James Robertson writes about outsourcing and how it is revisiting an old problem in IT. - ``In fact, this sort of outsourcing takes us back to the worst days of early IT - the requirements get tossed over the wall to a bunch of people that are hard to communicate with, and the finished application gets thrown back some time later. There's a pretty good consensus out there that this process didn't work well with IT groups that communicated badly; it's not clear to me why a repeat performance with remote developers will work out better.''#

The New York City Blackout as Photographed by John Wehr - The Page 2 "Ridiculous Photograph" is awesome! - ``The city was without its omnipresent hum of taxis, airplanes, people and trains. It was as if the city itself had gone to sleep.''#

Accordion Guy is a super Stud. - ``Weddings, the theory goes, are good places to, ahem, hook up. Or at least they would be, if my friends getting married would show some common courtesy and invite single women to their weddings. I want to be able to affect a Spider-Man voice (a la the old cheesy animated series) and say "_Bridesmaid...senses...tingling!_" (A number of people have asked me recently if I'm one of those "committed bachelors". Actually, the answer is no -- it's just that the one person I ever seriously broached the subject with said "no". She will regret this decision years from now, when local news crews use her life story for puff pieces: "And now, here's a story about the crazy old lady whose lives alone with 75 cats...") ''#

Economist Brad DeLong writes, ``I can testify that--in Economics at least--this claim that the quality of education does not depend on the number and quality of faculty in a subdiscipline is completely, ludicrously, laughably false.'' In response to Richard Heck - Quality oozes out of good professors, but I wonder if bad professors help people take things into their own hands. Taking it into their own hands could render either great success or great failure, is a large percentage of failure worth a larger magnitude of greatness if this conjecture is true?#

Mark Watson wonders why Robert Wahbe, Microsoft's .Net manager "[dislikes] the Semantic Web initiatives and specifically the world-wide-web consortium's use of resources to promote Semantic Web technologies." - ``The Semantic Web is all about using standards for data formats and meta data that allows software to find information, perform logical operations to make decisions based on information, etc. One of the illustrations in this book is of OpenOffice which uses legible XML for document storage - if the Semantic Web does catch on, there will be tremendous pressure from consumers and businesses for open document standards. It seems like proprietary (and changing!) document formats are part of the Microsoft Office long range business plan.''#

Jane, from Game Girl Advance, wrote an article about females at GenCon that is very interesting. She profiles various gamers that were there. - One woman plays D&D with her kids a lot, Jane writes, ``Wow. What must it be like to have gaming parents? I wonder if I would have thought that was cool or not when I was eleven? I love the image of family time D&D games. The family that slays together, stays together?''#

At Wired News is an article about the weak power grid of the United States. ``A day after the largest blackout in U.S. history darkened lives across the most populous swath of North America, power experts said the system's sorry shape appears to have been a surprise only to the unwitting consumers who relied on it.''#

Creepy Pictures of Dark Streets.#

Just a Gwai Lo reminds me of a great quote from "Fear of a Black Hat" - ``Yo, we got some hats now muh-fuckas!''#

Adam Bosworth has a vision of a Web Services Browser that is essentially client-side HTML scripting and generation (ala ASP, Mason, etc) that relies on whatever "XML Store" you've set up for a given service. He calls it the "Client Web" - ``So, to summarize, a set of related pages designed to work with the XML information in [question] called a ClientWeb, a set of information retrieved using Web Services, and a Controller to coordinate the actions that occur between pages and to invoke suitable web services when necessary. How does all this work offline? Also to be covered in subsequent entries. Lastly let me freely admit that this is a dream in progress, open to all, and sure to be wrong in some of its details.''#

Joi Ito writes about "Strong & Weak Ties" and about the difficulty of the getting a job in America, what employers are looking for. - ``I was recently at an advisory board meeting for a trade school. We had just done a survey of employers asking for what they their primary criteria for choosing new employees was and it was overwhelmingly about execution and character and very little about skills. Skills, they said, could be taught later. I believe that "character" in the context of a job is your self-esteem and your passion for what you are doing.''#

Matthew Dennis ponders on the "Difference a Decade Makes" - ``So we are reassuring everyone that this is just a glitch in our antiquated system. Nothing to panic about. Call it a snow day. I find this in stark contrast to the widespread disruption in AT&T long distance service in 1990. Officials quickly jumped to the conclusion that this event was caused by hackers. The telephone disruption was actually caused by a software glitch, not hackers. However, at the time, the idea that a critical piece of infrastructure could crash on its own, without the influence of evil forces, was too much to take. _You mean in can just crash? By itself?_ So the phone companies and the Secret Service went about looking for who could've caused it. They needed a villain so everyone would feel safe.''#

Ryan writes - ``After living with a woman for over a year, you begin to realize just exactly what love is. [...] Love is putting up with crap. Tons of crap. From both sides - and still loving each other. Doing anything with a girl is no walk in the park. I learned this when I was just a kid, trying to deal with my mother. I live with one now - and sometimes things seem damn near impossible to accomplish. We argue. We fight. There isn't a moment that goes by though where love seems like it's not there anymore, or that putting up with the crap isn't worth it despite the love. For people with chronically low patience ratings like me, there is much crap - dealt and taken.''#

Via Don Park is The Flame Warriors, ``[an] ongoing attempt to classify participants of online discussions. It's absolutely hillarious and illustrations are usually perfect.''#

Ted Leung announces his new book, "XML Development with Apache Tools" - ``The goal of this book is to help people use the unique features of various XML related projects at the ASF, mostly those that were a part of xml.apache.org at the beginning of the year. I'm pretty well along, but if there's something that you always wanted to know about some Apache XML tool, drop me a note, comment, or trackback, and I'll see what I can do.''#

Ted Leung links an weblog entry by Dan Steinberg called "Recharging your Batteries" about taking time to reflect and recharge your creative juices. The best part about it is the link to the paper, Innovation and Sustainability with Gold Cards - ``Gold cards are a simple idea. Every developer on an XP project is issued 2 gold cards per month. The cards allow the developer one day of work on a topic of their choice. You can read the article for the rest of the details, but I think that this is a great practice that can help keep people energized, enthusiastic, and thinking of the bigger picture.'' - Neat idea.#

A beautiful analysis of The Safety Dance by Men Without Hats at Kuro5hin. - ``The lyrics of Canadian protest singer Ivan Doroschuk are deceptively simplistic. They are, in fact, ripe with deep sociopolitical implications. They speak to intolerance in a world with high cultural borders and declining societal morals, in the era before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Superficially, one might suspect that Doroschuk is simply trying to say that the subject of his attention need not bring fraternal companions if they prefer not to dance. But look deeper and one will find that he is, instead, actually speaking to the troubled relationship between the United States and the rest of the world, with its mad-dog dictators, pinko Communist hounds, and foppish black berets. Get in step with America, baby, Doroschuk is saying, or get left behind in the superpower slow lane.''#

From Slashdot is something by Robert Cringely about Macs and IT departments. - ``If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly. Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job. [...] Why are Linux computers gaining in popularity with large organizations while Macs, which are based after all on BSD Unix, aren't? [...] Adopting Linux allows organizations to increase their IT efficiency without requiring the IT department to increase ITS efficiency. It takes just as many nerds to support 100 Linux boxes as 100 Windows boxes, yet Linux boxes are cheaper and can support more users. The organization is better off while the IT department is unscathed and unchallenged.'' - Interesting and very conspiracy-ish.#