March, 12, 2001 archives
a great interview with the author of the phantom tollbooth. what an awesome book.
something i don't understand is why gnu tar doesn't just autodetect tar files that have been compressed with gzip or bzip2 and handle that automatically, instead of making me have to remember the correct magic flag. let the computer do the work, i need to conserve brain cells.
whipped together a quick rss 0.92 (xml) version of this here weblog. it also includes a non-standard <datetime> component of each <item>, that is the date and time of when that entry was made (duh).
i hijacked the 'your personal start page' toolbar button in netscape to point to my my own personal news-aggregator thing. it sends a cookie that it uses to highlight new items (updated bookmarks and new stories). nothing terribly sophisticated, but i find it useful.
clay shirky is a very wise man. i like his points about the riaa, and the corporatization of media.
google is another of those companies i just like because they seem to have a good corporate philosophy. this interview with larry page, the co-founder/ceo, illustrates what i mean, i think.
unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. a study from cornell. basically, incompetent people think they are more competent than they are, and vice versa.
one of my personal heroes is steve martin. the man is just too funny. he should be entertaining as the host of the academy awards.
sand pendulum art, as produced by the seattle earthquake.
salon says that programmers are having a hard time finding jobs. or at least that's what the headline would have you believe. the article itself reveals that it is the junior-grade people ("i'm an html programmer!") that are finding that their skills aren't as highly valued as they were a year ago. (insert some sort of snide comment here about poor "hannah" who suffered the indignity of being offered a $35k job.)
go.com made a deal with goto.com. that's pretty funny, considering the wrangling over their logos a year ago. i remember when goto.com used to have a cute picture of a napkin that outlined how sparse their homepage would be -- no portal, just a search box. (you know, like google is still.). hmm.