I'm attempting to change the structure of my posts a bit.#

David Stout reports that Bush would like the UN to help the US in Iraq, but on US terms,#

WASHINGTON, Sept. 10 — President Bush called today for an end to "past bickering" so that the way can be cleared for a United Nations resolution to send more soldiers from other countries to bolster peacekeeping forces in Iraq.

"Let us not get caught up in past bickering, let us move forward," Mr. Bush said at a brief question-and-answer session with reporters at the White House. "A free Iraq is in everybody's interest. A peaceful Iraq is in the world's interest. And I'm confident we can work together to achieve that."

There's a new Knowledge for Thirst post,#

a few weeks ago I'm in a co-worker's office and see this sexy-looking bottle on her desk and I'm totally eyeballing it and she says, "Oh yeah, Lorina Sparkling Lemonade! This is my favorite drink!" And I admired the tasteful label design and mentioned, you know, off the cuff, that I happened to "work" for the "preeminent beverage-related website" and "really knew my shit" and she said: "Here, take it! Try it! I have another bottle right here to enjoy. But you must tell me when your review is online so I can read it!" So I chugged it down and was all: Eh. Kind of like Orangina (you ever pronounce "Orangina" like "vagina"? Just to pass the time? Like I do?) except with the carbonation cranked up too many notches.

[...]

Finally, I had T42's Peach Tea, which threw me because it tasted like actual real-life tea with a hint of peach instead of the corn syrup fantasia of, say, Snapple Peach Tea, and as a result I was all: Zzzz. I mean, what has become of me. But I did enjoy the copy on the bottle where they rail against tea poseurs, not naming any names, mind you, but making clear that they've been dealing with this tea shiznit for years and know what they're talking about, unlike some other wannabes who are just now jumping that particular bandwagon. I.e., the wimpiest cred ever.

Krzysztof Kowalczyk gives some advice about reacting to pundit-ish things on the internet,#

Sometimes it's what they don't say that invalidates their conclusion. A thesis and 2 examples to support the thesis. Is the thesis valid? Not really. Look at Microsoft - an example of extreme wealth acquired, in great part, by succesfully building a platform. Or even Apple (struggling but still alive thanks to the platform they built) or Playstation or Nintendo. It's not that building a platform doesn't pay, it does and extremely well, we might add. You just have to do it right.

loonyboi writes about the X-Files in honor of the 10th anniversary of the premiere,#

``The X-Files is a conflicted series. On the one hand, it has a great premise, and a lot of really likable characters, many of whom have a real charm to them. But then there's the fact that this was clearly a series where the creators involved hadn't a clue what the long-term storyline was going to be when the show started airing. The X-Files method of storytelling was to raise a whole lot of questions, answer one, and then raise a whole lot more. And then when those questions are answered, to raise a ton more on top of that. This led to some seriously insane leaps of logic, which occasionally reached the level of Metal Gear Solid 2 silliness.

Watching it now, I find myself laughing occasionally when the show takes itself too seriously. Fortunately this doesn't happen too often, but some of those scenes with Cancer Man are really cornball. And Krycek's forced snarl doesn't wash with me either. But the show is still great (especially when it deals with standalone stories, and not the silly long-term one), and for a far-out sci-fi show it earned a place in mainstream culture, which was pretty incredible. ''

Richard Tallent has a good blog, despite naming conventions :)#

Raymond Chen answers the question, "Why do some people call the taskbar the "tray"?"#

``Short answer: Because they're wrong.

Long answer:

[...]

One of the most common errors is to refer to the Taskbar Notification Area as the "tray" or the "system tray". This has never been correct. If you find any documentation that refers to it as the "tray" then you found a bug.''

The Yeti links an amazing Strong Bad email reply about a children's book. It's teh funny.#

Xian writes about Google making Blogger Pro free,#

``After my hour on blogs and RSS yesterday at Seybold, one of the questions I got was about why Google may have bought Pyra and exactly this question of whether they were planning to monetize it somehow. I explained my theory that:

Google values the "memex" trails that bloggers leave as they provide custom indexes of the Web, filtered with a human perspective

And, with a BlogThis! button on Googlebar 2.0 and AdSense, Google is approaching a very tightly held content input, indexing, and retreival infrastructure with a financial component. A barrier to entry of even a small payment doesn't help them.''

Just a Gwai Lo finally gets it through my head that's he's talking about what a hot girl I know calls, "Gyrates." Because they make you see the "gyration muscles," we don't like it one bit.#

Matrix Essays ponders on the "Who's running it?" aspect of the Matrix,#

``In Program, two characters have a debate, then a battle over whether to reject the truth and go back into the Matrix. In the end the character who does not want to go back triumphs, but then we learn that the whole thing was just a training program, "a test." What is the point of this episode, besides looking cool artistically? We've already heard the same basic "shoulda taken the blue pill, put me back in" patter from Cypher in The Matrix, so what does this story really add to the Matrix universe?

I think Program exists to show us a simulation run by humans, to influence or "reprogram" other humans ("a training program"). Matriculated shows us a simulation run by humans to influence machines. Machines run the "main" Matrix, of course, to influence (or mislead) humans. The only combination missing from this would be a simulation run by machines for machines.''

BileBlog bashes bad bloggers,#

``Bill Joy Leaves, Bloggers Pretend it's News At the risk of sounding like a broken record (yeahyeah), I must express my shock and dismay over this whole Bill Joy nonsense. So some high up guy leaves Sun. Eight genius bloggers decide that they need to reproduce this tedious piece of humdrum news in their tedious humdrum blogs. Pretty much everyone one of them had nothing to contribute beyond judicious copying and pasting from some other news source.

Come on folks, the whole point of blogging is, for better or worse, to contribute something personal, to make some form of contribution, to add even a tiny bit of self to the collective cesspit. Reporting news that one can find anywhere else, with no opinion, thoughts, or real content is madness. ''

Let Me Get This Straight has the "Dumb straight quote of the day" - it's pretty shitty,#

``"To me, [Queer Eye is] not a reality show about gay people. A really good reality show for gay people would be five gay men dying of AIDS."
[Julie Millam, Montana Family Coalition quoted on Gay.com UK]''

Peter Lindberg writes about exploration of possibilities,#

``I like to view this as guided evolution: you start with a seed, plant it and then control its growth. At any given time in its evolution, there is a limited set of possibilities for the future evolution. By evolving the plant in one direction, you rule out some of them, and sometimes open new possibilities.

If you pay attention to these possibilities, and respect them, you get coherence without pre-planning. Why is this scarier to software people than speculating at a time when you don't know much at all about the system you're building, and then committing to those speculations (in terms of scope and estimated time to implement)?''

And sometimes you get platypi

Peter Lindberg also pulled up something else very interesting,#

``I've also read that before words for other than primary colors entered our languages, we couldn't really see the difference between colors we had no words for. For instance, in mediaeval times, both black and blue were called blue. (What's also interesting is that the words for colors seem to emerge in the same order in different languages.)

(We register that for which we have concepts, and learn to distinguish variations we're exposed to. One wonders what is going on that we can't yet see. I don't know why I came to think about this.)''

Languages can act as a framework of thought that sometimes constricts what you can think. See 1984. Similarly, if you are a Java or C programmer you may not know what you are missing about Lisp/Smalltalk languages and their environments

Michael Watkins would like to start a global, pundit peer-reviewing process piloted by bloggers,#

``I'm a recent addition to the world of Blogging. None-the-less I am respectfully floating a proposal for a new Blogger initiative: distributed, real-time pundit puncturing.

As I see it, the goal of pundit puncturing is to make the web safe from true believers of all stripes, particularly those who are unencumbered by knowledge, or scruples, or both. I expect nailing these people to give one roughly the same sort of satisfaction as lancing a particularly pustulent boil. ''

Michael Feldman posts about a guy who mailed himself to his house, weird.#

``DALLAS - A homesick shipping clerk had himself shipped from New York to Dallas in an airline cargo crate, startling his parents and a deliveryman when he broke out of the box outside their home.

[...]

The freight cost billed to McKinley's employer was $550. At that rate, "he could have flown first-class," Phillips said.''

He was in the box for 15 hours. Woah.

Al3x describes an Ars Technica article in the most brilliant way,#

`` Confuzzled by the Linux/Unix desktop's workings and design? Wanna know more about GNOME 2.4? Ars Technica has got you covered like a jimmy hat. They get all under the hood, then all above the hood, then they wax that thing up and down. What a (popular) technical article should be. ''

Ryan McGee has an awesome post with much to quote, but I'll pull out something that rings very true of relationships,#

``How, how this all ties into the Hornby quote: dating, from the time the fateful words "going steady" through "reaching second base" through "unhooking her bra" into "three-way in the barn with your substitute teacher", is just another facet of external assignments getting in the way of two people trying to figure out if they wanna cuddle on a couch on a Friday night. If I meet a girl I like, my first instinct is to completely mold myself into the person I feel she wants to date, figuring I'll eventually let the real me grow on her like a fungus until she's too annoyed from scratching and lets "me" stick around. In the meantime, of course, I'll play the game. "Oooh, an Ann Coulter book signing! Fun!" "Yes, I'd love to watch the Cooking Network!" "Yanni! Sweet!"

I never stop to think if they are playing the same game. I don't, because I automatically place myself in the lower rung, needing to ascend to their level. Figure it's me who needs to improve to keep them interested. I'm always seemingly "too much" of X, "not enough" of Y. I'm like a soup that's consistently making Emeril shout words that aren't "BAM". More like "DAMN". I need more salt. Bit of parsley. But the last girl liked salt; this one likes parsley. And I switched the recipe at the wrong time.

Couldn't let the basic ingredients just present themselves. Most of us can't. Easier to get rejected for something you're not that to be shot down for who you are.''

Boy Without a Home looks pretty good, except there's no RSS feed. I hate at it. #

Werner Vogels got a paper accepted for a conference,#

``There was one comment from the reviewers that was somewhat unexpected for me. She/he commented that I had failed to critically asses the suitability of WS-Coordination for the purposes I was using it for. The comment is correct, I hadn't done that. The reasons for that is that for me the services described in the Coordination spec are so essential to distributed computing that I have never questioned that there would be contention about whether they are needed. The Coordination Service provides individual web services with a mechanism to establish a relationship that can be used within the context of a joint activity. The resulting 'context' that can be passed around among the participating services to have a way to join in the instance of the activity, which for example could be a distributed transaction, a consensus/agreement operation, or as in the case of the Service Tracker a failure detection and membership support service. WS-coordination provides a framework for acquiring a context for the specific activity type, and mechanisms for other web services to use the context to 'hook-up' with the software components that implements the desired distributed activity.''

Tony Pierce posts the funniest thing ever. Yep,#

``jessica simpson is my new girlfriend. and im am hopelessly in lust with her.

i dont care that she doesnt know the difference between tuna and chicken.

id kiss her on the nose and say, baby you know what tuna smells like.

and shed say, i do?

id say, it smells like every girl except you.''

Brian Carnell reports on insane protectionism#

``The BBC reports that the Egyptian government has moved to protect one of its native industries from competition from cheap foreign imitators. So, beginning January 1, 2004, foreign women will not be allowed to perform as belly dancers.

[...]

Whew, thank goodness they tackled that problem before it became a crisis. The nerve of some people to think they can just move to Egypt and start dancing. Sheesh. ''

Bill Dennis writes about the decline of common sense in regularly reliable media,#

``The following Breaking News Alert from ABC News has appeared in my mailbox: EXCLUSIVE: Woman Says J.Lo Will Marry At the Same Hotel as Her Daughter

[...]

It's an exclusive! It's also another sign that Big Media is determined to become utterly irrelevant. What's even sadder is that we've come to accept the tabloidization of once proud media sources. The more they devote time and energy to exclusive news like this is why more and more people search the Net for news that matters.''