Circadian Shift

• Molecular basis for Mozart effect revealed -- "New research has revealed a molecular basis for the "Mozart effect" - the observation that a brief stint of Mozart, but not other music, may improve learning and memory." (via del.icio.us)
• How To Hack Your Head, a buyer's guide to recreational brain scanning (via kottke)
• Why my brain hates your mistakes -- "Why is it so annoying to watch someone else make a mistake? Maybe because it affects the same areas of the brain as when a person makes his or her own mistake" (via the nub)
• Language 'Center' Of Brain Shifts With Age -- "Along with left- or right-handedness, the hemisphere of the brain where language capacity resides is likely predetermined. Researchers have now shown that with age, language capacity in the brain becomes more evenly distributed between hemispheres." (via Anthropology in the News)

Cheers to Pete for putting these on his site:

• Process Control
• Architecture Decisions We Regretted

Ran across these while looking for the links for the previous post. I'm rather pleased with them, even if the language is a bit, uh, colourful:

• Whither B-Blogs?
• Whither B-Blogs? Part 2

A lot of people have been linking to Mamamusing's post you may ask yourself "how did i get here?", wherein she talks about when and why she started blogging.

It's something that I've been thinking about as well, as it is the eve of my Blogiversary.

Two years ago, on a Thursday at 2.30 in the morning, I bit the bullet and set up an account over at Blogspot. Seemed like a fun thing to do, have somewhere to put my little screeds and ramblings on "Reading. Computers. Art. Music. Insomnia." (my first tagline) out there for all the world to see.

However, I'd been laid off about six weeks beforehand from a job I loved, and thoughts of career weighed heavily on my mind. It didn't take long for work-related things to appear, and it left me frequently conflicted about which way the blog was going to go.

To complicate things, when other blogs started linking to me, everyone seemed to put me in a different category. Some see this as a business or technology blog, while others seem to enjoy the more, er, "eclectic" things that I link to.

Anyway, I think I've made a decision, although it'll probably take me a few weeks to implement it.

And thanks to all of you who've been reading, linking, and commenting. I probably wouldn't have lasted this long without you.

• Worthy Reads and Worthless Reads -- quick reviews of a dozen business books (via Cutting Through)
• ! RANT Reading Re-Imagine -- Tom Peters' latest proves to be opaque
• Don't laugh at gilded butterflies -- "Rather than chasing wonder new products, big companies should focus on making lots of small improvements" (via EMERGIC.org)
• BAM! Part 3: Proactive Management Through BAM -- last in a series on business activity monitoring (here are Part 1 and Part 2)
• Do you have too much IT? (via Knowledge Jolt with Jack)
• Computer hacking 'costs billions' -- "Three-quarters of UK companies have been hit by security breaches in their computer systems over the past year, costing billions to industry."
• Jack of all trades, master of none -- "There are better ways to transfer files, hold discussions, deliver notifications, broadcast newsletters, schedule meetings, work collaboratively, and manage personal information. But even though e-mail isn't the best tool for any of these tasks, it provides a single interface to all of them."
• A Web of Electronic Denial -- people are downloading a lot more spyware, MP3s, video clips, and games than they are admitting

• 7 skills that customers appreciate from their vendors -- works just as well for dealing with "internal" customers (via the nub, who seem to be supplying an awful lot of my links today)
• Get Your Message Out - On a Shoestring -- "4 easy ways to create a successful advertising plan without spending a bundle" (via bBlog)
• Gonze's law of internet visibility -- "In any field where visibility creates success, resources that are online will experience positive feedback at the expense of their offline rivals." (via Seb's Open Research)
• Where Marketers Go for Information: Free Resources, Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4
• CRM gets strategic -- "CRM systems rarely hold all the information you and your customers want. They just add a layer describing customer needs and preferences in order to make data found in financials, SCM, manufacturing, and other systems more meaningful."
• Keys to intelligence success -- "Executives and analysts don't want disconnected, formulaic reports from each department within each unit. Instead, they want summaries that consider facts from all sources -- even facts they aren't trained to comprehend – that they can distill into high-level views supporting quick and smart decisions. That's the definition of intelligence. Anything less is just data."
• The "What's Next? Process" for Developing Your Strategy -- Gap Analysis is no longer adequate in the current competitive environment
• Top 100 Biggest Cities in the U.S. (via anil dash's daily links)
• New ad model charges by the click -- from April 29, 1996 (ibid.)

• Why You Need Allies at Work -- "Tips About How to Develop Alliances" (via the nub)
• Introverted technologists: "How to survive in an extroverted world", plus Getting Heard: "Feeling drowned out by your extroverted peers?" (ibid.)
• A Prescription For Business Innovation - Part Three -- last in a series from Dave Pollard
• Is Belief Crucial To Success? -- "Do I have to believe in what I am doing in order to be successful at it?"

• Seldom heard are discouraging words, "You're fired!" -- "many companies have adopted more surreptitious ways to get rid of unwanted employees. Human-resources experts call it "managing out," a way to nudge an employee out the door while minimizing legal exposure. Sometimes it involves making a worker's job so miserable that he'll quit. Other times, it might mean building an airtight cause for a firing, even if the cause is bogus." (via the nub)
• You always have the option of firing non-performers
• Barry Diller is Tough on Creative Conflict -- "Barry Diller, the media powerhouse and storied entrepreneur, discussed the pleasures of risk-taking and the necessity of conflict at Harvard Business School."
• Flush that potty mouth with popular euphemisms -- " In real life, the problem with euphemisms is that they don't provide psychological release... While out-of-control road rage isn't healthy, cursing can be a helpful coping mechanism to let off steam" (another via the nub)
• Employee Cyber Crimes -- "Employee Cyber Theft Dangerous as a Virus" (ibid.)
• The Enchanted Glass -- "We have a cognitive bias to see ourselves in a more positive light than others see us." (via Follow Me Here)
• Women Remember Physical Appearances Better Than Men Do -- and "women remember the appearances (of)women more than they remember the appearances of men.."
• How Deception, Reputation and E-mail Can Affect Your Negotiating Strategy (may require free registration to view) (indirectly via Synergy Partners)
• Job Shift -- "people who are employed in what they think of as full-time, long-term jobs are in reality hired by their organization to work as long as they offer value. So these are actually temporary jobs."

• WhiteSpace runs through what makes for that professional look in website design
• WhiteSpace also weighs the merits of using iFrames or Text Overflow
• Digital Web looks at website renovations
• If you're struggling to come up with a fresh page design, maybe it's time to think outside the grid (via Digital Web)
• If you're not one to do the page design yourself, you may want to look into the care and feeding of your web designer (via paranoidfish)
• Lastly, here's a look at nodes of design inspiration (via mezzoblue)

• Rick Klau writes about stopping occupational spam
• Elegant Hack links to a Harvard Business Review article titled Just-In-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management (PDF, 125kb)
• Cutting Through discusses What's a wiki and why would I want one?
• Cutting Through also lists 11 types of businesses that should be b-blogging and 5 uses for weblogs in business

I've gone and added a feed on the sidebar that displays my most recent 15 links from del.icio.us. The feed is actually powered by Spurl, another online link-logging/sharing service.

Spurl actually did a very smart thing and allowed del.icio.us users to import their bookmarks into Spurl, and use the Spurl interface to post to it and to del.icio.us at the same time. It's smart, because del.icio.us seems to already have the critical mass of users to make it a really good forum to swap links -- something with some of the other services seem to lack.

The payoff is that del.icio.us users don't have to abandon a strong link-swapping community, and can still take advantage of Spurl's functionality -- like more flexible syndication options, and the ability to save a "local" copy of the page you link to.

Meanwhile, there's Furl, which I've also played with a little bit. Furl also has more advanced functionality than del.icio.us -- including the ability to download your cache of saved pages as a ZIP file -- but I didn't find the selection of links from other users to be as good.

Anyway, check out the sidebar for quick bits and pieces that I'll link to on the fly (and, yes, there is an RSS feed).

[Addendum 27 April 2004: I adjusted Spurl's sidebar feed to display the last 25 entries instead of 15. Is it too much? (The RSS feed from del.icio.us still only has the last 15 links.)]

Please excuse any wierdness that may ensue.

• Father and daughter's SMS lifeline -- "An Essex man has taught himself to use text-messaging at the age of 81 so that he can communicate with his daughter who is deaf and has no speech"
• No Privacy for the Poor, Homeless -- "A panel examined how massive databases and computer algorithms are being used to track the homeless or discriminate against the poor who need insurance."
• Excel pile -- some people feel the need to use spreadsheets for everything
• How easily are you disgusted? -- take this online quiz and find out (via plasticbag)
• Hazards of sharing a small cubicle
• Gallery of the Forbidden -- "artifacts related to various historical censorship incidents" (via Follow Me Here)
• People feel loyalty to computers -- "People tend to develop strong ties to a specific computer, even if it means waiting to use their favourite machine"
• Metric-conversions.org has online conversion calculators (via xBlog)
• Giving It Away (for Fun and Profit) -- "Creative Commons encourages artists to share and distribute their work for free. And that could be the key to a new multibillion-dollar industry." (ibid.)
• Who Owns What is the Columbia Journalism Review's guide to what the various major media companies own (via anil's daily links)
• Subliminal Advertising -- linkage to examples, sorted by type and technique (via del.icio.us)
• FuturePundit reports that Humans Most Violent When Only 2 Years Old, but fortunately can't do too much damage at that age

Go on and look. You know you want to.

Here we go again. I can't help it. It's in my nature.

This one jumped right out at me:

Do you suffer from new economy depression syndrome?

NEDS is an acronym for new economy depression syndrome. It’s a mental state that a result of a combination of information overload and frequent interruption resulting in and erosion of personal close relationships. The symptoms are anxiety, fatigue, stress and lower productivity and irritability in a team environment.

There's also an audio segment, which I am currently in the process of downloading. (Link is via fab.)

And, there are these:

• The high cost of not finding information (via Mathemagenic, who has her own commentary and supplementary linkage)
• When it comes to competing in the search engine arena, IS bigger always better? -- "Search is a natural function of the brain. What it all comes down to is that the brain itself is rather like a search engine." (via EMERGIC.org)
• E-Mail Stress Disorder: New Tech-Age Plague? -- "When the boundary between work and play breaks down, so does the boundary between stress and relaxation -- usually to the detriment of relaxation." (via Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog)
• Robin Good points to the Lazy Person's Guide to being a NewsMaster Part 1
• Robin himself had a an article last month titled Information Overload: The Future Of Search And Information Access, which fell victim to my recent Bloglines-flush. However, Michael Fioritto's Weblog has put it back on my radar
• Two posts from Notional Slurry that've caught my eye: The race who knew too much, and The race who forgot everything
• Learn how to handle information overload has a number of tips, according to different learning styles (via LIS News)
• Elegant Hack points to The Business of Understanding, an excerpt from the book Information Anxiety 2 by Richard Saul Wurman. I have to admit that I haven't actually read this book, although I bought as soon as it was released a couple years back. Ironically, I got a bad case of anxiety just from reading the table of contents, and went no further.

Lastly, I've stumbled across a blog called Cutting Through, which bills itself as "A live case study to show how to cut through the information and technology clutter". It has many good posts and is a worthwhile addition to the aggregator.

[Addendum: Also stumbled across this piece by author Stanley Bing in Fortune magazine: Fragments of My Brain -- "Sometimes computers get all catawampus just because their brains can't handle the load. I know how they feel."]

[Addendum2 25 April 2004: According to this article, information overload could damage your health.]

• Gnooks is a self-adapting engine for discovering new writers, based on the ones you already like (via Meryl's Notes)
• OneBag is devoted to the art and science of travelling light (via McGee's Musings)
• Science Women Get Cinematic Boost -- "A pair of fledgling screenwriters, hoping to showcase two women overlooked for their contributions to science -- Rosalind Franklin and Hedy Lamarr -- have won financial support for their screenplays from film and science organizations."
• a survey reveals that most people think Online affairs 'are infidelity'
• the SnoozeAlarm checks if you've fallen asleep at the computer by "monitor(ing) the keyboard, looking for multiple keys held down at once in a forehead-like pattern. If held down for too long, a series of alarm sounds" (via Seb's Open Research)
• Anderson's Laws of the Experienced Science Journalist -- #2: " A scientist who can speak without jargon is either an idiot or a genius." (ibid.)
• Dave Pollard explains Canada in 10 Minutes
• meanwhile, Mathemagenic address a few stereotypes about Russia; many also apply to the Great White North
• those of you with Y-chromosomes who might be doubting your masculinity may wish to check out The Men Commandments (via Jeremy Zawodny's linkblog)
• new(ish) at The Word Spy -- wrap rage: n. Extreme anger caused by product packaging that is difficult to open or manipulate (via kottke)

• You Are Here is a very neat stop motion animation video (spotted chez kottke, and elsewhere)
• the folks from National Geographic bring you Map Machine, an online dynamic atlas (via xBlog)
• xBlog also links to the news that the MP3.com archive is not lost
• DigitalWeb reviews Computer-Based Music Production on a Budget
• The NYT has an article on Web Sites for Music Playlists and Baby Blogs (via Seb's Open Research)
• The NYT also reports that Sony is entering the online music market (via Tomalak's Realm)

• Google AdWords has a new conversion tracking feature (via Robin Good)
• How to Put Your Customers to Work -- " companies need not (and should not) go it alone when trying to create value... [There is] an emerging economic model of value cocreation, in which consumers and companies routinely collaborate to create value that, to a large extent, is personalized to the individual"
• Searching for Behavioral Clues -- entering the realm of search analytics
• Scobleizer wonders, in a lengthy post, How do you persuade?; the attention-challenged can refer to this summary (via EMERGIC.org)
• just bookmarking this one for myself: Despite Latino Surge, Marketers Continue To Under-Spend In Hispanic Media (via MarketingVox)

• Business Pundit points to an as yet un-named business-book blog
• Jon Udell has a post which states that one's blog is, in effect, an active resume
• Mathemagenic posts about information vs. knowledge
• Creating a Controlled Intranet Management Environment -- "There are a number of things you can do in-house to create an environment that allows for the flexibility of daily intranet management while preventing content owners from turning the system into a free-for-all"
• Are the Silent Saboteurs Impacting Your Project? -- sometimes, your biggest obstacle is you
• Measuring the strategic readiness of intangible assets -- human capital readiness vs. information capital readiness vs. organization capital readiness...
• most bloggers and open-source afficionados have heard of MySQL; looks like it's fixing to take on the database heavyweights (via EMERGIC.org)
• DNSstuff has all sorts of nifty tools for dealing with internet domain names (via McGee's Musings)
• Scientists Peg Data's Speed Limit -- "(S)cientists say they've discovered an apparent speed limit that will restrict how quickly data can be written onto disks and then retrieved." Don't worry; we're not even close
• Meryl lists some uses for corporate blogging
• everyone and their grandmother has been linking to this wee blurb stating that design-intelligent companies regularly beat the UK FTSE 100 index by 200%

• Radio Free Blogistan ponders Blogging as open email
• On the happy trail -- "Most of us are healthier and wealthier than ever before, yet an increasing number claim to be unhappy. Is it the stress of modern life? Or are we simply losing our capacity for joy?" (via Worthwhile)
• The Problem, the Balloon, and the Four Bedroom House -- without a problem to solve, there is no project (via Common Craft)
• Dave Pollard releases part two of his Prescription for Business Innovation
• Fortune runs an article on evolution in communication, society, and The Future of Work, while HBS Working Knowledg has an excerpt from the book discussed in the article (via EMERGIC.org)
• someone has figured out that Curiosity fuels anger at mobile chat -- "The reason people find mobile phone conversations so irritating could be down to human curiosity... in many cases it is simply the fact that we are only hearing half a conversation that drives people mad"
• meanwhile, someone else is teaching teamwork to robots
• How to pick or build a project team can vary, depending on whether or not everyone knows each other already
• the nub summarizes 10 enablers that improve creative thinking
• another 10-point list runs through Keeping your cool in a hot time (via mktg@msft)
• del.icio.us pointed me to this Group Dynamics Resources Page, as well as ChangingMinds.org, which examines "how we change what others think, believe, feel and do"

• here's a neat collection of quotes about design
• How to Quantify the User Experience provides a quick way to assess your site and compare it to others
• and here's another usability guidelines checklist that you can use when assessing a site
• meanwhile, interactive designers weigh in on trends in browser type (via Signal vs. Noise)
• Russ Weakley has 10 Questions for Eric Meyer on HTML, CSS and web standards (via Digital Web)

• The Usability Methods Toolbox -- more methods and techniques than you can shake a stick at (via Usability Garage)
• What is experience design? -- looks like everyone has an opinion
• What is Experience Design? -- and so does this guy
• Usability is dead, long live Product Value -- these sweeping pronouncements are getting really boring (via Digital Web)
• Selling usability by design -- enough of EITHER/OR; have both (ibid.)
• Let them eat cake -- Usability vs. Accessibility: the other EITHER/OR
• This cake is all frosting -- hey, it's NEITHER!
• Remote Contextual Inquiry: A Technique to Improve Enterprise Software -- there be users
• Observing the User Experience: A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research -- ditto
• Progressive Disclosure - the best interaction design technique? -- for when you don't want to smack people upside the head with a 2x4
• AFIA's Information Architecture Library -- like you didn't have enough to read (via InfoDesign)

Pairs:

• Meryl writes about using CSS for Stylin' Forms and also points to this nifty series of examples by The Man In Blue
• Digital Web writes about Separating behavior and structure by placing your JavaScript code in a separate file from your XHTML; Builder.com endorses the same technique in its list of JavaScript tips to accelerate a slow Web app
• The learning curve of web standards and A Rant and A Few Resources For The Well Rounded Web Craftsman both have tips and pointers to other references for the learn-it-yourself web coder (via Mezzoblue and DigitalWeb)
• InformIT links to some resources for CSS / XHTML Templates; CSS Help Pile does the same, and links to a lot more

Singles:

• a lot of people have been linking to this guide to doing Frames Without Frames
• another popular link is this list of Web Development Bookmarklets, which let you look at various guts of a page without having to wade through source code
• Snapfiles is a free Windows app that calculates how long something with take to download from the net at various connection speeds
• finally, there's liorean@web-graphics.com, which has a little bit of everything -- bookmarkets, scripts, CSS examples... (via Meryl's Notes)

• Denmark tops e-business rankings -- Canada doesn't even make the top 10
• ROI vs. Metrics -- "Traditionally, executives assume training has little or no impact on revenue, so they measure training benefits in terms of cost savings. This works against e-learning, in which increases in top-line revenue generally exceed reduced expenses by a wide margin. Enter metrics." (via Internet Time Blog)
• More balls through Windows -- "For years, hope has ebbed and flowed among many in the computer business that Linux, a freely available computer operating system which uses a penguin as its symbol, would become a viable alternative to Microsoft's Windows... The industry is currently riding another wave of hope. Will disappointment follow?" The Economist discusses. (via BusinessPundit)
• Passwords revealed by sweet deal -- "More than 70% of people would reveal their computer password in exchange for a bar of chocolate, a survey has found."
• Thinking about how to make a living as an entrepreneur software developer -- musings on different software business models from the recent BloggerCon (via EMERGIC.org)
• AOL plans to revitalize Netscape? (via anil's daily links)
• Ping-o-Matic! -- ping everything (via paranoidfish)
• Everything is broken -- carrier pigeon, anyone?

• 5 Career-Busting Health Conditions -- "A variety of health problems can derail even the most promising ascent up the ladder. But recognizing the signs and taking the right steps can help you cope with your condition -- and your career." (via Badbossology)
• The Secret of Dramatic Change at BP -- "An excerpt from renowned educational psychologist Howard Gardner’s new book, Changing Minds"
• Mad as Hell -- "Feeling betrayed by their bosses and their clients, IT workers are becoming more ambivalent about investing themselves in their implementations. After all, quality implementations make outsourcing easier to accomplish."
• What Type of Manager Are You -- Internal, External, or Balanced? -- "A psychologist says whether you take all the credit (or blame) when things go well (or badly) says a lot about you and how best to motivate your team."
• Helping Hope to Spring Eternal -- "When leaders ask for what seems impossible, it can often be achieved because the followers possess faith in the leader and hope in their own abilities."

• Web Content Migration Tools and Techniques -- sure, you've got a nice, shiny, new CMS to run your website, but what about your existing content? you have to get it in there somehow... (via Column Two)
• Show value in K-logs to senior management -- "What would be common ways to convince management to use lightweight, social collaboration tools for knowledge management?" (ibid.)
• Checklist for deploying open sourced GroupWare -- many of the points discussed apply to choosing any groupware solution
• Seth Godin becomes a convert to the wiki way and points to a low-cost hosted wiki provider
• Mathemagenic points to a screamingly long list of papers from HP Information Dynamics Lab; there are many, many goodies available if reading about information flow and online social dynamics is your thing

The 17th edition of the Carnival of the Canucks is online at Easternblog for your reading enjoyment.

In a fit of insanity, I've gone and volunteered to host Canuck Carnival #20 at the beginning of June.

Meanwhile, the latest Carnival of the Capitalists is underway, over at Knowledge Problem.

In an eerie bit of like-mindedness, a friend and I saw fit to e-mail each other the same Dilbert cartoon.

It's funny because it's true.
-- Homer Simpson

• Lee LeFever has a three-part series on how information gets transmitted online:
  • Introduction to Stocks and Flows in Online Communication
  • Weblogs, Wikis and RSS
  • Back to Basics
• John Porcaro writes about PowerPoint as a conversation-killer in meetings
• On the other hand, maybe you want to convert your PowerPoint to Flash
• frassle is some sort of online aggregator and bookmark management thingy, kinda like Feedster meets del.icio.us, maybe? I'm not sure (via Dedicavit weblog)
• last summer's mega power outage provides a lesson on the need for communication and quick decision-making (via Managing Product Development)
• here are some thoughts on Media Literacy and How Blogs Should Evolve (via Mathemagenic)
• Robin Good envisions The Future Of News: The Digital Information Librarian
• and, to help right along with your burgeoning info-mastery skills, Robin points to FeedSweep -- yet another tool for rendering newsfeeds into HTML

• The Role of Business Process Virtualization in Your Business
• Transforming data to business logic
• Software Architecture: Basic Training -- "fundamental concepts of object orientation, open systems, and object-oriented architectures"
• 1st Law of Personal Computing: One day your hard drive will fail, and you will lose all of your valuable data forever (via xBlog)
• Gopher: Underground Technology -- back in the days before there was a World Wide Web, there was Gopher; some people actually still use it
• Nine Rules for Good Technology
• 'Net ninjas' take on web censorship

Networking:

• Spoke is yet another online business networking thingy. Robin Good seems to like it.
• Zero to Network is a new blog that offers networking tips (via Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog)
• two articles that skewer online social networking: Friends like these and Fancy joining Bill's network? (via the nub)

Innovation:

• Synergy Fest ponders the value of studying failure
• Dave Pollard has a Prescription for Business Innovation
• The Life and Death of Workers' Ideas -- an excerpt from the book Ideas are Free (via the nub)

Playing nicely with others:

• Architecting Alliances -- pointers for managing strategic relationships between companies (via bBlog)
• 10 Principles of Change Management (ibid.)

Miscellany:

• Don't just sit there -- do something!
• Firms will pay when workers make escape -- "Human-resource experts will tell you the real costs of employees opting out are deep, systemic and long term. The reason is simple: The best people always leave first, because they have the most choices. After the best people leave, the second-rate people get promoted — and they have a tendency to hire and promote third-rate people. Follow this to its logical conclusion, and you can see how once-great companies gradually slide into mediocrity and then failure." (via Worthwhile)
• The right way to quit your job
• Flights of Fancy: Corporate Jets, CEO Perquisites, and Inferior Shareholder Returns -- there is an "inverse relationship between a CEO's personal use of the corporate jet and their company's stock value" (via kottke)

• Selling ROI: Beyond The Numbers
• Hip-Hop Marketing Strategy: What You Can Learn From Popular Music
• The Economics of Premiums -- when and why you should give away something for nothing
• CRM software on a smaller scale
• The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer (And How To Reach It) (via Conversations with Dina)
• Make a Good Investment in In-Site Search Engines
• Intellectual Calisthenics -- pushing the envelope of digital marketing practice
• Avoiding Over-Justification -- "Don't sell when it's already sold."
• The Often-Overlooked Survey -- clickstream analysis can only take you so far

• NASA Considers Space Visitors
• Why Mobile Phones Are Annoying
• Spike -- share text, images, and files with others via a network clipboard app (via anil's daily links)
• Why you should have a comfy chair in your office (ibid.)
• Look sharp -- 'professional dress' is back (via the nub)
• also via the nub are these fitness tips
• some advice for writers -- "You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop, You Know" (via Pervasive Computing News)
• Storage Limits On Our Visual Hard Drive

Thanks to those of you who've bothered to inform me that my RSS feeds don't work properly in all aggregators, and apologies for taking so long to do something about it.

Newsfeed junkies now have two options for subscribing to this little endeavour of mine:

• RSS 1.0 (validate)
• RSS 2.0 (validate)

BTW, there seem to a number of different RSS templates for Movable Type floating around out there, but I found that these MT Templates from Feed Validator were the ones that did the trick. Yahoo.

Although, really, you don't have to do anything here that you don't want to do...

Why, oh why, do attempts at going to bed early when one is feeling a tad drowsy invariably end up as toss-and-turn fests which leave one falling asleep at a time much later than what one might have accomplished had one gone to bed at a normal time?

(And why does writing about oneself in the abstract, rather than just saying "I", produce such turgid prose?)

Anyway, what else to do at this hour besides spew out some pointers to elsewhere on the weeb:

• Zed lists some Things that you can't mail to Germany
• FuturePundit has some nifty linkage about the brain
• Speaking of the brain, here's something that I've suspected for a while: Guys are brain damaged at birth
• Worthwhile has some useful linkage about dealing with bully bosses

• How Working Groups Can Further Connect Without Adding More Technology: Robin Good Interviews Ross Mayfield
• Supporting enterprise knowledge management with weblogs: A weblog services roadmap -- I think this link fell victim to my aggregator-flush the first time 'round, but has reappeared thanks to Lou Rosenfeld
• 10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis (spotted several times in the aggregator)
• Knowledge vs. Content Management (ditto)
• To Hell with Color Coding -- An argument against assigning specific colours to different sections of your website (via Digital Web)
• "Digital Dashboards are real time visualisation tools of critical business indicators that help in decision making." Good overview. Good linkage.
• Information Architecture: A Rose by Any Other Name -- another rumination on title-mongering in the field, but with more of a slant towards today's tight job market
• InteractionDesigners.com -- see above
• KM Reinventing IA Reinventing KM -- are we dizzy yet?

• Festival Takes Stock of Old Films -- "the Stockstock Film Festival showcases films made from stock footage -- those old educational films, forgotten commercials and other random movies freely available in the public domain"
• Andy's Early Comics Archive -- "A History of Picture Stories : Over 350 scrolldown pages of comics, or comics-related illustration, dating from 300 A.D. to 1929" (via xBlog)
• Howtoons -- "one-page cartoons showing 5-to-15 year-old kids "How To" build things. Each illustrated episode is a stand-alone fun adventure accessible to all, including the pre-literate" (ibid.)
• Album covers by famous cartoonists (via kottke)
• Record labels want to raise online mp3 prices to $3 per song (ibid.)
• Top Movies About Music (ibid.)
• Kill Bill movie references guide (via a klog apart)
• RIAA Singing the Same Old Song -- "Online file-sharing and other digital piracy persist, but a gradual turnaround in U.S. music sales that began last fall picked up in the first quarter of this year, resulting in the industry's best domestic sales in years."
• A quick primer on music theory from Ask MetaFilter (via Anil Dash's Daily Links)
• Music Gurus Scout Out Free Tunes -- "After receiving e-mails from friends filled with lists of URLs pointing to songs on various websites, programmer Lucas Gonze thought there oughta be a way to listen to the tunes in one continuous stream... So Gonze built Webjay, a site where users can build their own playlists of free music -- like a mix tape -- and share them with other fans." (via Seb's Open Research)
• Music Sharing is Viral Marketing (via Jon Udell)

As I sit here with a super-jumbo vat of coffee and try to map out what I can get accomplished with the remainder of the day, these seem oddly appropriate:

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-- Philip K. Dick

And:

"Reality is what you can get away with."
-- Robert Anton Wilson

Here's a new word that's popped up at The Word Spy:

chronotype
(krawn.uh.typ, krohn.uh.typ) n. The set of circadian factors that determine whether someone is a morning person or an evening person.

The earliest citation of the word dates back to 1994.

Word Spy also provides a link to a quiz that can help you determine your place on the Morningness-Eveningness Scale. I scored a 23, which makes me a "Moderate Owl" (as opposed to an extreme one -- I still need my daily dose on sunlight.)

Here's a tale of someone who once upon a time had a blog on Blogspot and later deleted it, only to have her old blog URL taken over by a porn site. Oops.

Blogger kicked the porn people off (because they violated the Terms of Service), and the woman was able to grab back the URL. However, the general rule with free Blogger blogs is that if you delete your blog, the URL you used is made available to be used again by someone else.

Fortunately, I hung onto http://circadian-shift.blogspot.com/, and it's still there. (And still ugly. Oh well.)

And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wave-length of probability.
-- William Gibson, "The Gernsback Continuum", Burning Chrome

Because:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

(via way down here)

I've been sitting in my cube, happily snarfing through a bag of Peek Freans Ginger Snap Crisp cookies (along with some tea), when I caught sight of this little item listed on the cookie bag's "Nutrition Facts" label:

Per 30g (Approx. 3 cookies)
Fat 4.5 g
   Saturated 1.5 g
   + Trans 1.0 g

Aaaaaggh! But they're so tasty!

Unfortunately, the pleasure centres of our brains light up when we put fat in our mouths. Evolution must be to blame. Somehow.

• A Q&A with Knowledge Management expert Scott Schwartzman, including suggestions on how to keep the knowledge base from getting clogged up with redundancies
• A Manifesto for Collaborative Tools -- "Society's problems are scaling at unprecedented rates, so solutions need to scale also. Our very survival depends on our ability to work together more effectively, to get collectively smarter. Computers -- when used properly -- can help us do this." (via anil's daily links)
• Putting old habits out of their misery -- "it takes the average person more than 15 days to adapt to a change as simple as moving a garbage can from the right side of their desk to the left side" (via Business Pundit)
• Learning and knowledge processing -- "Our brains filter out a great deal of the external stimuli to give us data for the brain to process into sensible information. We can then make decisions and take action based on this processed data in combination with our internal filters and biases."
• The Value of Thinking -- "Ideas are not in short supply. But thinking them through is not valued enough."
• Reciprocal Altruism and Productivity -- "workers who do favors at work are more productive"
• Waking Up a Sleeping Company -- "What do you do when you're the new CEO and your employees tell you, 'But that's the way we've always done it'?"
• Deadline Management: Are You Just Wasting Money? -- an excerpt from Alan Cooper's book The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity

During my recent aggregator overload freakout, I took to reading more books. A new purchase is Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays, How to be Alone.

The only one I've read thus far is My Father's Brain (originally printed in The New Yorker), which describes Franzen's father's decline and ultimate demise due to Alzheimer's disease.

Wow.

Not surprisingly, things have started accumulating again since I dumped out everything in my aggregator...

• Some musings on information overload, and some advice for coping
• In the same vein are these thoughts on Taming RSS (via j's scratchpad)
• Ming the Mechanic comments on blogs and wikis
• In his article on Filling in the margins, Jon Udell comments on the need for a universal way to combine "official and unofficial data" in electronic documents (via tomalak's realm)
• Using website landing pages to drive conversions from marketing campaigns
• The three core principles of great web design are convenience, speed, and price (via infodesign)
• Fun with forms - customized input elements (via mezzoblue)

I just flushed out my aggregator. Everything. Every saved item that I won't be posting, every unread item that I won't be reading. A few thousand bits of bits are gone, gone, gone.

And it wasn't as painful as I thought it would be. (Mind you, we'll have to see how I feel about it in the morning.)

Now to start weeding out subscriptions....

(Thanks, as usual, to Gaping Void for the visuals.)

I've been trying to clean out some of the saved items in my aggregator. It's slow going. Really slow going.

Anyway, here's a handful of resources that may be of interest to infovores

• Question to myself: why have I not been reading Radio Free Blogistan? It's a group blog that covers "the realm of blogs, personal publishing, microcontent, nanopublishing, syndication, online community building, and related topics".
• Then there's Emergic.org's blog category called Digital Dashboard, which also covers topics pertaining to inforamtion management
• Size Matters (from whom I found Emergic.org) often posts about same
• Soople is a website designed to help you access some of Google's more powerful functionality (via About.com)
• News Search Portal provides a single interface to numerous search tools and online services (via Robin Good)

• Duct Tape Wall Tapings (via Mookie)
• Chocolate 'makes for happy babies' -- "Scientists in Finland say eating chocolate during pregnancy may make for happier, livelier babies."
• AirScooter II Personal Flyer -- "AirScooter II is a twin-blade personal helicopter that falls within the 'ultralight' class of flying vehicles" (via the nub)
• Nvu is a WYSIWYG web authoring tool for Linux (and hence is an alternative to FrontPage or Dreamweaver for Windoze)
• Display RSS feeds on your site using Perl and JavaScript (via SiteLibrary)
• Trout Turn Into Bullies Under Stress -- "University of Oslo scientists found that dominant rainbow trout reduce their stress levels by venting their frustration on socially subordinate trout."
• Humans should 'talk' like chimps -- "If humans behaved more like their chimp relatives they might be better at communicating, say experts." (via Technorati NewsTalk)
• Quit work for a year: 7 steps to do it right (via Cookie Crumbs)
• The hidden costs of too much stuff (ibid.)

There seems to be no end to the amusement that people derive from looking at pictures of cats with funny haircuts. Here's another one (you might have to scroll down a bit).

Number of unread items in the aggregator has hit 2250. Yikes.

• Curt offers ways of getting unstuck
• Eva wonders about cooking asparagus
• Jittery? Peevish? Can't Sleep? What Are You Drinking? (via del.icio.us)
• people on the other end of the alertness spectrum may want assess themselves using The Epworth Sleepiness Scale
• The Brain from Top to Bottom! has all sorts of neat info about (not surprisingly) the brain (another find from del.icio.us) (needs Flash plugin)
• Bubblegum Machine offers a treasure-trove of MP3s -- "If it's ever been on K-Tel or Ronco, it's in. If it features hand claps, cow bells, syrupy orchestration, walls of sound, wrecking crews, sha-la-las, toothy teen idols or candy-based metaphors for carnal acts, it's in." (thank you, largehearted boy)
• two language links via NBierma.com: The Future of English? and What Global Language?

And something seems to have happened to the main page over on Circadian Shift: The Outpost. Suppose I ought to do something about that.

[Addendum 07 April 2004: OK, looks like the index page is back, over at the Outpost, but the style sheet is still AWOL. Should probably do something with that page, regardless, 'cuz it looks like hell and hasn't been updated in 6 months.]

Revisiting the spreadsheet article that I mention below, I noticed some related sidebar linkage of interest:

• CRM: Spreadsheet of the New Millennium?

  What the spreadsheet did to propel desktop computing in the '80s, CRM is doing for enterprise systems in the '00s. It's the tool that sells more computation to companies, and it's the raw material in which every vertical specialist wants to carve its own image of adding (or seeming to add) strategic value.

  Hey, I know -- let's take the crappy analytical techniques that we employ when crunching speadsheets, and apply them on an enterprise-wide scale! Just think of all the data we'll generate!

• Decisions Deserve a Record of Whence They Came

  When engineers choose their own calculation tools, Razdow added, "40 percent of them choose spreadsheets." In most cases, that's all that's there, in addition to the engineer's own handheld calculators. Mind you, even calculators can have marvelous facilities for managing units in calculation, so that accidental mixture of (for example) English and metric units is less likely to go unnoticed. But working with units and other attributes of key supply-chain and production data, and preserving audit trails for crucial engineering calculations, is arguably the next frontier in enterprise data management.

  Note to self: Better start using the "Insert > Comment" function in Excel.

What are all these dead sheep doing in my cubicle?

Note to self: do not start reading newly-purchased novels at bedtime if one must get up at a semi-civilized hour the following morning.

Anyway, since I'm still awake, what else to do but indulge in a bit of web-surfing. A visit to Technorati's current events page yielded the following link:

Spreadsheets: 25 Years in a Cell

In this 25th anniversary year of the PC spreadsheet, we can be proud of the progress we've made in decision technology. We can also be appalled by the stagnation of our decision-making practices. The things we learned to do badly in 1979, upon the debut of VisiCalc, we mostly continue to do wrong today...

There are two ways that spreadsheets, as we know them, distort our thinking and lead to bad decisions. The first distortion is the use of point values and simple arithmetic instead of probability distributions and statistical measures. So far as I know, there's no off-the-shelf spreadsheet product—certainly none in common use—that provides for input of numbers as uncertain quantities, even though almost all of our decisions rest on forecasts or on speculations...

The second distortion caused by conventional spreadsheets is more subtle. It's described in a 1980s paper, written by university researcher Jeffrey Kottemann and others concerning what they called "Performance, Beliefs, and the Illusion of Control." The paper described an experiment in which subjects were asked to perform a planning task using different tools, some of them with elaborate what-if capability and others without it.

The subjects whose tools invited them to imagine alternative scenarios believed they were doing a better job—even though statistical measures of their results showed no improvement in the actual quality of the forecasts. Those subjects did, however, take longer to perform the task. Isn't that the worst nightmare of those who must justify IT's return on investment—spending extra money on a more time-consuming product that yields absolutely no measurable improvement?

And yes, another day of Excel-mongering looms on the horizon.

(* Oh, come on -- look it up. You know you want to.)

• Darren Barefoot has updated his Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness
• music-philes can check out this Guide to Medieval and Renaissance Instruments; web-o-philes may want to go and marvel at the circa-1996 web design
• I wasn't into many girlie-toys when I was a kid (I played wit