last month i wrote about eddie west, the guy who owns the shop in my town and how he's crazy an funny.#

last thursday i woke up and rode my bike to work, as i have been doing recently. my idea is that if i ride around without my shirt on enough eventually some beautiful women will ask me for my seven digits. anyways, i was planning on going to Dave Winer's thursday meeting that night so when i went home i was kind of upset to see a flat tire on my car.#

because i was raised inside a computer i don't know how to change my tire. this is very hard for me to admit. i know what to do, i could write it down, but i don't have the confidence to do it alone. so i get ed to come down to my house, do that up and then we go down to the shop so i can wait around while they get a new tire and put it on.#

every time a customer came in Ed would explain to them that I was his psychiatrist and that anything that they wanted to ask him they would have to whisper to me first because he was feeling unstable at the moment and needed a buffer. keep in mind that eddie is like 70, nearly. so this really caught me off guard the first time he said it but i felt that i caught only quickly and we had them all confused. he was telling everyone that he found me through Dr. Bill - who as i mentioned in the last episode is this great Doctor of Psychology who works there fixing cars because he likes doing it - apparently i was bill's star pupil in a class he was taking and when i graduated (i was the youngest psychiatrist in massachusetts) he fixed me up with some money for a practice.#

so then ed and i talked about money, public funding, and education. ed is really involved in town politics and right now there's a big deal about how much money is being spent on new schools for the town. the core of our conversation was that we thought public schools did a poor job doing what they do and that we would both prefer obligatory attendance of private schools of your choice with the government spending money on accreditation programs, scholarships, and breadth of knowledge testing. he liked this idea because it relieves some of the tax burden from people without kids in school, creates better schools, and creates a real quality control system similar to that of colleges and universities - without destroying the chances of people without "means" of getting educations. Bill (who's ex-wife is the head school administrator of the towns) and I thought that his idea was pretty valid but of course no one would really stand for it, the only way to implement it would be to start putting kids in private schools by the thousands.#

the conversation then moved to whether or not people are "really" better off with education and ed talked about when he was a kid in our poor poor farm town. ignorance it seemed was bliss.#

it was a nice time, then i went to the meeting and met Dave Winer and some people. very interesting discussions, i plan on going more often. #

don park advises on the best uses of a wiki, pointing out that ''People identify a page by its content, not just its title. Editing the page, particularly the first two screens of content are like flash floods that wash away recognizable landmarks and leave the Wiki user disoriented.'' - so true, especially in wiki sites where every page looks essentially the same (minus content) - it's like driving to a familiar place, you don't know the street names but you know the turns#

don park, aka "Mr. Smarty-Pants-I-Solve-Problems-The-Easy-Way-For-A-Change", writes that the solution to generating metadata is to accept donations - acknowledge that you can't tag everything from point zero and start accepting donations. what is neat about this is it allows users to tag things as they find it useful, and it's nearly axiomatic that designers can never know all the ways their tool will be useful to users - and content is no different.#

moxie has such a nice relationship with her mom, i can't imagine talking to my mom and nearly anything - especially things that she wants to do in her life. i think a moxie + moxmum road trip blog/book/anything would be a huge seller. they would talk about their hysterical past and reveals the secrets of making a woman happy. i wish.#

tony, was she here ?#

ted leung links an essay that Mitch Kapor reproduced - it's about business ethics and it's get two thumbs up - ''My son, a high school senior, recently observed that students planning business careers seem most interested in doing whatever they can get away with.''#

enter the e-hamburgers scheme of internet investment - the author has this to say about traditional investment: ''Apparently a 'share of a company' is somehow 'more valuable' than a share of a brick of gold. Well bricks of gold don't get up and fake how many ounces they have inside of them, nor do they vote themselves 5 million dollar raises and go flying off to Jamaica to 'do lunch'. They don't raid pension funds and they don't hire slimeball accountants. They just kind of sit there. Except that their owners might hire slimeball accountants. So we are back to square one. ''#

is internal ethics training worth it? from demos.#

i love the fresh scent of lemonodor even without playboy parties#

at the green hat journal is discussion of the tipping point about ''how little things can make a big difference'' and how it's thesis could be applied to why certain programming languages get popular while other's don't - ''A tipping point is when an idea passes some threshold and spreads quickly among a population, much as an epidemic breaks out of a small subgroup and enters the main population. Three key elements are required for an idea to hit the tipping point: (1) a few people who excel at communicating and spreading ideas; (2) a simple, "sticky" way of packaging an idea so it becomes irresistable; (3) the context in which the idea spreads is critically important. The book presents a motley collection of examples: suicide, sneakers, Sesame Street, etc. '' - heh.#

from kurzweilAI.net is an article about a new understanding of the nature of time, or rather time's non nature. it's interesting because it's extends the quantum idea of not being able to know position and velocity at the same time to the next level - saying that you can't know position at all because it doesn't exist as a result of instants in time not existing. interesting.#

from retail horror to new found freedom. to a new found appreciation of tacos.#

it was too good to be true, first errata for openbsd 3.3 out. it made it since may.#

from meteafilter is an old article about "Why Advocacy Sucks" - the basic problem is that people are so wrapped up in themselves and their languages that they can't take any sort of criticism, even if it is constructive, as something that is good, something that can be used to improve all languages. it's a very interesting article. - ''You can be 'unfair' to a person, and you can hurt their feelings, even if you tell only the truth. But Pascal is a programming language, not a person. It has no feelings to hurt. Criticizing Pascal's type system is like complaining that your hammer has a scratched face. There is no use getting upset about it. You just have to get a new hammer or make do. Saying that the criticism is unfair to the hammer, for whatever reason, is just silly.''#

i want to hear more from Glenn Reynolds about the RX-8 he just bought. they are supreme machines. i'm all about the Rotary Engine - although i prefer more to read about glenn has to say about dean and why people are "afraid of him" - acknowledging your enemy gives him/her strength, it allows to them know that they are on the right path.#

read a quote from a great book on incipient thoughts - the book is Rethinking Systems Analysis and Design - and the quote is about saving money when developing.#

it's rough to learn around twenty-five that time is your greatest enemy - '' If I had all the time in the world to get everything done, then I could code for a living, code everything I'd like in my spare time, write everything I'd like to write, read whatever I'd like, and still find time to play music, socialize, and travel.'' - one reason i like weblogs is that i can vicariously live my dreams through others, aggregating the content as if it were my life - hah#

if you were saddam hussein, which disguise would you choose? i'd go for number 5.#

al3x ponders the eternal question - "If you find a flaw, do you actually fix it because it's the right thing to do? Or do you just drop everything on the floor and pretend you never knew the foggiest? Or do you display a wonderful error message clearly illustrating that you actually found the problem but didn't find it worth your time to fix it?" - actually that's not such an eternal question but it should be. - ''the cardinal axiom of all user interface design: *A user interface is well-designed when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would.*'' from Chapter 1 of the book of Joel#

courtney's ten cents on the gay marriage debate. in an email to another blog (i wish i were right-wing so i could say i have right thinking, it's very clever) - ''I don't think that people who oppose gay marriage are going to win this battle. In fact, I believe (and I may have gotten this from Andrew Sullivan) that opponents of gay marriage will be looked upon in a similar light as those who opposed the War of Independence, abolition, women's sufferage, and interracial marriages. I'm sure those who supported the (historically) wrong end of those battles in the name of traditional institutions had great arguments that were based on history, religion, and common sense. But they lost, and I'm glad they did. '' - what a great way of putting it, she then goes on to say that marriage has always been partly about money and convenience (ie dowry) - word.#

stupid video games names from loonyboi - ''There have always been stupid titles for good games, ever since games moved beyond utter simplicity like "Adventure" or "Tennis". But a few years ago, things started to get really silly.''#

nat and miguel have strange posts on the news#

also, in a past post (which i can't permalink) miguel explains what he meant by saying that the Parrot VM was flawed by succumbing to ideology. he points out that bytecode is just a transport mechanism for processing instructions and he thinks a stack based method is more fitting than registers. - the fight is two fold: your design is not based on substance, and because mine is i can show it's better.#

ev points out that whether or not blogs corrupt google is a moot point. google does not tell you who is famous, it tells you where information is to be found. use the right tool for the right job.#

i had a complaint about the way netnewswire handles clicks when rss items have both 'guids' and 'links' - i bothered dave winer about it last thrusday and he said i should email brent - brent thinks a way to prefer the 'guid' is a good idea. - yes, permalinks are where it's at.#

mamamusings wonders about if "women [are] really less interested in computers?" - while i'm not a woman, nor a teacher, i like what liz says about how ''prior experience is not necessarily a predictor of success in class. ... Those who come in tabula rasa are in much better shape by the end of the quarter, because they have no bad habits to unlearn.'' - it's not that having prior knowledge is a bad thing, it's that thinking you know everything prohibits you from asking new advice and methods. keep a beginner's mind#

an article from Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center of Harvard Law School about Copyright laws, their history, and hilarity. from Richard Tallent who proposes his own alternative. i like the idea of a "Copyright Tax" so that you don't have to learn obscure rules, but i like the idea of simple, controlled, rules better.#

shelley powers on the problem with wikis - they need to be "ungeeked" - ''Wikis favor the aggressive, the obsessive, and the compulsive: aggressive to edit or delete others work; obsessive to keep up with the changes; and compulsive to keep pick, pick, picking at the pages, until there's dozens of dinky little edits everyday, and thousands of dinky little offshoot pages.'' - sometimes control is good, how sad it is to have to admit it :( - sam ruby says necessary, but not sufficient fro that particular project#

geoffrey doesn't like the "queer eye for the straight guy" show, and wants to make his own show - '' I'm going to make a counter-show. "Straight Eye for the Queer Guy". Original, huh? I'm going to take random straight guys with manly careers: construction workers, bouncers, loggers, etc and team them up with a queer. Each week their mission is to transform a limp wristed and lisping homosexual man from lean to mean.'' - hmm... jealous he's not good looking?#

Is Six Apart the New Apple? a very "in your face" title that makes you want to read it. from brian hess (who wrote it and linked it)#

new Accordian Guy URL - one thing changed that i liked, he used to have cute little sentences about all the links her posted on the sidebar and he had the "Favourite Posts"#

scoble on the "good idea" of Jobs for John - ''We as a country need to figure out how to get rich people spending their bucks creating new companies again. The three companies I've spent most of my time at over the past decade were started with less than $2 million between the three of them. At one point they had about 250 employees combined. It doesn't take a lot of money to create a multiplier effect.'' - investment creates jobs, not thrift#

scoble remembers a conversation with THE WOZ: ''I asked him how to start another Apple Computer. You know, I wanted to "win the lottery" like he did. He said it's only possible once in a while when the existing business "expertise" totally ignores a new market long enough for new players to get going.''#

scoble also writes about the difficulty in getting educators to buy ebooks - ''Learning technology requires trying things. It's very hard to try things when most of your life is spent doing things that don't require you to get your hands on a keyboard. How do you market to people who don't experiment?'' - plus there's the bit about how public teachers don't want kids to experiment and do things different, they want to sit quietly and do their work just like everyone else... the man!#

the lynx effect from nik, via digital web magazine - teaching you how to test out the accessibility of your site with gouging out your eyes.#

ryan mcgee and the drinking game based on risk - absurdity ad infinitum - ''Now I'm slightly panicked, which is a familiar state to me. I look over to her husband, trying to figure the best combination of eye, arm, and shoulder movement to convey, "Yo, G Funk, I'm so not trying to tap recently-married ass over here, shizzle my nizzle." Luckily, before I had the chance to fully formulate such a combo, her husband shrugs and says, "Well, five to one the bra's coming off sooner than later as well. This happens all the time."''#

MSG was first made to encapsulate the fifth taste, umami from interconnected#

oh my god, screenshot from the river city ransom remake - yes!#

don park makes you laugh at the strangest moments - ''Kim Dae-Joong, the former Korean president who caused all this mess, should have been jailed for abusing power IMHO. At the very least, he should have returned the Nobel prize he got for that paid-for meeting. As to Kim Jong-Il, I think he should forget the nukes and concentrate on finding a better hairdresser.''#