In general, monday's not my favorite day of the week. Even though I work from home, I mostly stick to a monday to friday work-week, and monday is administrivia day. It's the day to balance the checkbook after whatever shopping I did over the weekend. It's the day to catch up on work-related email. It's the day to plan out the rest of the week, and make adjustments for last week's plans which went sadly awry. There are a bunch of things that don't contribute directly to the bottom line, but still have to be done. I've decided to do these things on Mondays because it's a way of easing back into the work-week, but I sometimes wonder if it doesn't slow me down by putting off the "real work" for part of a day. It's easy to lose all motivation and momentum after spending a morning on administrivia and just call it a day at lunchtime.
- Stolen Beatles tape found! - So, how long 'til there's a new CD? [Jim]
- RIAA hacked again. This is the fourth time in recent months. You'd think they'd eventually figure out how to secure their servers. [fark!]
- Montreal English is a 'linguistic laboratory' in the only major city in North America where English is a minority language. That minority status makes interesting changes to the English. Speaking of Montreal is another article about Charles Boberg, who's also studying The phonetics of Canadian English, eh. [boing boing]
- Without protest, Americans are giving up freedom.
The government now has the power to enter your home or your computer and secretly record whatever they find without ever having to notify you. They do not even have to obtain a warrant from a publicly accountable judge showing reasonable suspicion that a crime is being committed.
Nothing really new here. I pointed most of this out back in the ten minutes or so when USA-PATRIOT was being debated. - Burningbird's Tyranny of the Commons discusses the Lone Blogger, and Movable Type Competition? points out that Dean fits the mold, in part because he's building his own blogging tools. Well, so am I. I probably fit the Lone Blogger mold, too. I acknowledge the community a little. There's that blogroll and the referrers list over there on the right. But I'm not planning to dive into "the blogging community", because there is no single blogging community. There are cliques out there. Some are based around which tool you use. Some are based on geography and knowing people in meatspace. Some are based in business relationships (like some of the O'Reilly blogs and Salon blogs). Me, I tried some of the tools and decided that I'd rather write my own tools and control my own destiny.
Geography plays an important part, too. Minnesota is not one of the "blogging hot-spots". There are enough of us around here that there are occassional meetups of folks, but I've only been to one of them. Part of the reason I don't show up more is because I'm busy, and part is because I'm just not a joiner. You see, I'm a Minnesotan, which leads to a certain reticence. Again, I play the Lone Blogger. Obviously I don't think that's a bad thing, it's just different from those who want a huge social circle.