- When I woke up this morning about 6am and walked into the kitchen, I noticed that the glow from the streetlight on the curtains in the front window had a different quality. Hmm? Pulling aside the curtain, I see that there's enough snow to cover up all the dirt and grass. Light fluffy snow that hadn't yet been mashed flat by the cars and feet of the students heading off to the University. The streetlight was reflecting and sparkling off it, and it looked darned pretty, and now it suddenly feels like we're getting close to Christmas and I need to get moving on writing cards and buying presents and I bet there's even eggnog in the stores.
- Small study links biking, male infertility is a misleading headline. Clearly, what they mean is that riding a standard upright bike (a "wedgie") is connected to male infertility. It's really just another reason to buy a recumbent. (Jim)
- The e-waste land, where old computers go to die.
[some guy]So much harm has come under the green passport of recycling,
says Puckett.Whenever someone says that word, it has the effect of making people swoon and think that everything is going to be lovely.
In places such as Guiyu, everything is far from lovely. - The Pitfalls of Premature Generalization There's an art to designing things (like software) that are expected to grow over time. By contrast, building a bridge that spans a river is more direct -- the civil engineer will have a concrete set of requirements at the outset and can design a span that fits to spec, exactly. Software often isn't like that. We expect the requirements to change and are tempted to anticipate those changes early-on. This can lead to the tactical mistakes of premature generalization and optimization. Worse yet, there can emerge snobbish culture to reinforce those bad habits. [Reed, via the awesome JavaBlogs]
- About once a year or so I end up doing some online chatting (usually with a cute gal, natch) and invariably end up trying a new client. This time, it was Yahoo! Messenger - Macintosh Version that I tried out, and I tried it on Mac OS X. It's a pretty nice bit of software. It did exactly what I wanted, and didn't have a ton of bells and whistles in my face to bug me.
- Tired of those pesky electric bills? But some Telco Powered Products (TM) and get your power from the phone company.
Too cheap to meter!
[boing boing]