Joey deVilla points to Andy's post about charm and it's greatness...#

Andy: ``Colin Farrell won the Powerball of Charm. He can curse, but it comes out as Charming, thanks to that fake Irish accent of his. He can show up on a talk show wearing torn jeans, an old tee shirt, and the sort of knit hat that you might have seen in the opening titles of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and it just comes across as Unpretentious. His week's worth of unshaven stubble is Casual, his tales of hard drinking and soft women mark him as a Dashing Rogue. ''

Joey: ``There is a fine line that divides the rogues from the jackasses, and if you're on the jackass side of this line, charm will obscure this fact for only so long. Charm, like any other power bestowed upon you by Fate or radioactive spider bites, should be used only for good, or perhaps to extricate yourself from sticky situations. With great charisma should come great responsibility. ''

A very interesting though on Matrix Essays -#

``Does anyone else find it strange that the machines don't have a leader? Normally in movies when the good guys are faced with an evil army, the army has a leader of some sort: a general, a commander -- someone who can proclaim, "All your base are belong to us!" Why isn't there a CyberGeneral, commander of the Machines?

The Architect is not the leader of the machines (that we know of). He is merely the designer of the Matrix, and we have only seen him there, not in the Zion world. Agent Smith has been set up as the main villain of Reloaded, and perhaps of Revolutions as well, but he is not the machines' leader either. He is a wild card, a free agent who no longer fulfils his designed role in the Matrix.

[...]

This leads to an interesting conclusion: *since the machines have no leader, they must not really be the enemy.* The only enemy the plot has set up as a strong character so far is Agent Smith. From the Revolutions trailer, it looks as if the big showdown in that film will be with Agent Smith. And defeating Smith will not save humanity from the machines, because Smith does not care about the machines or the larger struggle -- he only cares about himself, and getting revenge on Neo.''

This is very funny. Via Matrix Essays obviously.#

Via Matrix Essays is The Culture Industry Has You -#

``In the spectacular stupidity of the latest Star Wars movies or the boobilicious banality of the Anna Nicole Smith Show, Adorno and Horkheimer might ask us to see the final failure of the Enlightenment project (or, rather, its totalitarian success). The technological management of popular culture centralizes power in the hands of those few corporations that control its production and distribution. The culture industry claims to serve the consumers' needs for entertainment, but conceals the way that it standardizes these needs, manipulating them to conform to what it produces -- the summer blockbuster, the situation comedy, "reality" TV. Variations in consumer income and taste are rationally organized and modifications to the standard form are carefully calculated to ensure that each consumer "choose the category of mass product turned out for his type." Although it provides pleasures for consumers, the culture industry ultimately serves to distract people from the excesses and inequalities of the market. For the Frankfurt School, the culture industry is just as much a system of mass deception and control as the virtual world of the matrix.''

Rory Blyth on stupid elevator riders...#

``During the first 24 years of my life, I kind of assumed that elevator travel was slow because elevators weren't programmed very well. There's some evidence to back this up, too: Two elevators servicing the same request at the same time. Things like that.

However, in the past year of my life, the 25th, I've come to realize that there isn't really much wrong with elevators. There's something wrong with the people who ride them. ''

The Daily Flight defends the box as a web design paradigm.#

When This Book is it out it is I who will buy.#

The Knowledge For Thirst reviews Pepsi Vanilla...#

``Good lord, is this bottle ugly. All it's missing is a <BLINK> tag. I was actually embarrassed to be seen in public with it. How do they expect this beverage to succeed if men live in fear that a hot chick will see them drinking it? I was like hiding it under my jacket, sipping it out of a paper bag. Better they think I'm an alcoholic, I thought. ''

Raymond Chen on hardware backwards compatibility...#

``My favorite bad hardware, though, was a system which would crash if the video card was put in an expansion slot too far away from the power supply. Manufacturers will do anything to save a nickel.''

But really, is Lowest-Common-Denominator really the best way to go?

New Queer Eye Review -#

``The Fab5 end it by presenting five special gifts for tonight to saturate the five senses. A very good theme. Ted (taste) presents chocolates. Thom (smell) provides atmosphere with ginger currant candle for the sexroom. Jai's offers the new "sexy" Angie Stone R&B album. Kyan (touch) sensualizes with lotion and massage oil (which can also be used for the bath). Carson finishes with a "touch of luxury" with black silk boxer shorts.''

Peter Lindberg writes about an interesting movie, but what was the movie? A Swedish movie?#

``Since I began thinking about things in terms of constrained universes of expression, I can't help studying how movies establish its universe with the viewers.

The movie I saw last night completely overthrew, about a third into the it, the universe it had set up. Then the movie restarted at the beginning, showing the events from the point of view of the other of its two main characters.''

Peter Lindberg writes about an article that talks about "Imitating Serendipity" - This is kind of the idea of "Rememberance Agent" software like DEVONthink too, make those memory jogs automatic.#

Chrystal has dating advice...#

``Yesterday, I hit one of the kids in my COB 300 groups car with my car. I felt like the biggest idiot ever in addition to feeling really horrible. Even though no damage was done and I was only going like 4 mph. He laughed about it and said it was alright today during class. More funny than anything else. Well, atleast he's cool and laid back. Awesome. Also, he's kind of cute.... Of course, if I were going to go after a girl in my class I wouldn't go for the one who hit my car in the most retarded of ways. Haha.''

Just A Gwai Lo writes about the feeds he reads. I can't figure out how to get NYT RSS feeds, I'm dum.#

``The definition of a good weblog, for me, is one that separates the wheat from the chaff then links to the wheat.''

Dan Sugalski is out of the club, he revealed the "dirty little secret of CS", too bad, he was a good guy. (A side note, I think I've been writing his name wrong as "Sugalaski", whoops)#

Brent Simmons thinks about how RSS can fit into the solution to the "Email Problem"...#

``I don't know if RSS is the answer or part of an answer or not.

When it comes to newsletters, I think it's obvious that RSS is a great alternative. (Just ask Chris Pirillo.)

But what about mailing lists? Mailing lists are many-to-many. I love mailing lists; I subscribe to quite a few.

One possible solution is to have a weblog that people sign up to be able to post to. You can post but you can't edit other people's posts. You could comment on other people's posts, though. And it would all be available via RSS.

This could be pretty nice, actually, assuming some good software for reading and writing. The important thing is that it be made as easy as joining a mailing list and reading and sending email.''

Courtney posts that affirmative action is against MLK's Dream...#

``A reminder from a great man to the race-baiters, the militants, those who hate everyone but those who share the same skin color, those who want to continue race-based hiring, matriculation, and other discrimonatory practices, to those who look at African-Americans as a group to exploit for votes, for blackmail, for misery, for power.

You are fighting against the dream.''

Ryan McGee joined a new gym and raves about the features of the equipment...#

``Sensors that automatically detect difficult breathing patterns, and as a countermeasure, instantly play the theme from "Rocky" ''

Hornik at Venture Blog recommends that if you don't know your product then why do you expect someone else to remember it?#

``After sitting in on a very good meeting today, I thought I'd share another presentation tip -- know your presentation cold. From the perspective of someone sitting on the other side of the table, it is impressive when an entrepreneur is able to handle questions during a presentation without losing track of where he is in the presentation and without losing momentum in the process of answering the question. It is far more impressive when an entrepreneur is able not only to answer that question but has anticipated that the question will be asked, has a slide that speaks to question, and is able to quickly jump to that slide, answer the questions and jump back to where he was in the presentation. Obviously the answer to any question has to be compelling, whether accompanied by a slide or not, but I always find it telling when an entrepreneur knows his business and his presentation so well that he can answer any question with the aid of an appropriate slide and get right back to where he was without skipping a beat.''

PragDave wonders, "How do you deal with rule hell?"#

``Imagine you're writing an order processing application for a large company. In the past, this company used a fairly random mixture of manual and ad-hoc automated business practices to handle orders; they now want to put all these various ways of hanadling orders together into one whole: your application. However, they (and their customers) have come to cherish the diversity of their business rules, and so they tell you that you'll have to bring all these rules forward into the new system. ''

At Asterisk* is some stuff about forms often being written using tables...#

``I thought to myself, hmm, do we need all this? Nope. In a matter of about 2 minutes I'd removed the style, placed it into the style sheet attached it to the form element. Now all that is in my code was a form with an CLASS attribute that contained a text field and submit button. Clean, clear, easy. It looked exactly the same to the user, yet I had eliminated quite a bit of extraneous tags. Plus now I had a style I could easily hook in to other, similar forms on the site.

Why was it done this way? It's all about mindset. This is how we think at times. "Forms need a table to lay them out." Period. We don't even think about using CSS at first, because standards, semantic coding, etc. are not yet second nature to many developers and designers, even those who "get" it. Some times we choose old methods because they are simply more comfortable, or more predictable. Sometimes we're too busy to even realize what we're doing.''

A new LWN Weekly Edition is available.#

In Kernel Section is something about NUMA Systems that is pretty interesting.

Also in the Kernel Section, something about ARP in Linux ...

`` A lot of the confusion, it seems, comes down to a subtle difference in how systems handle IP addresses. Many (perhaps most) networking implementations treat addresses as "belonging" to the interfaces they are assigned to. With that view of the world, no network interface has any business responding to an ARP request for an address which is assigned elsewhere. Linux, instead, sees IP addresses as a property of the system as a whole. So it makes sense for an interface to respond to a request for one of the system's addresses, even if that address is normally associated with a different interface. ''

Tim Bray writes about a particular performance "problem" he had at one point...#

``Now, I was terrified about performance. This was on a Sun 3/260 or maybe 4/60 or something, the kind of processor you'd use today to run a toaster. In the back of my mind, I had all sorts of optimization schemes like building a tree over the layout and so on, but there was no way this was ever not going to involve plowing through a lot of lines of code.

To my amazement, it ran like a demon, no matter how fast I waved the mouse around the selected region kept right up with it, I never saw a noticeable lag. I dragged all my friends over to look at this magic and they looked blank and said "So you can select text, big deal." ''

Richard Tallent has very interesting post about Religion and the government...#

``Alan Keyes brings new perspective to the question of the 10 Commandments statue in Alabama.

Nutshell: under the Constitution, the federal government is barred from establishing a religion or from prohibiting the people's exercise of religion. That right, however, is reserved to the states, who can establish religion as long as the republican (little "r") vote of the people determines the states' religions expression. [...]

n other words, this is not a case of whether Alabama should express a sentiment toward the Judeo-Christian foundations of law with a statue, but rather whether it can, under the Constitution and with the will of the people. In this sense, I think Keyes is dead on. States were not instituted to simply be convenient protectorates of a federal system, they are constitutionally autonomous in all aspects of law not granted specifically to the federal government in the Constitution. *This is the check and balance: if you don't like the state's religious sentiment or other laws, you have the opportunity to either elect new officials or move. When all choice in such matters is homogenized at the federal level, the citizens lose both courses of action.* ''

Anil Dash on the scam that is Bottled Water.#

``Perhaps the finest testament to the power of marketing and distribution is the fact that I regularly buy bottled water.

In case you don't know, bottled water is an incredible scam. I used to help out with running a water company when I was a kid, so I got a good background in the stringent set of requirements that utilities must meet when providing drinking water to a community. Generally, bottled water doesn't have to meet standards that are anywhere near as tightly regulated in regards to contaminants, filtering, or purity. Not to mention the fact that waterwhich stagnates in plastic containers on supermarket shelves frequently has a higher bacteria count than water from public utilities.''

Ole writes about "Bloggers as Filters" ( I accidentally said this was from Brian Carnell... I don't really know why... must've been confused )-#

``Much has been made of the dichotomy between "thinkers" and "linkers". Some bloggers mostly originate information, or add analysis or commentary to daily events. These are thinkers. (Steven Den Beste would be an A-list example.) Other bloggers mostly link to things which are off their site, usually adding some light commentary or opinion. These are linkers. (Glenn Reynolds is an A-list example here.) Some bloggers do both, they alternate between thinking and linking. (Dave Winer does this, and I try to do it to :) Thinkers add information to the blogosphere, which is a good thing. But linkers contribute to, because they inherently act as filters. Consider Boing Boing, one of my favorite blogs. They cast a really wide net and consistently come up with wacky things I find interesting. In so doing, they are creating value; there is no way I could monitor all the information sources they monitor, and filter it down myself.''

James Robertson writes about the WOAD Roundtable he was part of...#

``WOAD Roundtable on development issues. It's a small group - only 7 of us here. We started a discussion about the rationales for moving a typical Fortune 500 shop from a set of "stovepipe", unconnected applications to some unified architecture based on (whatever). It's done a lot; it fails most of the time. Here's why:

- political issues surrounding the movement of developers from the tools they know and like (whatever they are) to the "new standard" - this is akin to the issues that surround the well documented CRM failures - the political issues dwarf everything else
- "Doing it on the cheap" - not getting experts and/or training (or getting the wrong experts - big consulting companies with an army of ill trained people, for instance)

However, we hardly stayed focused on this - the discussion ranged all over the place. The conversation ranged over to modeling and code - round tripping - do models, help - can a model be language independent? IMHO, models end up being language dependent - because the design choices you make will depend on the implementation environment you'll live in. ''

Loony Boi links an article about the decline of 2d animation at Disney...#

``What Eisner, et. al., is missing is that the most important factor in the success of an animated features has always been its story. A great concept, terrific characters, catchy music are important, too. The medium is absolutely the least important.

It's a lesson Disney forgot in the 1970s, when the Nine Really Old Men were doing pictures like The Aristocats and spending a lot less time crafting an original story than adding elegant flurries of animation.''

Loonyboi adds...

``The erosion of 2D animation in cinema is a crime against filmgoers. 3D is good, yes. But it's a style, and nothing more, and shouldn't be looked at as being the future of animation in cinema. In the article linked above, it's mentioned that Michael Eisner has toyed with the idea of remaking classic Disney movies in CGI. No idea could possibly be more offensive to anyone who appreciates the work of the great Disney animators from the days of Walt. A CGI Snow White would be as offensive as the colorization of black and white movies during the 80's, if not more so.''

John Gruber continues on how computers and IT should be reliable and easy to use...#

``Complexity is not an excuse for low expectations. We've strapped men into giant rockets loaded with jet fuel, propelled them into space, and landed them on the moon. That was complicated. And our expectation was that we'd get them back.

Why we don't expect our email to work is beyond me. ''

Tony Pierce made a new wordless photo essay. The Best Part#

Tony Pierce had a near life experience...#

``all day long i chase guys with guns, break down doors that could be boobie trapped, fist fight with guys who have spent most of their lives in jail, and still i hardly ever think im going to die.

this morning i was sure someone was going to cross the intersection with their car and slam into our bus and send me careening head first through a pole in the bus and then people would publish this busblog into a book and it would be a best seller, and my mom would be proud, but the millions would be bittersweet. hopefully more sweet than bitter.''

An Article on Kuro5hin about Currency...#

``This system is based in scarcity [...] We can produce more than enough food to feed everybody, and there is definitely enough work for everybody in the world, but there is clearly not enough money to pay for it all. The scarcity is in our national currencies. In fact, the job of central banks is to create and maintain that currency scarcity. *The direct consequence is that we have to fight with each other in order to survive.*''

''The agreement can be conscious or unconscious, coerced or free. Most of us don't consciously choose our money. So currencies (and therefore, money) are like The Matrix; they exist and work because we believe in them.''

This comment is very interesting...

``Excellent article with lots of great info. One problem, though - the central problem: I don't think George Soros, Alan Greenspan and the Queen of England really care about all of this. Like they're going to roll out of bed one day and say, "Hmmm, this global hegemony we have going is really great at making us rich, but maybe we should replace it with something more fair for everyone."

It's like the war in Iraq: how many billions is it costing the American people? How much is it costing the Bush family, Haliburton, or Unical? The whole world knew a "better" way to handle that situation, but that doesn't matter one bit in the end.

A good friend once pointed something out to me: if a system is in place long enough, and it's not accomplishing its stated aim, eventually you have to conclude that the system was never set up to accomplish the aim that was stated, but actually serves some other purpose.''

Philip Greenspun had an interesting conversation with someone, that he summarizes...#

``Now that I'm back in provincial Boston, one conversation from Bryce Canyon still resonates. I got into a conversation with a political science professor who was originally from France. How could he have foresaken a thousand years of culture and moved to the land of fast food and the strip mall? He said, "I didn't want my children to end up living in a Muslim dictatorship." How was that possible, I inquired? "If you look at the demographic trends, the Muslims in France will grow to 30 percent of the population within 50 to 100 years. An average French couple has less than two children. An average North African Muslim family or Palestinian couple will have 7 or 8 children. Through immigration and the high birth rate of Muslims already in France, it won't be long before Muslims are the largest voting bloc. Most citizens don't know what they want from the government and many don't vote at all. A relatively small but well-organized and coherent group of voters can easily take control of a democracy." ''

Tom Coates comments on the "one huge siteness" of weblogs...#

``So my immediate reaction is that the fact that there are a limited set of really popular weblogging systems has probably been a good thing, because it means there's an active and widespread community large enough to be able to self-support, fully explore the boundaries of the software available and push for new functionality. But more importantly, there's an element in which all weblogs are part of one huge site. And that's only partly the sense in which all the web is basically one big hypertext entity in which all boundaries between sites are essentially arbitrarily - or culturally - enforced.''

Zeldman on Grammar and Spelling not being the same thing...#

``In the book we point out that merely converting from HTML to XHTML does little good unless you also reassess the way you approach underlying document structure. Otherwise, you're merely replacing "last year's tags" with this year's. Likewise, converting from complicated, nonsemantic table layouts to complicated, nonsemantic CSS layouts does little good. It may give you warm feeling, but so does peeing in your diving suit.''

Razib writes something interesting about Jerry Falwell...#

``I used to watch CNBC years back, in college, and Jerry Falwell would sometimes be on this or that show. One time when asked why he opposed a lot of social welfare, he stated that "to force people to give to those in need removes the act of virtue since it is not done freely out of charity and compassion, but coerced." I remembered this when weeks later Falwell sadly admitted that though this country would never ban pornography, he wished it would, because it was a terrible sin. In this case, Falwell did not seem inclined to err on the side of free will and allow people to virtuously choose The Good and reject the sin. Just goes to show, hypocrisy is a human universal.''

Jeffrey Zeldman links an excerpt of an article about 21st century slaves...#

``Victoria was a debt slave. Payment for her services went straight to her owner of the moment to cover her "debt"—the amount he had paid to buy her from her previous owner. She was held in servitude unless or until the money she owed to whomever controlled her had been recovered, at which point she would be sold again and would begin to work off the purchase price paid by her new owner. Although slavery in its traditional form survives in many parts of the world, debt slavery of this kind, with variations, is the most common form of servitude today. ''

More problems with my drive today, so makeoutcity.com was down from
about 3:30pm to 4:30pm. Bummer, maybe this will be my lesson and I'll
finally get a replacement?#