Amazon Honor System: "How does the Amazon Honor System paybox know my name?"

My word of the day: grotty

Very unpleasant; miserable.

September 2003 horoscopes for geeks.

18. Your cats. Attachment to a non-human mammal that doesn't give a fuck about you bespeaks emotional damage. It's the kind that transforms you from 'alluringly quirky' to 'certifiable.'

Nerve.com - The Unsexy List by the Nerve staff

A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20x1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

FAQ : HURRICANES, TYPHOONS, AND TROPICAL CYCLONES

The DeLorean, the Fiat Panda, the Saab 9000, and the Volkswagen Golf where all designed by one guy: Giorgetto Giugiaro.

Free doesn't always mean beautiful: Free Software Song over at GNU. Sung by rms.

Nikolai Bezroukov. Portraits of Open Source Pioneers. Ch.3 Prince Kropotkin of Software (Richard Stallman and his Anarchistic GNU Project). The whole site Softpanorama is really cool.

Slides on doing a long presentation: Conference Presentation Judo

I recently tried Internet telephony for the first time with Speak Freely. Worked like a charme (from Windows to Windows, in our case). Unfortunately, Speak Freely will be discontinued. As Walker writes, the Intenet is a different place now than it was when he wrote Speak Freely. One problem being that many machines on the Internet sit behind NATs. Who would really know how to work around that? Well, somebody like the KaZaA guys. So they did, with Skype.

Popular Science | The Worst Jobs in Science

10. POSTDOC

Sure, some Ph.D.s do enriching work in their postdoc "year" (this limbo between earning the doctorate and getting a real job has in fact grown to a more typical two, three or four years)—but in an obscene number of cases, it's just drudgery leading to dashed dreams, for the simple reason that we produce many more science and engineering Ph.D.s in this country than we have professorships to fill. The academy line is that, overall, the postdoc is a beneficial "winnowing-out time": The fittest scientists are selected, while the rest flee to lesser callings (like … picking randomly here … science journalism). But, to extend the Darwinian metaphor, overwhelming anecdotal evidence suggests that the postdoc limbo selects not for intellectual fitness to be a scientist but for sheer endurance to put up with 80-hour weeks of, say, sticking electrodes in rat brains and getting bitten. People with interests in family, art or recreation are the most likely to bail. As well-rounded minds, they're also potentially the best scientists.

Research Shows: There is A Perfect Editor. Should form a good basis for those Emacs vs. Vi fights.

Semantic Web, proper noun
An attempt to apply the Dewey Decimal system to an orgy.

From The Devil's Dictionary (Via Schockwellenreiter).

As you can see in my case, choosing a catchy title and tag line for a blog isn't easy. So I have to express my admiration for this: A Man with a Ph.D. - Richard Gayle's Weblog: "An attempt to use Radio to further my goal for world domination through the study of biology, computing and knowledge management."

Stealth Disco

Ghost Sites: The Screen Shot Collection

Bloomberg.com: Bloomberg University: "Take our free online tutorials and learn to invest like the pros. Enrich your financial life. "

This lucky guy Brockschmidt got both wealthy and wise while working at Microsoft: Mystic Microsoft: Spiritual Transformation in the Halls of High Technology. Looks like I have to check out his books on OLE.

High tech's missionaries of sloppiness: "Japan would always lag behind America in software innovation and sales because of a business culture in which perfectionism is rampant." Because innovation is more important than quality. Sigh.

Jargon word of the day: PEBKAC

I got a license from Habeas. Not because an email of mine got actually blocked, but it seems to be a pretty cute concept: The license allows me to include a haiku from Habeas in my email headers. Emails with those headers should be able to pass spam filters more easily. And Habeas is suing spammers who just copy that Haiku. And winning. (And kicking out their founder. Whatever.)

Ich kann die Schriftart Rotis von Otl Aicher nicht mehr sehen (benannt nach einem Kaff). Jedes zweite Nahverkehrsunternehmen benutzt die inzwischen. Und jedes dritte Fachbuch auf der Titelseite.