Circadian Shift

• 5 Super General Laws of Software Development -- applicable to getting many things done in business, really (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)
• Cyber blackmail wave targets office workers
• IT Forecasts for 2004
• Neilsen/Netratings 10 Most Influential Websites
• More viruses are being written with an explicitly criminal motive
• 101 Ways to Save the Internet
• Some Important Considerations for Web Delivery -- things to keep in mind when putting content on the web
• Florence Nightingale: Information Desiger
• Static vs. Dynamic Files
• (Not) Using Accesskeys in Webpages (via paranoidfish)
• Liquid layouts the easy way (ibid.)
• 2003 web design fashion trends in review (ibid.)

Dave Pollard has come up with a list of time savers for bloggers. Much of it can be used by anyone who finds that they have way too much information to process. Among the points discussed:

• Read less. Whether you use 'push' tools (RSS feeds) or 'pull' tools (browsing your blogroll), you're probably trying to read far too much every day. How much of what you read, and see in the news, really matters?
• Read what you do read less often. I used to scan 150 blogs three times a week, and now I read a selected few twice a week, and the rest only every 14 days. One day a week (usually Saturdays, when the blogosphere is quietest) I spend an hour serendipitously scanning my beloved Salon blogs (especially new ones) and specialized online journals.
• Filter your reading. Use news filters to capture only articles on subjects that are of particular interest to you. If that still produces too much, narrow the filters until you're down to a manageable volume.
• Read faster. The key to this is focus -- it's said that our mind can process information at ten times the rate most people read, so you need to avoid distractions and mental wandering and 'read with a mission'.
• Browse faster. Learn to scan through large numbers of articles, long reports and web pages to recognize the 10-20% that is actually worth reading. Use headlines, synopses and abstracts to decide what not to read, and be critical in deciding what to read.
• Budget your time. If the time you're spending (or think you should be spending) [reading] has you stressed, maybe [it's time] to revisit the purpose, and budget time for [it], so it either becomes more important or less urgent.
• Give yourself time to think, to experience offline, and to think creatively. This is the most important time-saver of all. Don't just react to what you read and see in the news. Get away from reading and your computer and other media, take a walk, do things that stimulate your creativity

I guess I have to figure out how to make this work for myself.

Went to Grand & Toy at lunch today to buy a highlighter (I seem to be unable to get any serious reading done if I can't highlight passages in what I'm reading), and these were sitting next to the cash register:

Yes, that photo is bigger than the actual camera itself.

Anyway, I couldn't resist playing with my new keychain-cam on the way home:

Obviously, I'm not going to be winning any photography prizes with this little gizmo, but it's still hella fun.

And this is the same pic, reduced to half-size. I rather like the lo-res postage stamp effect. Yeah.

More reading for a slow afternoon at the office:

• Curt Rosengren links to another page on left vs. right hemisphere brain processing; and, of course, there is a quiz
• further exploration at the Journal of Digital Information (mentioned below) yielded this paper on Web Page Layout: A Comparison Between Left- and Right-justified Site Navigation Menus
• surfing through tbit's December 2002 archive pointed me back to an article that I linked to last year: The 10 Technologies that Will Help You Stay Employed
• following a link I posted a few weeks ago led me to this Amazon.com page with a number of Free Digital Books, Articles, and Excerpts; there's stuff from Seth Godin (what I mentioned before), as well as a Harvard Business Review article on management theory, a piece on holiday rewards for employees, and an excerpt from Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life?
• two articles from Whitespace (added today to my Bloglines subscriptions): devising a website directory structure, and a web design resources wishlist
• Software Development magazine (which now requires free registration to access its site) has a PDF download titled "Notes on the Role of Leadership and Language in Regenerating Organizations"; some of the prose is a bit fluffy, but the footnotes and bibliography are useful
• also check out Software Development magazine articles on tools for project portfolio management and implementing naming standards in the organization

Technology

• Standards: Do We Really Need Them? -- discusses the benefits of supporting open standards, and provides pointers to tools and technologies you can use in place of proprietary formats (via Seb's Open Research)
• The table of equivalents/replacements/analogs of Windows software in Linux (ibid.)
• Journal of Digital Information -- "Publishing papers on the management, presentation and uses of information in digital environments" (via Bloug)
• Do we code or not? -- A discussion on whether or not people who work with XHTML and CSS are really "coders" (via Digital Web)
• Using tables to present tabular data (ibid.)
• Implementing Collapsible Menus
• another experiment in navigation design with CSS (via paranoidfish)
• The year's lowlights and highlights in technology (via Tomalak's Realm)
• 'Robot Tarzan' helps forest work -- "A fearless mobile robot is helping scientists monitor environmental changes in forests"
• Radio boost for rural broadband -- "Rural broadband has been given a boost by the UK Government's decision to free up a key radio frequency."

Squishy stuff

• Why Implementations Fail: The Human Factor
• How to Build Your Business Through Building Yourself
• Web Of Misinformation -- Think about what you're reading online (via Digital Web)
• New Year's Resolutions vs. New Year's Goals
• Junk e-mail 'costs an hour a day'
• That's too much information (via Tomalak's Realm)
• Multitasking Overhead -- "Context switching demands more time and energy than you think" (free registration required to view)(via Managing Product Developoment, via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)
• Business Management Tips -- little nuggets of advice
• Blogger's block, collapsing facets and the number 150 (via paranoidfish)
• Radical Simplicity: A Second Look, And Lessons Learned

Business and marketing

• How Much is That? -- The relative value of money over time (via Thoughts on Business)
• Search Engine Contextual Ads Gain Momentum (via MarketingWonk)
• Study Indicates Online Shoppers Spend More Time Buying, Less Shopping (ibid.)
• Creating and Using a Marketing Calendar Effectively
• Conquering the Fear of Authoring -- "Ten tips for motivating content contributors"

Just because I can, I added some search widgets to the sidebar (scroll down).

I also added the following linkage to the blogroll; these are all sister sites of Wikipedia:

• Wiktionary
• Wikiquote
• Wikibooks

Have fun.

[Addendum 29 December 2003: Uh oh, looks like the Wikimedia folks need money to keep the thing going; 'twould appear that they've reached their target ($20,000) already, but could probably do with some more cash]

yourDictionary.com cranks out its Top Ten Words of 2003, as well as top phrases for the year, plus other fun lists.

The Cliché Finder is also there to help you in your quest for literary mundanity.

• The CBC has a number of resources about the debate over legalizing marijuana up here in The Great White North (thanks, "N"!)
• The Economist has a good article about the increasing use of biometrics as a security measure (via Manifesto Multilinko)
• On Deciding... Better offers "Tools and information for better thinking and deciding", while sister site Decision Tools has "Notes on software and processes for collecting, analyzing and acting on data" (via Stretching Thought, via Digital Common Sense)
• Lastly, a study concludes that silver cars are less likely to be involved in accidents

The 25th is on its last legs. Large quantities of food have been consumed, presents exchanged and opened, painfully slow internet access endured, and several hours of wholesome holiday programming viewed on television. Hope y'all had a good one.

Meanwhile, two observations on political correctness during the holiday season:

• from Raging Kraut
• from Accordion Guy

Thinking of ditching your old-fashioned telephone landline in favour of going wireless? Think again.

(via Gizmodo)

• Caution over 'microchip world' -- "A future where everyday objects have computer chips in them will have a dramatic effect on our lives."
• The world's first fully automated domestic assistant will be "3 laws safe"
• Broadband so near yet so far -- "Neil Croft campaigned to get his local village telephone exchange upgraded for ADSL broadband. But when the village was hooked up, Mr Croft found he lived too far away to actually get it himself."
• Don't Anger the Search Engine Gods
• Old Skool Search Engine Success, Step-By-Step -- "Most people decide to pay for targeted traffic instead of putting in the time and learning the techniques to attract that traffic from the search engines for free."
• The New Voice of Tech Support -- "high cost of answering routine customer service calls has driven the adoption of voice-recognition software"
• a public service message: back up your blog!
• Forbes's list of Top 10 Business Movies -- The results may surprise you.
• Three Essential Small Business Resolutions for 2004 -- "1. Set non-business-related goals, too."
• Working With Contractors
• Survey: IT workers expect raises in 2004 -- "More than four out of 10 U.S. IT workers received no raises during 2003, but 60% expect to receive a raise of at least 3% in 2004"
• IT's Coal Mining Jobs
• Which came first, the technology or the policy?
• A Guide to Creating Your First Ontology

• Dictionary.com provides us with the Origins of Christmas Words
• The second edition of Carnival of the Canucks is online at Accordion Guy's place. There'll be 8 segments in all, starting here. And thanks, dude, for including little old moi in the Four Pounds of Back Bacon segment.

Organizational Behavior: The Enemy Next Door

In a 1999 interview in the academy of management Executive, former CompUSA CEO James Halpin boasted that he'd built a high-performance work culture at the company. His philosophy was that "you should consider your coworker your competition," although he insisted that his employees still had great trust in each other...

...These methods probably did drive Halpin's people to work harder, but research suggests that it undermined employee cooperation. I suspect that this cutthroat culture was one reason that Comp-USA got into serious financial trouble shortly after this interview, and Halpin lost his job.

Making changes to the newsfeed. Anyone seeing them?

[Addendum: Um, I think it's working. Do you like it? Dislike?]

[Addendum 2: Aaaaaaagggghh!! Why is it, when I add my own blog to my Bloglines subscription, it just shows the items dating back to Saturday? Goddam RSS. Aaaaaggggghhh!!!]

[Addendum 3: Awright, what the hell does this mean?

Exception parsing: {E301} The prefix "content" for element "content:encoded" is not bound.

Aaaaagggghhh!]

[Addendum 4: *breathe* Ok, everything seems to be copacetic now. I'm sure it was my screaming incoherently into blogspace that did it. Yeah.]

IA/ID/web/marketing

• Enterprise IA as Intellectual Property
• The Basic Elements Of Design -- a 10-year-old DTP artifact from Apple
• Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003
• On Bulleted Lists and Evil (via IDblog)
• From Composite to CSS -- "A tableless, standards compliant approach to web layouts" (via Information Management Weblog)
• Desperately Seeking Jessica the Single Female -- 18-34, educated, affluent, ambitious... and coveted by Madison Ave. (via MarketingWonk)

Squishy

• Does groupware imply groupthink?
• Good, Fast, Cheap - Pick 3! -- challenging the traditional view of project management's triple constraint (via Reforming Project Management)
• The Theater of Business -- All the world's a stage...
• What Keeps Executives Awake At Night
• Employees pay cost of rising productivity (via About.com)

Various

• World Flu Outbreak Med Challenge
• One in 100 may get travel blood clots, study shows (via BitWorking)
• "on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds" (via Seb's Open Research)
• hydrogenaudio's audio technology wiki (ibid.)
• did Michelangelo paint God over an image representing the mid-sagittal outline of the human brain, and if so, why?
• Apollo 8 and the first Earthrise photograph happened 35 years ago this week (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)

OMG, this frigging rocks...

About Bloglines: News, December 22, 2003

Today we launched a new feature called Email Subscriptions. You can create an unlimited number of email subscriptions. Each subscription is like a normal subscription in your My Blogs page, except that each one has a unique Bloglines email address associated with it. When email is sent to one of these email addresses, it shows up in your My Blogs page. Emails are not viewable by other Bloglines users, and when you unsubscribe from an email subscription, the associated email address becomes invalid.

Email subscriptions are great for announce-only or broadcast mailing lists that don't provide RSS feeds. They are also useful as temporary email addresses.

My inbox is clogged with newsletters that I haven't been reading because the RSS feeds have kept me so damn busy. It'll be great to keep all my "news" together in one place; I've also missed a few personal emails that've gotten lost in the clutter of the "broadcast" stuff.

Over at The Occupational Adventure Blog, Curt points us to a MindTools page on using a Reframing Matrix to look at problems with a different perspective, and devises his own Reframing Matrix for examining your career dreams.

Also of interest is this brain persuasion test, (thank you, DiVERSiONZ) which helps to determine whether you use your right or left hemisphere more when you think. My results were uncannily accurate.

• 'Glosspost' is a searchable database of glossary URLs. The glossaries come in many languages and cover all sorts of arcane topics, from forestry to mainframes to genomics to bridge playing. (via Languagehat)
• Manifesto Multilinko points out that yesterday's episode of Quirks & Quarks was the Holiday Science Book Show. You can listen to/download the entire show in RealAudio format, or download excerpts in MP3 or OGG.
• The Economist has an article titled 'The Internet in a Cup', which examines the role of coffee houses as places to exchange information in 17th and 18th Century Europe. (via Accordion Guy)

My Blogrolling collection of links has been restored to the sidebar. You have to scroll down to see it. And it's very long.

I had several different rolls going before Blogrolling scaled back the number that you could have on a free account to one. However, I did manage to backup all the old rolls to OPML files sometime ago. Only today have I bothered to hunt down the CD on which the files were stored, wherein I've imported all the linkage from the old rolls into the sole remaining one.

I've done some pruning, and added a few new links. It, like everything else here, is a work in progress.

Marketing

• The Ultimate Web Traffic Dashboard
• 10 Ways To Increase Your Search Engine Ranking - Part 1 and Part 2
• Just in Time For The Holidays -- a list of Christmas SEO tactics
• Learn From Your Marketing Mistakes
• Drop in Email Unsubscribe Rate May Not Be Good Sign
• What Is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System?
• Marketing ROI

Business

• strategy+business picks their Top business books for 2003
• Monster.com has a New blog
• Why Wal-Mart's Wal-Mart (And You're Not)

Squishy stuff

• Weinberger on Projects
• The Promise and Pitfalls of Social Networking
• Putting It All Together Again -- "Knowledge worker productivity: your questions answered."
• Managing for What's Really Important
• Six Ways to Boost Morale
• Ethics and the role of corporations
• generalists make the best leaders
• Project Portfolio Management - Assessing Risk
• Lessons in Management
• The Blind Leading the Blind

Info-wrangling

• RSS channels I track -- Yeesh. And I thought I had too many.
• Still more Tufte
• Doc Searls - It's the Story, Stupid [Addendum 21 Dec 2003 -- link fixed to go directly to the article] and Seeing Through Slides
• Information literacy

Web, design, and technology

• Validating While Browsing
• Images in liquid columns
• More on fixed widths
• Doublefloat - CSS Text Wrapping
• CSS Target Trick
• Donald Norman in Scientific American
• Spot the Arial
• Sun Linux a Good Rival to Windows

Somewhere in the middle

• Presentations from XML 2003
• Extreme ERP Makeover -- I always tend to read "ERP" phonetically, as in "Erp!" It's like the sound that a big monster makes after swallowing everything whole.
• Lies, Damned Lies and Requirements -- "The road to applications development hell is paved with rigid code requirements."
• How to Play to Your Audience -- "turn user research into persona-based design"
• EContent 100 -- "companies that matter most in the digital content industry"
• CMS Forum

• Internet helps Taiwan fight back as SARS returns
• Bendy lampposts may save lives
• Heat Telescope Shows Cool Sights
• Wanted: Gift Guides That Surprise
• Tech Toys Survive Trial by Tots
• Wrist-mounted catapault watch

Here's a bunch of Calvin & Hobbes cartoons about snowmen.

This one's my current favourite:

Feel free to to substitute "Mom and Dad" in the above cartoon with the authority figure of your choice.

• I wish I could remember how I found this, but there a new LCD Soundsystem song that's just waiting for you to download. Go do it now. Now!
• Now that you're back, go check out this Guardian special report on weblogs, particularly Rebecca Blood's piece 'The revolution should not be eulogised'. Bonus: the illustrations are by Hugh McLeod from Gaping Void. (Gracias, Accordion Guy.)
• Meanwhile, Yamaha Motor Company (!?) has put online a bunch of papercraft models for you to print (PDF), cut, and fold. There are various Yamaha motorcycles to be made in miniature, but what I liked were the seasonal models. Only six-and-a-half weeks until Setsubun! (Via NetworkScience.)

And this week's "what kind of __________ are you?" result is:

You are a Theory Slut. The true elite of the postmodernists,
you collect avant-garde Indonesian hiphop compilations and
eat journal articles for breakfast. You positively live for theory.
It really doesn't matter what kind, as long as the words are big
and the paragraph breaks few and far between.

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

(via post-atomic)

Holy, freaking blast-from-the-past, Batman -- here's a list of 100 Canadian Pop Songs You Oughta Know. And indeed, you should.

Punching in at #72 is B.B. Gabor's "Nyet Nyet Soviet", released in that magical year that I discovered New Wave, 1980. You can download my clumsy vinyl-to-digital transfer of the tune here (not anymore).

Or if you happen to live here in T'rana and get your ass downtown to CD Replay (or to Edwards Record World at Yonge & Eg), you can find his two albums issued on one CD. Of course, I have my copy.

Props to tbit for the link.

Film links:

• Movie Review Query Engine (via Seb's Open Research)
• An interview between Lars von Trier and Paul Thomas Anderson (via kottke)

Brain links:

• Abyssal Mind, and the companion linklog (via Reflections in d minor)
• Brainworld, "A Weblog on Brain Sciences, Society, Arts and Culture" (linked to by Abyssal Mind)
• Arts and Minds (via Seb's Open Research, again)

And then there's:

• Cinebrain, "A weblog on Brain Sciences and Cinema" (another link from Abyssal Mind)

• Leonardo da Vinci on blogging
• R. Buckminster Fuller on thinking

Damn. Better clean out the aggregator before it gets too clogged again.

IA/ID/KM/CM stuff

• Everyone's favourite usability whipping boy, Jakob Neilsen, gets lampooned in this very unfriendly 404 message (via ID blog)
• Information Design: the Popular Communication experience (ibid.)
• Avoid the Santa Claus approach to content management (via InfoDesign)
• Squeezing value from KM (via Column Two)
• The Ideal CMS, circa 2004 (ibid.)
• Content Management Systems: How to Make Sure Yours Is Not the Downfall of Your Web Site is an article aimed at marketers, but go have a look

Web design stuff

• The 4096 Color Wheel joins the roster of online color widgets, for your hexadecimalized enjoyment (via Information Management Weblog)
• Night of the Image Map -- Gawd, remember those? New CSS techniques make it feel like 1996 all over again (via Jeffrey Zeldman Presents)
• Where every browser gets it wrong -- "According to [CSS2], there is no way to get a float to size according to it’s content." (via paranoidfish)
• The death of flexible width designs (ibid.)
• Make Internal Links Scroll Smoothly with JavaScript (ibid.)
• A look at Web design generations from 1993 onwards (ibid.)
• www.s7u.co.uk is a new CSS demo site (via Simon Willison's Weblog)
• Here's a page with a whole bunch of CSS, Accessibility, and Standards links -- The serial comma in that title is my own addition, because I prefer it (via InfoDesign)
• Web Page Development: Best Practices (via Information Management Weblog)
• Build Your First HTTP Cookie if you must

Squishy stuff

• A meditation on First Principles for getting along with people (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog)
• Risk and Commitment (ibid.)
• Build Trust on Your Team
• Building Personal Trust
• Developing the Master Skill of the Leader
• Dialog vs. Exposition and Saying vs. Writing (via Column Two)

I still have a few more links to shuffle through, but that should keep you occupied for now.

• Fax - the technology that refuses to die
• Dilemma Over New Flu Vaccine
• The American Film Institute's Top Films of 2003 (via kottke)
• Addiction to information -- Doesn't sound like anyone I know. Oh, no, not at all. (via plasticbag)

• Everybody and their grandmother has already linked to this blurb on how PowerPoint makes you dumb. It's a New York Times bit (free registration required); go read it before it disappears into the for-pay archives.
• And, a lot of people are also linking to this Q&A with Edward Tufte.
• IDblog has still more Tufte, as well as a pro-PowerPoint rebuttal.

His GAKness has ever-so-gently chided his fellow biglist contributors for being, well, listless of late. I have attempted to address said deficit in usual half-baked fashion.

Go read my list of Song lyrics that I've scribbled into my notebook at work.

If you live in downtown Toronto, odds are good that you've gotten phone-spam (an unsolicited sales pitch left on your voicemail or answering machine) from Boris the Mover.

Today, when I got home, the little red light on the machine was blinking. I pressed play, and sure enough, it was Boris, for what must be the fourth or fifth time.

And then...

A second message, from some guy calling himself Reggie. Reggie also had cut-rate moving services to sell, with his pitch delivered in a execrable wannabe-British accent which sounded like a bad cross between Queen Elizabeth and Robin Leach.

Before signing off with a high-pitched "Cheerio!", 'Reggie' left his phone number. Quelle surprise -- it's the same number that Boris left. Nice try, dumbass.

Meanwhile...

I didn't realize that I qualify as a "Toronto blogging personality" (there must be some mistake, surely), but blogging.to is a new blog that collects and publishes posts from a number of us bloggers here in the GTA.

Chris still seems to monkeying with the code a bit, but go over and check it out for a quick overview of what's happening in this corner of the blogosphere.

And tonight, I really must do laundry, as even my emergency backup supply of clean underwear has hit bottom. Oh, joy.

Well, I've just managed to spew out 166 links (plus 2 quotes) that I got from my aggregator (see below). I really have to cut back. This is nuts.

A myriad of linkage on management, leadership, workplace culture, psychology, and other intangible job-related things, that I've been accumulating for nearly a month; I keep meaning to sort them out further, but I might as well just post the damn list.

[Addendum 14 December 2003 -- Sorry, there really is an awful lot here to sort through. I've marked a few of the really good ones with asterisks, and removed the one duplicate link from the list.]

1. 360 Degree Feedback = Lower Shareholder Return?
2. Is Benevolent Leadership the Key to Success?
3. Finally. Visible Business Ethics.
4. In Decision
5. US State Dept. Issues Dress Code
6. Dress Code Changes Coming
7. Dress Code For Professional Women
8. Necktie Ruled Unequal In Dress Code
9. SimpleBites: Seattle Insights
10. SimpleBites: Seattle Insights II
11. Productivity Scene
12. ** Guide to ethnography
13. ** Incompetence - the last taboo?
14. Thinking like an outsider
15. ** John Seely Brown on Stolen Knowledge
16. Stolen knowledge
17. Down my throat no more
18. ** IEEE Software - Cargo Cult Software Engineering
19. Capacity for Language Introduces Uncertainty
20. Positive Psychology
21. Subtle Nudges for Big Results
22. Gray Matters -- No JELLO® Attack
23. Leaders Matter
24. ** Fingerprints of Unhappy Companies All Look the Same
25. Idiot Bosses
26. New Patch Nixes the Liquid Lunch
27. Managing Law Firm Culture
28. Some empirical support for the magic number 150
29. ** Columbia's Last Flight
30. The Best Way to Change
31. repenting the seven deadly workplace sins
32. What Are Your Biggest Workplace Headaches?
33. Gray Matters: Introduction
34. The power of social suggestion
35. RADICAL SIMPLICITY
36. Gray Matters: Dollars and Sense
37. Gray Matters: Politics
38. Gray Matters: To the Finish Line II
39. Being a Target
40. Being a Target II
41. People Issues
42. Surviving The Office Party
43. ** Cognition and Business Risk
44. Capitalizing on Relationships
45. Capitalizing on Relationships II
46. ** Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? [Addendum 14 December 2003 -- bloody hell, this article has already disappeared into the NYT's archives, which require $$ to access; here's a summary, and here's the full article]
47. Time, Says Malcolm Forbes ...
48. Negative Thinking Can Be Good For You
49. 1984? No, Animal Farm
50. Stupid Business Ideas
51. Procrasti-Nation
52. Procrasti-Nation II
53. Letting Go Without Losing Control
54. Headaches
55. Headaches II
56. The value of writing
57. The Value of Writing II
58. What Sins Bug You the Most?
59. Managing the Holiday Season
60. Balancing Priorities on Schedule
61. Welcoming Delegation
62. More on Neurocompetitive Advantage
63. More on Thought Leaders
64. ** Designing Accountability
65. Obstacles
66. ** Better Workplace Now
67. A Rose by Any Other Name...
68. Apparently Transparent
69. Phantom authority, self?selective recruitment and retention of members in virtual communities: The case of Wikipedia
70. Blog :: Effective Client / Contractor Meetings
71. Management Training Or Not
72. Reactive Management Blockhead
73. Servant Leadership
74. ** The new 2004 collection of Demotivators
75. Value
76. Motivation
77. Five pillars for leading the client-focused organization
78. The Paradox of Leadership
79. Driving performance through training

1. Burningbird: The Gluttony of Information
2. Jeremy Zawodny's blog: TrackBack and Corporate Secrets
3. Simon Willison: YAGNI and DRY
4. CSS Fast Rollovers Without Preload - Updated
5. How to get a Purple job

1. In the People Business...
2. Deliver better customer experiences
3. Study Says Revolving Ad Positions Increases Effectiveness
4. Process for naming a company or a product
5. SWOT Team: Damage Control During Difficult Times
6. How to Write With Sizzle When There's No Sausage
7. BoomNation
8. The Kevlar Test
9. The Kevlar Test II -- Tell Us More!
10. Failing the Kevlar Test
11. Free to Fee in 10 (Not so Easy) Steps
12. 2003 Executive Summary: The Year In Scandals
13. The Anatomy of a Starbucks Customer Experience Program
14. Arrogance Reinfects Industry
15. Testing Web Copy Improves Results
16. Business Gifts
17. 2003 Marketing Books of the Year Awards
18. Networking and Marketing in a Down Market
19. The Buying Process Leads to a Decision to Buy
20. So What Exactly Is a Point of Action Assurance?
21. MetaNeeds and Doing Business
22. How to Fill Your Customer's Needs
23. Explorations in Uncovery
24. Offline Sales Key Factor in Setting Search Bids
25. Slouching to Commoditization

1. Automated email from websites to customers
2. Infographics weblog
3. Tons and tons of airline logos
4. Turning Heads With PowerPoint
5. Design: From drab to fab
6. The Evolution of Type
7. Fixed Width Designs
8. Creating an XHTML Compliant Web Site
9. Writing Efficient CSS
10. MF Bliki: MovingAwayFromXslt
11. Intranet authoring models
12. Interface widgets
13. Enhancing Structural Markup with JavaScript
14. Widgetopia
15. Building a Vision of Design Success
16. Paradigm Dissonance: A Significant Factor in Design and Business Problems
17. The Visual Vocabulary Three Years Later: An Interview with Jesse James Garrett
18. Quality control: The importance of website testing
19. One hot design book
20. Quality systems and process maps using the style of the London Underground diagram
21. Thoughtful post by Ben Trott on the misconceptions people have about the role of design in software development
22. Grouping table data by header
23. New Python Computer Science text book
24. Static content generation
25. Myth of doomed data
26. There are only four things that people do on the web
27. Microsoft to stop offering host of older products
28. Origami help for tech design
29. Jay Cross overview of knowledge management
30. Worse is worse
31. Understanding brand experience (PDF, 789kb)
32. Architecture of the World Wide Web, First edition
33. Erik Benson's Weblog: layers of abstraction
34. Web Design - The Ultimate Balancing Act?

1. World map color coded by how much attention each country is getting in the news
2. Small Portion of Bloggers Motivated by Money
3. Downloaders favour singles -- It's the record industry's own damn fault; most CD singles are way overpriced
4. Jokes inflame 'e-mail epidemic' -- Some people oughta take up blogging instead
5. Tech Gifts a Luddite Will Love
6. Top 20 Definitions of Blogging
7. The How To Save The World Roadmap
8. A good - but old - piece about the perceived sense that weblogs are ruining Google
9. Whimsy for Your Special Nerd
10. These Squirrels Are Super Cool
11. 10,000 Ebooks
12. A link-rich meditation on time from Jay Cross
13. How to Hold Moonbeam in Your Hand
14. Comix Without Words
15. Tool for quickly creating timelines -- Like those visual timelines that depict the history of something, not timelines for project management
16. Which dictionary is the best? -- Just examines U.S. dictionaries
17. Which historical lunatic are you? -- I'm Charles the Mad, apparently
18. Games show nasty side of life
19. How good is your grammar? -- I got tripped up by one question; goddam subjunctive verb tense...
20. The Guardian presents a fascinating article about the flexibility and adaptability of memory (as well as how easy it is to manipulate)
21. A pyramid of bears
22. From Ronald Reagan's joke book

I accumulated 138 saved posts in my aggregator over the past week. I managed to weed it out further, down to an even 100. Two of them were quotes.

From Seb's Open Research:

"We see people and things not as they are, but as we are." -- Anthony de Mello (1931-1987), Jesuit Priest

From Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog:

"Planning is an unnatural process; it is much more fun to do something. The nicest thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise, rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression." -- Sir John Harvey-Jones

Now only 98 more to sort through and disseminate...

Santa paid an early visit to The Hovel this year:

Wheeeeee!

Meanwhile:

Copyright Board taxes MP3 players, holds line on blank CDs

OTTAWA - The cost of MP3 players is going up after the Copyright Board of Canada slapped a levy on the sale of digital audio recorders on Friday.

However, the board turned down a request from a music group called the Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) to impose levies on blank DVDs, removable memory cards and micro hard drives. The board also said no to higher levies on blank audio tapes, recordable CDs and MiniDiscs.

Both articles from TechCentral Station:

• Dear Unemployed Techie

  "I like to use the analogy of hitting a baseball where there is a wind blowing at thirty miles an hour. If the wind is blowing toward right field and you try to hit to left, you have to connect perfectly just to have a chance at a single. On the other hand, if you go with the wind and hit toward right, just getting your bat on the ball may be sufficient to drive one over the outfielder's head."

• How to Argue

  "Citizens in a democracy must know two things: how to argue and how to evaluate arguments (so as not to be duped, hoodwinked, railroaded, snookered, or browbeaten)."

New 'toons up at Gaping Void.

Go look at 'em.

Number of e-mails that accumulated between 10pm last night and 2.15pm today: 84
Number that were spam: 61

sigh

Got me some eyestrain from staring at the 'puter again for too long. Boo.

Meanwhile...

Overloaded

Am I the only one around here who feels overwhelmed by the volume of data I expect myself to absorb and process every day?

I just did a Google search for “information overload”. It yielded “about 296,000” results.

Go read the rest. If you can handle it.

Note to self: Remember how much better you feel after you've gone outside for a walk. You should do so more often.

• My cup runneth over.
• A Todo List
• "Where have all the bloggers gone?"
• plasticbag.org | weblog | The long-term cycles of weblog-writing...

• MP3 blogs are switched on
• Shared playlists
• Ten Things
• Feedrolling
• Brain scan clue to delayed speech
• Bodies database 'to aid families'
• Drivers face mobile phone fines
• Kelly's Catalog of the Cool
• Your Geek Gift Guide for 2003
• Umberto Eco on Paper vs. Electronic Memory
• Are You A Closet Canadian?
• Hot Links
• My kind of learning object

• User Experience Accountability: Assessing Your Impact on Business Results
• The importance of documentation
• Workflow or workclog?
• Writing Gold Medal Content
• Unusable Web
• decaffeinated archives :: Alphabet soup
• Smegma? Oh, Six "Sigma"!
• Where Are You Going and How Will You Get There?
• Do You Suffer From Technology Migration Migraines?
• PowerPoint Presentations Online: No! Stop! Don't!
• Error Messages: More Important to Your Web Site Than You Think
• Usability Useful, but Not the Final Goal
• Pollard's 'Most Important Books Of 2003'
• Actionable Knowledge
• Testing the Three-C