Circadian Shift

This looks kinda neat:

EPC Sound & Radio Arts: a collection of sound poetry, audio art, audio hypermedia, and arts radio broadcasts

Lalalalala....

You have a Shitty Attitude! Go figure.
You're an asswipe. It's that simple.
You're whiney, annoying, and tiresome.
One day, someone's gonna smack you.
Take the What the Hell Kinda Attitude is That? Quiz at aka cooties

Mr. lactose incompetent guy isn't having much luck at piecing together his thoughts either.

I think I need to go for a walk, or something.

Over on !?, Timothy discovers blog fatigue.

Tell me about it.

Just in time for X-mas: Despair.com comes out with its 2003 Calendar, for all your gift-giving needs. (This one is my favourite.)

Speaking of the Yuletide season, I was wandering the aisles of The Bay today, and found myself wondering how many of their loudspeakers (which were blaring carols, of course) I could take out with a BB-gun before I was arrested. Thinking about now, I'd probably need more firepower than that.

Ah, nothing like a trip to the local Vietnamese eatery for a big honkin' bowl of noodles with BBQ'd pork and spring rolls to make one feel that all is well with the world...

I've gone and uploaded a new file to Circadian Shift: The Outpost. I'd thought about posting it before, but never got around to it. Today, there were two Google searches for Electronic Dream Factory that wound up here, thanks to this post. So, here you are:

"Johnny and May Ling" by Electronic Dream Factory

I was suprised to learn that EDF were actually from Toronto; I just assumed, with them recording on Nettwerk, that they'd be from Vancouver. Anyway, I hope you like it.

Linkage:

• Sleep Disorders


• Got a job interview? Pay attention to your med intake.


• New toonz at explodingdog


• Advisor to Alberta Premier Ralph Klein calls Bush an "idiot" (via MeFi).

Recombinant Pop-Culture Memetics 101, Session 2:

Spidey and pals go to Bollywood (Caution: obnoxious MIDI soundtrack.)

A couple Circadian Shift landmarks from yesterday:

• Total number of visits to this site passed the 5,000 mark.


• Yesterday also holds the record for most visits in a single day. (Not that it's anything to compare to the A-list blogs, but I'm happy.)

Now that we've got all that self-congratulation and suck-uppage out of the way....

Gary has some words about the "moron" comment, and about the erosion of rights to privacy south of the border.

Yep, light on the bloggage again.

But, thanks to a certain online widget, I managed to generate the contents of a new post for thebiglist. Sad to say, my last post on thebiglist was also widget-generated.

Hell, why do any writing at all when you can have essays generated for you?

Ayn Rand acolytes take note:

Bob the Angry Flower's Classic Literature Sequels: Atlas Shrugged 2: One Hour Later

Enjoy:

• The Mod Pop Punk Archives


• Punk Rock In My Veins!

Bork! Bork! Bork!

Do you like the Swedish Chef from The Muppets? There are a number of video clips available at Cman.ca.

More stuff to read in your copious spare time:

• David McFadzean's Memetic Lexicon


• Anders Sandberg's page of memetics resources


• also from Anders Sandberg, a motherlode of transhumanist resources

Got my flu shot on Thursday, and I've been achy and dozy since yesterday. Not that it's made a major impact on my present lifestyle. Incidentally, I could use some new pyjamas.

Anyhoo, here are a couple links I found browsing the Blogger home page:

• ph8: This guy lives in Boston, but I daresay his experiences of riding public transit are universal.


• Twittering Machine -- some tech talk, some pop culture, some other stuff.... oh, yah, and the title's from a painting by Paul Klee.

Was browsing through the forums over at Pure Obscure and came across a link to a site called Blind Youth, which documents the early days of The Human League.

Surprise -- The League actually had several albums out before Dare, and there are a number of early demo tracks available for download. The tunes aren't as "pop-y" as what The League later went on to produce, but still have that distinct early synthpop sound. You kids who like Ladytron will enjoy them too.

Also found myself visiting another retro site called wavelenghts.com (sic). Wavelenghts (yep, that is how it's spelled) has been around for a while; I hadn't really followed it before, since it featured mostly obscure German synthpop that I wasn't familiar with. It seems to have re-focussed on tracks that are better known outside Germany -- for instance, this week's offering is an extended mix of "Big In Japan" by Alphaville.

Well, dive into mark is back after a three week hiatus (as I found out via blogdex), and has come out with a toy that's perfect for information junkies like me (or, I guess, it could be a bad thing).

http://diveintomark.org/newdoor/ checks out your blog home page, or links page, compares it with data from Blogging Ecosystem and makes a list of recommended readings for you.

Some of the recommended blogs based on links from Circadian Shift are ones I'm already reading (eg. Photojunkie, as well as dive into mark itself), but I was pleasantly surprised by one recommendation.

Oblomovka is a blog with various geek techie notes and linkage, which happens to derive its name from a novel called Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov. Oblomov is a man who spends his life lounging around in his pyjamas and rarely gets out of bed:

With Oblomov, lying in bed was neither a necessity (as in the case of an invalid or of a man who stands badly in need of sleep) nor an accident (as in the case of a man who is feeling worn out) nor a gratification (as in the case of a man who is purely lazy). Rather, it represented his normal condition. Whenever he was at home--and almost always he was at home--he would spend his time in lying on his back. Likewise he used but the one room--which was combined to serve both as bedroom, as study, and as reception-room--in which we have just discovered him. True, two other rooms lay at his disposal, but seldom did he look into them save on mornings (which did not comprise by any means every morning) when his old valet happened to be sweeping out the study. The furniture in them stood perennially covered over, and never were the blinds drawn up.

I'm glad to have finally found the book, as I'd heard of it, but couldn't remember what it was called. There is, of course, a handy text file available for download, so I can then read (or ignore) it on my PDA.

Anyway, should you not have nearly enough to read in your copious spare time (and even if you do), go give newdoor a whirl.

[Addendum: OK, this is weird -- I went back to my page of recommended links, and the list had changed. No more Oblomovka, among other things.]

[Addendum 23 November 2002: Turns out that Oblomov is available in multiple formats (including a dramatic adaptation) at Blackmask.]

I don't have a lot in the way of commentary to add (except, maybe, "Wow"), but I feel obliged to post the link to Pitchfork's list of the Top 100 Albums of the 1980s (currently at #5 on Blogdex).

Also on Pitchfork is a piece on The Ambient Music of Brian Eno.

Reporters Without Borders has published its first worldwide press freedom index:

#5: Canada
#17: United States

Writing on Your Palm has an article on the introduction of several low cost PDAs to the marketplace.

Should anyone in the viewing audience have a few hundred dollars that they don't know what to do with, I'd love it if you bought me one of these. (Originally spotted on Slashdot, but thanks to Richard for the link to the Canadian page.)

Thanks to plasticbag.org for the link to a kickass site on rhetoric -- much better than the one I posted some time back (I could go look in the archives, but why bother).

Hopefully, I will no longer keep confusing alliteration with onomatopoeia (they're both rhetorical devices based on sound), but I suppose there are no guarantees.

Got a computer with speakers at your office? Want to annoy your cube neighbours? Play this. (Thanks, Mookie!)

Time was on my side When I was running down the street It was no bind bind bind A suitcase and an old guitar It's all I need to occupy A mind like mine

Over at A List Apart is an interesting piece about elitism and cliqueishness on the web, particularly among web designers, but it could easily be applied to what goes on in blogdom generally. Here's a choice quote:

Those still consumed by resentment may take consolation in this: any artist, writer, or developer who is currently well-known will be replaced by someone else. (emphasis found in the original)

Am at my parents' place. Lots of snow. Looks real pretty. The impending drive back: not so much.

Linkage roundup:

• This Is a Headline For an Essay About Meta -- introducing the New Irony (NYT article; free registratio required) (via MeFi)


• Sex Urged for More Productivity -- geez, is it any wonder I'm unemployed (via some blog I found via Blogsnob; caution: page contains Michael Jackson's face)


• Flaming Dr. Pepper -- it's no Flaming Homer, but that's OK (via Fark)

Give a man an espresso and he will have a buzz for an hour. Give a man an espresso machine and he will be buzzed for a lifetime.

The November issue of First Monday is (finally) out. There's an interesting, if somewhat brief, paper on corporate cyberstalking, wherein companies have been both the victims and the perpetrators.

Via extrasonic comes this gallery of scary-looking aircraft landing pictures.

Recombinant Pop-Culture Memetics 101:

Spiderman meets Las Ketchup

How could I not have found this site before?

INeedCoffee.com

Well, that didn't take long....

After this morning's early arising (I actually woke up about 20 minutes before my neighbour's alarm went off, because my phone was making these wierd beeping noises. Perhaps I'm being bugged. Or not.) I went back to bed and stayed there 'til about 5 again. Oops.

Am I the only one who is repulsed by that goddam Michael Jackson picture that's everywhere online right now? (I'm not going to link to it. Go check Blogdex.) Stop it. Stop it, already.

Meanwhile, Slashdot links to an article in Time about layoffs in the workplace, and their impact on morale. The ensuing Slashdot discussion has some interesting posts.

Lastly, here's a link cribbed from MemeMachineGo! (who lifted it from Eclectica) to a site with pics of cute 'n' fuzzy animals being friends, even though they're of different species. Awwwww!

Did you know that Google has an entire directory of links on information overload?

My upstairs neighbour has an alarm clock that sounds like my alarm clock. I can hear their alarm right now. Apparently, they can't.

Having rambled before about using blogs for knowledge management in the workplace, I was happy to find an account written by someone who's actually tried it. In "A K-Log Pilot Recap", Rick Klau reports on what happened when his firm tried out blogging, using the Radio software for 30 days. A couple of the lessons learned:

• Blogging in the workplace isn't going to catch on overnight.


• Support from management, and rewards for people who actually participate in the blogging exercise, are essential.

Other assorted linkage:

• Coffee drinkers stay fresh --"Women 80-or more-years-old who were lifetime coffee-drinkers performed better on cognitive tests than women who were not." I have no idea if I'm going to live that long, but I'm not going to take any chances. (Via Badgett's Coffee eJournal.)


• Derrida: Online -- Deconstructionism ahoy! (Via hiving.)

As if yesterday's complimentary "Blambage" wasn't enough of an ego boost, I discovered that Captain Graig also has nice things to say about this little venture of mine. Aw, shucks.

I'm on something resembling a daytime schedule now. We'll see how long it lasts.

Can I just mention how much I love Rhino Records? Yesterday, I purchased yet another fine, fine compilation from them, The Best of INXS. Thank gawd somebody remembered to include my favourite INXS song, "Don't Change". The song's off their first album, and has more of a New Wave feel to it than their later mid-80's stadium-rock sound.

Other Rhino essentials include an anthology from The Cars, various Elvis Costello re-issues, and the oh-so-cool New Wave Hits of the 80s series.

Right.

Been a less than happy camper over the last while. It is November, therefore life sucks.

On the upside, there are some nice words about this site over on Blam!Blog, where Brett professes that he's a "committed" reader of my blog. Or maybe he should just be committed. Or maybe I should just shut the hell up and take a compliment once in a while. Thanks, Brett!

[Addendum 22 November 2002: Brett's post is now perma-linked.]

Two articles of interest over on Slashdot (with usual Slashdot frippery amongst the relevant comments):

• Re-tooling Your Skills for the Future?


• Book review of Questioning Extreme Programming

Also of interest: Gar's Tips on Suck-Less Writing (via paranoidfish).

Happened to be browsing the magazine racks at Indigo and caught sight of latest issue of Inc. magazine. This month's cover blurb asks "Are you a tough enough boss?" and features "zero tolerance" CEO Thomas Charlton.

Charlton, a recreational boxer who Stings Like a Bee reportedly is fond of throwing objects against his office wall, and expects everyone to put in a 70 hour work week (quote: "Burnout is a term I don't even recognize"). While I can appreciate anyone who is willing to take the piss out of the head of marketing ("It was awesome."), there is a line between willingness to cut through the crap and being an asshole. Not to mention that I can see all sorts of pointy-headed managerial types who will apply exactly the wrong lessons from Charlton's hard-charging style.

Also spotted the latest Harvard Business Review which features these scary headlines:

• The Empire Strikes Back: Counterrevolutionary Strategies for Industry Leaders -- from the summary: "Industry leaders frequently worry that their companies will fall victim to some revolutionary business model or disruptive technology. But new research shows that it's strategically better for incumbents to counter a revolution than to ignore or fully embrace it."
• How to Identify Your Enemies Before They Destroy You -- "(The authors) have developed a tool that can help companies detect potential disruptive innovations while management still has time to respond effectively. The tool's decision-making methodology harnesses the organization's collective wisdom to determine how likely it is that a particular innovation will seriously damage an incumbent's business. The methodology has two components: an analytical instrument and an organizational process. And the tool's rigorous approach can spell the difference between flailing around and acting effectively in the face of a serious competitive threat."

Meanwhile, Fast Company's November issue has been out for a while. I haven't bothered to read it, but today's "Fast Take" e-mail alerted me to one article called Keith Yamashita Wants to Reinvent Your Company; some bullet points:

1. Outlaw PowerPoint.
2. Don't rely on words alone.
3. Make strategy an everyday act.
4. Argue forcefully against your most dearly held hypotheses.
5. Make decisions, right or wrong.

InfoDesign notes that the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications is now available as a free download.

I've found that the MSTP is a reasonably useful publication, especially if you're documenting apps in a Windoze environment. However, some of the usage notes are (unintentionally) hilarious -- for instance:

navigate
Avoid the verb navigate to refer to moving from site to site, page to page within a site, or link to link on the Internet (or on the desktop or in other applications, as well). Instead, use explore to mean looking for sites or pages generally, move to or move through to refer to sequentially moving from one link or site to another, or a similar neutral term describing the action.

Here's another good one:

crash
Do not use in end-user documentation; use fail for disks or stop responding for programs.

• spazzes


• throws a hissy fit


• vomits


• trashes


• blue-screens

Ran across two posts by blueschnauzer about separating one's personal and professional personas on the web.

I've mused before about this, and what sort of consequences it might have for my future professional life, and I still haven't found a happy balance for myself.

Obviously, rambling on about music, movies, silly websites, and my whacked-out sleeping patterns falls in the category of personal interests. Ostensibly, writing about technology, IA, KM, or anything workplace-related would fall under "professional". But these topics also interest me on a personal/intellectual level. I guess that's one of the hazards of working in a field that one enjoys, and especially a field which is evolving constantly -- it makes it hard to check everything at the office door and just go home for the night.

This issue is also on my mind thanks to my blurb on there being too many goddam IA books, which references a post by David Crow. David's post got picked up by InfoDesign and Elegant Hack (and the gods only know who else).

David, in turn, posted a follow-up which cites my blurb. Which means that I got a wee bit of traffic from people in the same line of work as me, who wound up reading a piece that starts out reasonably coherent but quickly devolves into a self-pitying whinge-fest. Not likely the best presentation of myself to my peers.

I thought about deleting the remark about being in my pyjamas for three days, but I've left it in. I can't quite bring myself to remove it, because it's part of the person who I am right now. I can't help that.

I still don't know about this....

In a follow-up to Saturday's retro tunage post, I've discovered that the formerly defunct Audio Paragon has resurrected as Pure Obscure. Looks like I've already missed a few good tracks as well. QFD.

Another MP3 site that I thought I'd re-mention is the Deep House Archives, which has several CD-length techno/house/jazz mixes available for download. Recommended mix: "Meltin' Pot", mixed by Steve Z.

Damn. Done gone and twisted my hours right round again. For most people, "9 to 5" does not refer to the hours when one is asleep.

Linkage:

• The Duality of Knowledge (via Onepine Updates)


• Creating the Complex Adaptive Organization - A Primer on Complex Adaptive Systems (via Synapshots)


• IDblog: An Information Design Weblog


• Column Two: News and opinion on all things KM & CM

For all you youngsters out there lookin' to kick it retro style, BoingBoing offers these handy links:

• How to be Electroclash (also be sure to check out the main 313ctr0 page for tons of linkage)


• How to Dance Gothic

Other electro links of note (most of which I've mentioned before):

• globalState -- the official 808 State website; the Sounds page offers a number of demo and live tracks


• MOEV tracks on MP3.com -- MOEV was a Canadian group that recorded on the Nettwerk label in the 80's; recommended track: "Capital Heaven"


• Last Tram to Mancentral -- has tons and tons of tracks from The KLF / Justified Ancients of Mu Mu


• manparrish.com -- Man Parrish produced a number of 80's era hip-hop and EuroDisco tracks, the most well-known being the song "Male Stripper"


• underworldlive -- offers a ton of Underworld live tracks dating from a few years ago; recommended track: "Pearl's Girl", recorded at the Fuji Rock Festival in 1999
  • The more studious members of the audience should check out Underworld's main site, dirty.org, particularly the list of classic records by other artists who paved the way for the whole dance music phenomenon

[Addendum: From dirty.org's list of classics, I found Orbital's official site, called Loopz. There are a number of live tracks available for download.]

Yesterday's attempt at circadian shiftage was only marginally successful. Instead of being out of bed at 3, I'm now up at the crack of noon.

I notice that Epitonic has a new design. Downloaded a few more electro tracks, which I'm enjoying, in a nostalgia-redux kind of way -- go give Tinfoil Teakettle a whirl if you want to know what I mean.

I'm a little disturbed at the appearance of a new Jungle Brothers track in Liquid Audio format. One of the things I've always loved about Epitonic was the availability of tracks in no-holds-barred, trade 'em, burn 'em, whatever, MP3. The fact that the music is being offered in a secure digital format just makes it feel less free, even if it didn't require an outlay of cash on my part to download.

*sigh*

All right, I took a nap. A four hour nap. But I'm still going to get outside during regular daylight hours. Really.

Was perusing the list of new e-books over on BlackMask and noticed a work (and author) I'm not familiar with: Definitions: Essays in Contemporary Criticism by Henry Seidel Canby. Authored in 1922, it's a critique of literary writing in America (Canby was apparently an "Editor of The Literary Review of The New York Evening Post, and a member of the English Department of Yale University") and looks quite interesting.

Here's an excerpt from a section titled "Out with the Dilettante":

Two kinds of expository writing are natural for Americans. The first is a hard-hitting statement, straight out of intense feeling or labored thought. That was Emerson's way (in spite of his expansiveness), and Thoreau's also. You read them by pithy sentences, not paragraphs. They assail you by ideas, not by insidious structures of thought. The second is an easy-going comment on life, often slangy or colloquial and frequently so undignified as not to seem literature. Mark Twain and Josh Billings wrote that way; Ring Lardner writes so to-day.

When the straight-from-the-shoulder American takes time to finish his thought, to mold his sentences, to brain his reader with a perfect expression of his tense emotion, then he makes literature. And when the easy-going humorist, often nowadays a column conductor, or a contributor to The Saturday Evening Post, takes time to deepen his observation and to say it with real words instead of worn symbols, he makes, and does make, literature. More are doing it than the skeptical realize. The new epoch of the American essay is well under way.

But the desire to ?make literature? in America is too often wasted. The would-be essayist wastes it in pretty writing about trivial things?neighbors' back yards, books I have read, the idiosyncrasies of cats, humors of the streets?the sort of dilettantish comment that older nations writing of more settled, richer civilizations can do well?that Anatole France and occasional essayists of Punch or The Spectator can do well and most of us do indifferently. We are a humorous people, but not a playful one. Light irony is not our forte. Strength and humorous exaggeration come more readily to our pens than grace. We are better inspired by the follies of the crowd, or the errors of humanity, than by the whims of culture or aspects of pleasant leisure. And when we try to put on style in the manner of Lamb or Hazlitt, Stevenson or Beerbohm, we seldom exceed the second rate.

When the newspaper and magazine humorists of democracy learn to write better; when the moralists and reformers and critics of American life learn to mature and perfect their thought until what they write is as good as their intentions?then the trumpets and drums may sound again, and with justification. Many have; may others follow.

And perhaps then we can scrap a mass of fine writing about nothing in particular, that calls itself the American literary essay, and yet is neither American in inspiration, native in style, nor good for anything whatsoever, except exercise in words. Out with the dilettantes. We are tired of the merely literary; we want real literature in the essay as elsewhere.

Still up. Mind you, this is the easy part. Maybe I should turn this into some kinda blogathon -- maybe the Circadian Shift-a-thon. But that would require staying close to the 'puter, instead of leaving the hovel, which is the plan....

Some linkage:

• The Social Life of Paper -- "(W)hen it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk -- or the spectacle of air-traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips -- arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives." (Via Intellectual Capital Punishment, which hasn't been updated in a while, but I love the name.)
• Boom and Gloom -- "(P)eople may know when they're happy, but they often don't know what will make them happy." (Via v-2.org.)

Lalalalalala....

I think I'm going to take a stab at the up-all-night-up-all-day thing and get out of the hovel during regular daylight hours. During the remaining pre-dawn hours, I should probably get around to responding to people whom I owe e-mail and take care of some other domestic stuff I've been neglecting.

Over on Blam!Blog, Brett has conducted a psuedo-scientific anal-ysis of correlations between Myers-Briggs personality types and blogging temperament (no perma-links -- what's up with that, Brett?). One notes that the sample contains a large number of E/INTP types compared to what's found in the general population.

Gotta love INTPs. We rock.

Can you stand more IA navel gazing?

David Crow has a post about the overwhelming number of new books on information architecture, usability, interface design, etc. What I'd like to know is: how many of these books really have something new to offer, and how many just re-articulate, re-metaphorize, re-tool, etc., the same message?

On the other hand, is the need for all this repetition necessary because the underlying principles continue to be pushed aside by the mainstream?

How the hell can IAs (and tech writers) be beacons of clarity and good information management if we can't articulate what the hell we do and manage our own information intake?

In case you missed it the first time, here's an earlier post of mine on IA burnout.

(Yeah, I see the needle on the whinge-o-meter rising again. I'd like to think that this is at least more relevant to the viewing audience than the fact that I've been in my pyjamas for the last three days.)

Via Cogito Ergo Sumana, I've found another neat page of 'toonz: BoxJam's Doodle!

I realize I'm starting to get whiny again. Sorry, folks.

Quite the discussion over on MetaFilter about AIfIA and Information Architecture as a discipline (including, I notice, some astute questions from blamb).

In lieu of anything constructive to say, I will remark: if you think IAs are a bunch of navel gazing whiners, you should try hanging out on TECHWR-L some time and see the technical writers go at it.

As if I didn't have enough of an identity crisis already....

The Fourth Quarter, 2002 issue of strategy + business magazine is online, and includes a number of essays on the best business books of 2002.

And here's Jake Guevara.

Fellow fire sheep Joey has a bunch of linkage about turning 35.

Also found this link about chronic sinusitis. The article mentions sinusitis being triggered by pollutants and household chemicals. Makes sense.

As for me, the ol' air filled spaces in my head got fried in a chemistry experiment -- literally. Second year organic chemistry lab at UofT: we were extracting caffeine from tea leaves. At one point I stepped too close to the bunsen burner and caught a snootful of benzoic acid vapour. I wound up with symptoms of a really bad head cold for a week afterward, and my sinuses have never been the same since.

I feel like I ought to write more here, but I ain't got nothing to say.

Sometimes the act of creation is mindless, is painful, is embarassing, is fulfilling, is joyful, is truthful, is neverending.

My hours have completely flipped around again. Up 'til 6 or 7; sleep 'til 2 or 3. Funny to think that I'm pondering just going to bed at a time when other bloggers are getting up and starting their day.

Another notebook blurb, October 30, 1997:

This page is going OK. Of course, now that I think about this, it doesn't. To think is to negate. How anti-Cartesian. Backwards through the looking glass.

I'm feeling rather uninspired. I'm also avoiding things that I should be doing.

Memoware has posted a copy of the US Army Survival Manual in DOC format for your PDA. It covers things like survival medicine, finding food, building shelter and fires, dealing with animals, surviving in extreme conditions (eg. cold, desert), signalling techniques, and other stuff that could come in handy. Provided you've got your PDA with you at the time.

Currently have a disc of retro club tunage circa late 80's / early 90's blasting on the stereo, which reminds me of a question that Carla once asked me, and I will now throw out to the masses....

A number of the members of our viewing audience will recall the song "The Power" by Snap, with its buzz-saw guitar sample, and refrain "I've got the power!" Around the same time (1990), another group released a very similar song, with the same refrain and guitar sample (and, no, I don't mean C+C Music Factory). I believe there was a bit of a tussle in the music press, if not the courts, over who came up with the song first. Does anyone remember who this other group was, and what the song was called?

While on the topic of retro club tunage, Scott continues to amaze me with the tunes he's posting over at Rare 1980's MP3 of the Week. This week's selections include Yazz and the Plastic Population's "The Only Way is Up", and "Straight Lines" by New Musik. I'm proud to say that I own the latter tune on 10" vinyl (not 12", not 7", 10"); now I have a digital copy. Thanks, Scott!

And, for Rannie: you can download the original mix of Man2Man Meet Man Parrish's "Male Stripper", and well as the 1998 remix, at Man Parrish's site www.manparrish.com -- look in the MP3 directory called "man2man". (Credit again to Scott for the link.)

Word up to everyone who offered tips and condolences re: my sinuses yesterday. I took a long, hot, steamy shower, and it helped considerably. (I'm sure the mold in my bathroom enjoyed it too, but that's another story.)

Couple articles of interest from the latest HBS Working Knowledge:

• From Lone Star to Team Player -- offers some tips on how to create a knowledge-sharing culture in your organization


• What's Best for the Corporate Brain? -- check the links to additional resources for further reading

Goddamit, my head hurts. Fucking sinuses.

v-2.org has a new design. I like it. I like it a lot. Particularly the fact that I no longer have to deal with multiple scrollbars on the page. (I know, Jakob says users won't scroll at all, but it's not a big deal, especially with advent of mice that have scroll wheels. Having to click and scroll, on the other hand, is still a pain.)

Meryl's Notes points to a page of tips for writing error messages. My two pet peeves with error messages:

• Messages that end with an exclamation point, especially those that respond to errors in user input. (Trust me, I've seen this.) Might as well just write, "That is not a valid phone number, moron!"


• Anthropomorphized error messages. Eudora is really bad for this, for instance notifying me that it's "tired of waiting for a response from the e-mail server". No, I'm tired of waiting for a response from the e-mail server; you're a freaking computer program. Deal with it.

Awright....

What is with everyone and this search? Seems like I get 4 or 5 hits every week from people looking for it (or variations thereof). I mentioned it once, and the link goes to this picture, which I found via a Google image search.

That's it. That's all there is. Move along. Nothing to see here.

Linkage cribbed from JOHO (which I keep meaning to read more often):

• Some Features you may Need on your Computer


• old computer and video game commercials

Quack.

• blamb's very own Dancing Jakob Nielsen


• free pix (via MeFi)

Especially the ones that go off right after you've sat down, and spray your ass. Dont'cha just hate that?

What pisses you off?
Created by ptocheia

(via digital-ed)