journals. although this isn't "REALLY" a mac/apple branded site it tries to brand itself with the apple-addict/mac-monger personality. i think a real apple weblog site would be pretty... because macs are like pretty right?#

dr. frank talks about a day of tracking and the perils that a presented producing preformed pieces prior to being put in place. he talks about his great quality of using other musician's genius and standing on their giant guitars: '' It's true that quite a few musicians feel that they should downplay or remain silent about the "borrowings" from other, more famous, people, but I've always figured that *flagrant incestuous interpenetration* (if f.i.i. is the phrase I want) of material and musical idiom is what makes rock and roll great. And even when it doesn't actually make it great, you might as well admit it and get on with your life. It's not "I hope no one notices who I am ripping off here." It's more like, "I hope everyone notices the extremely interesting and cool way I've figured out to rip off x while invoking y and stomping all over z." That said, it leads to some funny, eh, discourse in the control room. '' (my emphasis of a funny phrase) and an example of what DF is talking about#

john robb is spot on with
the purpose of dashboard/devonthink/mylifebits/etc - ''It will make it much easier to draw on available resources when publishing to your weblog by automating the process of resource discovery.'' - although an additional reason i think DEVONthink is cool is that it will help me categorize the hundreds of research papers i have yet to read.#

at burningbird we have shelley powers talking up the meaning behind FOAF and other technologies of the semantic web. she writes about something that i was thinking about, although not nearly as nicely (or deeply) put. what kind of "friendship" does a FOAF actually talk about? i have a lot of people on my blogroll, they are there because i'm interested in what they write. but i can count on one hand how many i've had anything close to real-time contact with. i wonder if it would be useful to have an "I read" portion of your FOAF description. i'm not a deeply semantic web kinda guy but I think new technologies are neat and i'm not sure what the best way to use them is.#

from a whole lotta nothing is some research on whether blogs REALLY clog up Google search results. both the research page and awln's analysis are interesting. i too am amazed that ''almost 4% of all web pages on the internet could be blogs'' -- neat!#

razib at gene expressions gives us research on the idea that humans had to give up a heightened sense of smell in exchange for being able to have full colour vision. genetics is wicked cool.#

marshall brain makes some predictions on the robotic future of america and the world. he uses the seed of automatic kiosks as an indicator that as technology advances many jobs that based on the "labor = money" equation will be lost to machines that don't need money (yet.) he also writes, ''If you think about it, robots are a very good thing. Human beings should not be driving trucks, flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets. These activites represent a massive waste of human potential. The question is: what will these tens of millions of people do to make a living when their tens of millions of jobs evaporate? What will happen to the economy when the unemployment rate reaches 30% or 40%?'' - a very interesting article and subject from slashdot if you aren't very critical of dates. it's too bad that the author's blog doesn't have an rss feed. ick.#

brian carnell notes that the cool "batman - dead end" video is very impressive but will probably be "cease-and-desist-ed" soon.#

john grubber identifies some pc world analysts who are giving apple a fair shot. or at least a fairer shot. he offers the great advice for use when measuring apple's success and "market share": ''The analyst Baker is on the right track with his \u201cAcura sports cars vs. Taurus station wagons\u201d analogy, but it isn\u2019t quite right. The idea of overall PC market share, as currently conceived by IDC, is not so much like overall automobile market share as it is like overall motor vehicle market share. It\u2019s like counting everything from golf carts to tractor trailers as a single category, thus making the \u201coverall market share\u201d look worse than it is for a company that only makes actual passenger cars.''#

a slashdot review of the perl6 book. word. by jay bonci, who contributes a lot to the everything project, that i like, but don't really use.#

al3x, i actually hit the glitches yesterday. and i think that berkeleydb is wonderful because i'm of the embedded mindset that likes little things and thinks sql is gross. i think it's mostly just because i'm a huge bigot and whenever i think of sql i think of php and java and stuff... and that just makes me cringe.#

MyLifeBits seems pretty tight.#

interesting mini-gallery of chinese racial types from dienekes' anthhropology blog -- i think there should be a gallery of the racial types of the Emo-Loser branch of the Punk Rock race. That would be a laugh... because... uh... makeing fun of emo is very funny.#

there's a very interesting picture at burningbird. i will sound really stupid saying this. but. nature is very pretty. i enjoy that at "simple" picture of a leaf can be so colourful and good looking. and, this picture is also strangely serene.#

apparently accordionguy is going to be a Navy SEALs instructor, cool! maybe he'll also teach about anticipation creation#

from kasia is a nice list of links and a comment that you learn the first names of people whose blogs you read pretty quickly. sometimes it's hard to find them on peoples sites or figure out what they actually are, for example i didn't realize that Ask was actually his name because i suck at. anyways on kasia's list was this year's best collective nouns and the threatening idea of having to fire an employee -- which in turn linked how to fire your best friend -- you really do feel like you've some how failed and made it so that the person could not succeed. i like the advice from the second that says, ''I've never fired anyone for making a mistake. I have, without exception, kicked out any person I've caught making a mistake and then lying about it.'' -- firing is tough.#

learn some blogging manners from a cup of chicha.#

sifry links his interview with christopher lydon who had a great idea and made a great web studio for it. cool stuff.#

keith at asterisk* teaches about web design and how it differs from graphic design. he talks about how you can't completely control what users will see and how it's much easier to ignore something on the web than on a paper: ''This will happen no matter how hard you try to control a users experience. Imagine if you designed a print ad for a magazine and as soon as someone came across it they took out a sharpie and drew all over it - then read or looked at it \u2014 that\u2019s kind of like what the Web can do to your designs.''#

jeremy's commentators point out that he did in fact link the strange link requester whom he meant to discredit. although it's not an actual link so they won't see him as the referrer. bummer.#

a new free lwn.net weekly edition is available. on the front page is a discussion of the seriousness and utility of Debian's Social Contract. in the kernel section is talk about having lots of memory in linux and contains this great quote about the tradeoff between the user/kernel memory split: ''Allowing the kernel to address more memory would reduce the maximum size of every process in the system, to the chagrin of Lisp programmers and Mozilla users worldwide.'' hah. also is a a bit about how the bug reporting process should be like the patch submission process: submit and pray. i like the idea of "if it's not worth your effort to resubmit it's not worth my effort to fix it."#

don park writes about this awesome Korean congressman, Kim Doo-Han, who used to be a gangster and could get pretty pissed off - read at it.#

at gene expression, godless writes about how the human will evolve and improve. will it be a green (naturally/genetically) or grey (cybernetically) progression? he links a discussion with a concise summary and goes through many interesting points. two favourite parts: pointing out that trying to impede particular routes to advanced scientific knowledge will only put more effort into getting around them, ''Like stones in a stream, the water rushes around them'' - and, ''Personally, I believe that once something is well understood, it is best implemented in hardware. Our planes fly faster than any bird, our weapons kill more surely than any claw, and our telescopes see more clearly than any eye. Similarly, once the processes leading to self awareness are well understood, I feel certain that they can be more efficiently implemented in an artificial substrate.''#

godless also wonders why porn is legal but prostitution is not - ''Aren't people being paid to have sex?'' i had never thought of that. but i am a bear of little brain.#

moxie is such a good friend and she has great hair too. for some reason moxie's memories here really got to me. i used to the same stuff: make real popcorn with the fam, we actually went through a few iterations, first we'd make them with tin foil over the fire at my summer house and then we had this old strange popcorn make that had to be massaged and prodded constantly; then, also at the summer house, we'd spent countless hours playing scrabble, miles bourne, and parcheesi, the whole family + cousins would get in on it and we could never accept how we lost; also, in my backyard we used to have blueberry, strawberry, raspberry, and rhubarb bushes that we'd also pick from and make pies and ice cream toppings. it's kind of upsetting to think that i long so much for my simple, happy youth. not that it was bad and i shouldn't want it, but that i'm so obviously not happy with my life now when i consider it at more than a cursory level. hmph.#

tony pierce writes about life, how it is fleeting, and how you should appreciate every moment. when you put the tupperware lid on your green beans, you never know if tony is going to be the one not eating them instead of you cause you might be dead, having been capped by him. tony also doesn't believe in karma. i do. "if you mess with the bull, you'll get the horns"#

tony also looks at what people are saying about him. for example, noah glass says that ''tony pierce's lies contain so much truth'' - i was listening to drexel and in one of their songs, jeff highway sings ''lies told with a smile, and some style, stay a while'', i think he was talking about the busblog.#

ted leung connects that the best way to hire people is from high quality personal contacts and that the blogosphere is full of intelligent people. so why not take someone smart and find someone they know to hire? that's what i would do if i would hiring, because i don't really know anyone personally worth half a fart and if you're smarts enough for me to read every day then you're probably top notch.#

ted also comments on kim's complaint about the difficulty of debugging stateful programs that are hard to manipulate in fix. he says that this supports the notion that functional languages have a great advantage because they remove state from the picture and he is sure the James Robertson will point out that Smalltalk and Lispy languages have an advantage because you can easily replace objects/functions/etc will the program is running/being debugged and that increases test turn around. it's all about using a real language. *update:* surely enough, james has something to add#

philip greenspun honors the courageous and George Gershwin. sounds cool.#

i'm subscribing to forbes wolfe via boing boing#

dan. foxes live around my house too, because i live in the middle of the woods/country. on two sides there are horse farms. on one side there is a cow farm. and i could throw a rock to another. cow town usa.#

when joey talks about the possible release of REALbasic for linux he writes about the Language For The Masses vs Language For Smart People "thing". joey is on spot when he says that the other people aren't smart, they have different domain knowledge and they aren't geeks. but just like someone can have domain knowledge i don't, i can have domain knowledge in the world of programming that they don't so i can apply advanced programming ideas in ways they can't. so the idea behind the difference is spot on, the only problem is that the "programmer" side presents it in a very demeaning way. which is wrong. but, what can you do?#

boing boing links a professionally made batman short.#