Things I've Been Reading

Not books - links.  I'll get to a book.  I read over 3000 pages in January.  That's a pace twice my fastest reading rate of the last 20 years.  I warned Mean Mr. Mustard not to read Mira Grant's Parasite.  I'll dig into that a bit more soon.

• Three Fitness Tests You Should Be Able to Pass: via Fox. Plank, Sit and Rise, and Height to Waist.  That's a nice short list and rougher than you'd expect as you get older.
• 10 Ways to Burn Fat (Men's Health): I'm sorry about the left/right slider.  I hate sliders.  But it's a good summary of the major points.  Lots of water.  Move every day.  Eat breakfast.
• 7 Chord Progressions That Work All the Time: for those of us who know just enough guitar that we don't really want to spend time learning more.
• R.Crumb Illustrates Philip K. Dick: I didn't know he'd done this - neat.  Not the scifi stories, but the crazy bits later in Philip K. Dick's life.  My prof from Hamline wrote a biography of Dick and he mentioned in class how he got to see the religious writings that were a huge stack.

ja niin edelleen

I find myself dumping most of my one-offs on Facebook, but I have some things I wanted to capture, in case I want to refer back to them for gifts/jne later.

Misc:

• Acoustic chords for the duck song.  Note the notes because they help.  D G A with a capo on the third fret.  Strum pattern dduududdud.  If you haven't heard the duck song before, you can listen to it here .  There is a duck song 2 and 3 that Eryn also likes, as well as The Gummy Bear Song which wedges itself in your brain.
• An article I really enjoyed that I found when looking up why everyone in Bollywood movies called women "Aunty" - http://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2010/01/06/please-dont-call-me-aunty
• Danger 5 on YouTube - Attack of the Show says I should watch it.  The title, I Danced for Hitler, is intriguing.  It looks like it should be full of puppets after only 30 seconds.

Tech:

• Titanium vs. Phonegap for native iOS development - I still think it's easier just to program in XCode.
• Creating your own standing desk for $22.
• Indie Game The Movie - I want to watch it.  I may have to pony up the $9.99.  But it got me to thinking.  If I were to buy a physical copy, I'd really only watch it once.  Seems like there should be a RedBox for sharing videos between people in a neighborhood.  Then again, that's probably the library and garage sales.

Games:

• Goblins Drool, Fairies Rule.  Probably a good game for my nieces for a birthday or Christmas.
• Defenders of the Realm - looks like fun, but mostly it reminds me that the new 3D printer for plastic pieces might be really fun to own just to create your own board games (e.g. the Solidoodle 2)
• 5 Bad Scrabble Habits Learned From Words With Friends - I knew it.
• Toc Toc Woodman - another possible gift game for the nieces.  Logan never has invited me to play Pitchcar.
• Discworld the Game - I didn't realize it's out.
• There's a whole site dedicated to Dominion Strategy - I should have known.

The Singular of Data is Anecdote

Thoughtworks pointed me at this enjoyable article by Amy Perfors  refuting a common saying, "The singular of data is not anecdote."  In places, it reads like I imagine Temperance Brennan would read if she weren't a fake forensic scientist based on a real person.

"A better truism would therefore be more like "the plural of anecdote is probably not data", which of course isn't nearly as catchy."

iPad Rundown

iPad rundown.  I've done it before, but this time it's for Kristine.  Caveat - I'm still running on a first gen iPad.  No camera in mine.  And I have other things on my iPad, but these are the things that are commonly used (although Eryn has some tap games she likes to play that aren't on here, like Dragondale).

Education:

• TED talks
• NASA
• Star Walk 
• BrainPop (Eryn)
• See games

Media Consumption:

• Netflix
• Kindle
• Link to Kindle store (instead of buying through the Apple store)
• Zite - news, not current, but based on topics - best way to get programming posts on the iPad
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pulse - aggregator (I don't use Flipboard since I got it, but my wife still uses Flipboard)
• Pandora - free music
• YouTube
• Flixster - movies (rotten tomatoes ratings, local theaters, & hook to netflix)
• Trailers - movie trailers
• Westlaw Next
• Maps
• McSweeny's

Productivity:

• Fat Secret (calorie counter)
• Dropbox
• Textastic
• Penultimate (probably better out there - for free form notes)
• Timer (countdown)

Games:

• Carcassonne
• Small World
• Life
• Tichu (cards)
• Words (with Friends)
• Ticket to Ride
• Civilization
• Toontastic - Eryn, make kids videos
• Lots of chess apps
• Lots of math/geography apps
• Sudoku (Kids)
• Angry birds (Eryn)
• Cut the Rope (various versions - puzzle)

Music:

• L&M Guitar
• Guitar Toolkit

Food:

• Whole Foods
• Epicurious
• AllRecipes
• BigOven
• SparkRecipes
• RecipeGrazer

Links:

• Work Email
• CBS (local news) - most newsreaders suck
• Kickstarter
• Khan Academy
• MIT Open Course

11 Best Science Books of 2011

Just so I don't lose it, Brainpickings.org lists their favorite science books of 2011. I should really get Eryn the Dawkin's book.

Software Links VI (and other articles of interest)

• Refactoring Javascript with kratko.js - an interesting way to apply statistical analysis to your javascript refactoring.  You can try it on the page by using their simple bookmarklet on the page and the window object.
• 9 Tips on How To Improve Yourself as a Web Designer - read, write, talk, build.  It's surprising how few developers and designers actually follow that advice.
• 10 Tips to Boost Your HTML Forms Performance - label above the field and don't mask your password are particularly interesting.
• 5000 Free Math, Physics, And Engineering Video Tutorials And Lectures - Khan and MIT are the bulk of them, but these will be cool to share with Eryn.
• 45+ New jQuery Techniques For Good User Experience - so many easy little javascript widgets for autocomplete, navigation, file trees, book widgets, and more.  Although I'm not I'll ever have a need for a robot on my web pages.
• Content Management Assessment Worksheet - I post this because I think the first three sections would be fun to ask any developer when doing their mid-year review and discussing their projects year-to-date.  "I'm going to go ask your stakeholders if they can give me an elevator pitch. Your review partially relies on their answer."  Unfortunately, I might have to mark down my own assessment in such a case, although anyone who had me as their stakeholder could be guaranteed I have a pitch of some sort.
• Jalapeño and beer brined pork chops - I really want to try them.  And as a bonus, you get to learn about "Pork Chop Theory".  "According to Dupree, if you cook one pork chop in a pan on high heat it will burn. But if you cook two pork chops in a pan, the chops will cook evenly as each chop’s fat will feed the other. As Willis has written, “It’s the ultimate in giving, sharing, and developing mutually beneficial partnerships and relationships. It’s not about competition, it’s about sharing the fat, sharing the love.”"
• Fit or Future, Which is More Important When Hiring? - my focus is usually future, although I better get the impression your piece doesn't fit because of the skill selection, not because of a lack of foundation knowledge.

Software Links V (and other articles of interest)

• 5 Books to help you become a better software engineer - I disagree about The Pragmatic Programmer, but I did enjoy the others.
• Beer Archaeologist from Long Reads - Dogfish is so freaking cool. "But will the za’atar—a potent Middle Eastern spice mixture redolent of oregano—clobber the soft, floral flavor of the chamomile? And what about the dried doum-palm fruit, which has been giving off a worrisome fungusy scent ever since it was dropped in a brandy snifter of hot water and sampled as a tea?...The truest alcohol enthusiasts will try almost anything to conjure the libations of old. They’ll slaughter goats to fashion fresh wineskins, so the vintage takes on an authentically gamey taste. They’ll brew beer in dung-tempered pottery or boil it by dropping in hot rocks. The Anchor Steam Brewery, in San Francisco, once cribbed ingredients from a 4,000-year-old hymn to Ninkasi, the Sumerian beer goddess."
• Nailing down non-functional requirements (Infoq) such as "General 'ilities' of the system such as scalability, interoperability, maintainability, portability, performance and security".  I fully agree about the trickiness of making this work as well as getting it in the backlog and in front of the business unit.  I'm particularly sensitive to the issue, because lately I've been tasked with handling our Open Source tracking for the department, including porting the scripting of the process from AntHillPro back to Powershell scripts (AHP keeps failing on us), considering the OWASP scanning schedule, including writing up a standard "bundle" for partners interested in our security stack, and determining the best way to automate some of our testing within the constraints of two development FTEs for half a dozen products.
• Why Most IT Departments Are Modeled After a DMV (Even Yours!) -  How to codify saying "no".  "Campaign rhetoric aside, governments have a bit of a vested interest in slowing down change in the way government works. Governments are meant to be stable, reliable and predictable -- and change opposes those goals...My problem is that ITIL pretty much abhors change. No, not on paper -- on paper, ITIL manages and controls change. In practice, IT organizations use ITIL as a blunt instrument to halt change."
• It's getting real...in the Whole Foods parking lot.   Thanks to Betsy Burton (@betsyphd). I wonder if I should form a competing gang over at Kowalski's.

Software Links IV (and a few others)

• Not a software link, but Alex Carnevale's short piece on "In Which We Consider the Macabre Unpleasantness of Roald Dahl".  He's still one of my favorite authors.  I adored him as a kid, precisely because he treated children as real people.  But I've never read a biography of him, so this was illuminating.  Reminds me of my mother's story about how my grandmother wouldn't let her read or see The Wizard of Oz because Frank Baum was an anti-Native American a-hole.
• Richard Dawkins interviews a creationist via Thoughts From a Godless Heathen (about an hour if you watch all the parts).  Dawkins' patience is amazing.  And Wendy Wright is nuts.
• Eagan Market Fest is live and you can earn free food if you bike there.
• On to actual software links: A quick comparison of Joomla!, Drupal, and Wordpress.  I agree about the ease of Wordpress for blogging compared to the other CMS platforms.  Joomla! can be a bit of a bear to modify if you're using a third party blog.
• I saw a quote by Alan Cooper, "Software is not built with 'resources', nor is it built with 'money'. It is built by intelligent, non-fungible people."  Absolutely true, although it screws up my idea to use underground, mushroom people as our next outsourcing pool.
• I'd like to read this book on Business Model Generation by Alex Osterwalder (and others), it looks very interesting.  Amazon seems to bear out that it's worth reading.
• Expression Engine - an interesting CMS Erik pointed me at.
• Touch and Gesture events, also from Erik.  A working example.
• Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla! market shares in Europe.  Even there Wordpress outnumbers the others installs combined.
• Lullabot on The Art of Estimation: " I would advise breaking the project down into existing Drupal solutions. What are the content types, the views, the taxonomy requirements, the menus, the blocks, etc.? Will you require Panels or Context modules for help with blocks or layout? Knowing the tool ahead of time is a huge advantage when it comes to making estimates. When you've already used solutions like Panels, or Services, or SOLR, or Migrate, or Features to solve problems in the past, there are fewer unknowns, and you can estimate off of past experience."  They provide a Numbers spreadsheet for doing some of the Drupal breakdown.
• Have you considered SaaS before choosing your CMS tool: it is possible to choose a CMS hosted in the cloud.

Software Links III

Get the idea that I spend a lot of time reading about software lately? The iPad helps immensely. If you have one, I recommend Zite, the programming category is great, particularly after it starts to get a read on what you're interested in. Not perfect, but still good.

• How to Create a Killer Ignite presentation - our submission of how to do your own stick figure comic was denied, although we're pulling together better art. Some other options are CMSes and Dytopias. We're going to queue up a few of our ideas and make sure we're ready to go next time with some options. I should speak in front of audiences a bit more - I'm not known for being a stand up commedian.  If you haven't heard of Ignite! there are plenty of videos at that link, plus some at the YouTube tag.  The videos from the most recent event (#3/2011) aren't out there yet.
• I didn't know until I bought a PDF book from them that Pragmatic Programming had a magazine (online).  There are really good articles out there on Agile at 10, Refactoring Your Job, HTML 5, Writing a Book for Pragmatic, and a slew of other great content.
• Work is Fascinating: the Metagame - speaking of "refactoring your job" (nice...I have transitions in my links, they're like an iTunes playlist), Mark O'Connor talks about optimizing his job to keep himself interested and only busy with the most enjoyable things.  In the spirit of Peter Drucker's books, he recommends aggressively eliminating all repetitive tasks so that you can focus on what's innovative and makes your brain work.  How he specifically goes about it might not be everyone's cup of tea (I'm still not going to use Vim), but the basic ideas speak to find tools to eliminate wasted time, find opportunity to do what's fun in new ways ("Write in all the fun languages you can’t use at work"), measure it, and do it immediately.  That most of the advice you need to make your job tolerable (the other bit being, in my experience, just take it easy, relax, enjoy the change and enjoy the people).
• Moshidora - a graphic novelized application of Drucker (see, transitions...told you so).  I'm looking forward to getting my hands on an English version some day.  Reminds me of Dan Pink's Johnny Bunko: the Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need which is one of the few management books sitting on my shelf at work (signed copy, thank you Dan).  I just recently recommended it to two high school students I'm mentoring via BestPrep.  If I'd have been planning better, I'd have had two copies available when they came to visit.  I'll be better prepared next year.
• Speaking of Dan, he recommended Leadership is Dead some time ago on Twitter.  I'd like to skim it, despite at least one assertion that there's nothing new involved in the work.  My stint as a Large Database Partner Consultant for our corporate proprietary database involved leading by influence and it's my experience that in a large company, on any large project, there's almost always a lack of leadership somewhere that can be filled indirectly by someone with the skill.  While looking at Amazon's Leadership is Dead page, it was recommended that I read Poke the Box, which has a Q&A section that includes: "Question: What does it mean to Poke the Box?"  Nice.  I like the part where it says Poke the Box may be the kick in the pants I need.  I bet if I poke enough boxes, I'd get a whole bunch of kicks in the pants.  Just not the back side.
• And, speaking of things that made me laugh in the management/career space, this article about Leveling Up: Career Advancement for Software Developers by Peter Lyons has an amusing first bit of "Duh" advice, "Don't Annoy Management."  I enjoyed the bit about "watch your language."  I used a bit of profanity at work twice last week.  It's not going to be a habit, but I had two people I wanted to break out of their normal perception of me.  One I've known to use swearing before and I think he thinks I'm a bit of a conundrum, not showing enough urgency on the one hand and a little too straight laced and traditional management on the other.  In that case, the swearing was to convince him, a.) I was passionate about our software, and b.) definitely not tied to management protocol in all situations.  In the second case, it was with someone down chain (how's that for management speak) who I think perceives me as the typical manager to be avoided and who will avoid you if you avoid him, and who doesn't care about what you're working on as long as some things get done for appearances sake.  That time it was for a bit of shock value.  Hopefully I won't be writing about getting called into HR in my next post. And this advice is golden, "Make sure management hears your name in a positive light." I've been telling my new team for months that it doesn't just apply to management.  The department (and beyond) needs to hear your name in a good light, and if that means pimping your own name, filling out your own award forms, telling your manager when s/he doesn't understand your contribution, or even finding a buddy so that you can promote each other, then that's what it takes if you're aiming for something inside the company.  It's advice I wish I had understood more completely when I was an MTS2.  Anyway - I think Peter overdoes it a bit, but his core message is solid, if you want to level up, there are ways to go about it, particularly in a large corporate culture, and you if understand where to apply that effort without appearing mercenary, unless you run afoul of management (speaking from experience), the path upward is in your own hands.

Software Links II

• A guide to mobile blogging - a light dig into a few CMS platforms to discuss what blogging options they support via mobile.
• Software Craftsmanship 2011 - interesting that it has content similar to Code Camp.  I primarily like the post for the pub metaphor, "To me, "software craftsmanship" is a pub where a certain crowd of talented, brilliant and passionate programmers hang out. Back in the late eighties and early nineties, they hung out in the "Object Oriented Arms", which had great real ale and comfy chairs. But the OO Arms got overrun by consultants and salesmen in suits who all stood around drinking expensive cocktails and talking ignorant crap in very loud voices, so the crowd started drinking in the "Patterns Bar" a few hundred yards down the high street. That too soon became overrun by the suits, so they moved to the "Agile Lion" (briefly stopping off at the "UML & Firkin" for what turned out to be a very heavy, stodgy meal that made them feel slightly sick). In recent years, the Agile Lion has started to fill up with suits - indeed, it's more of a wine bar these days. So a bunch of us have decided to open our own pub, called "Software Craftsmanship" - a traditional, no-frills boozer where all that matters is quality beer and good conversation."
• Calipso - a NodeJS and MongoDB based CMS that claims to support 180 hits/second (that's 648,000 per hour.  Makes me wonder what other CMS platforms support).  Can you tell I have an interest in CMS platforms lately?  You can see a demo here, and a further write up here at the DailyJS.
• Scott Hanselman giving an MVC tutorial (for .NET) from Channel 9 and Dev Days.  Over an hour long video.  Very nice way to dig into the .NET MVC space.
• 10 free wireframing tools from SpeckyBoy -  I've heard of Cacoo and Pencil Project (for Firefox).
• 15 best wireframing tools via Tripwire Magazine (note, note necessarily free) - I've heard of Basalmiq and Creately.  Looking forward to giving a few of them a try.
• Ultimate Guide to Wireframing - nice definitions of wireframe, mockup, prototype, low-fidelity, high-fidelity, and considerations about what tools and resources.  Reminds me of the horrible paper-wireframing presentation I went to at Code Freeze that involved watching people use Facebook.  Ugh.  The real value was a single statement and then they could have skipped the whole presentation, "If you're wireframing, it works just as well to use a sheet of paper and a pencil, or cut out pieces of paper you can move around."  We did real paper wireframing in Scrummaster class (I'm a certified Scrummaster - quite the trick as I've never led a truly Agile project) using Post-It (tm) notes to create a pet services brochure.  Worked very well.
• Is There a Peak Age for Entrepreneurs from TechCrunch - it should be noted that Mean Mr. Mustard will have to identify with Arianna Huffington.  "the majority of the sustainable businesses created in the 90′s were founded or run by older entrepreneurs...The research shows that an older age is actually a better predictor of entrepreneurial success, and that three other traits also correlate strongly to success: strong fluid intelligence, high openness, and moderate agreeableness."

So many great software links to read lately...

Some interesting links from lately:

• A book review of WROX's Professional Mobile Web Development with Wordpress, Joomla!, and Drupal by James Pearce. "Chapter 5, "The Mobile Toolbox," will probably be of more interest to web developers than the earlier chapters, because it surveys the mobile development techniques, server-side technologies, and development tools that are most often used for creating mobile-ready websites. For nondevelopers, the section that describes the key components of a CMS, can be valuable as an introduction to CMSs." And from Amazon: "I really wish Pearce had written 4 books. One on mobile web development and design in general, and one each for Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla. If you are new to Drupal, give this book a pass for right now. But if you want an introduction to design and development for the mobile web along with a bit of guidance to get you started with mobile Drupal, this may be a good place to start."
• 15 Criteria for Evaluating Software - I don't think this is a definitive list, but I like that they ask if you can promote it cost effectively.
• The Line interviews Dan Grigsby, who I saw speak at MHTA Spring Conference.  His live discussion with a Microsoft evangelist got down into the nitty gritty of MVC, Mono, and specific language preferences, and half the audience seemed to wander off, but for a techy at a conference with more of a managerial feel, it was Nirvana.  "Say you're a technologist and you have a kind of entrepreneurial bent to you. You go from having a job to setting up a consultancy that works with several firms. You do essentially the same kind of thing you would do with a job--write code--but you're your own boss. You pick a technology that's emerging, like mobile, so you get a higher rate. That higher rate gives you a surplus of income, so now you have extra time, and if you organize things right you also get the intellectual property rights to what you develop--and soon you go from having this income-replacement business to having what I call a cash-cow business. You build up a portfolio of intellectual property in an emerging space like mobile and ultimately this leads you to product."
• The Myth of the Flat Fee, by 80Beans - "We then try to explain that we can't give an estimate, let alone a price, based on the supplied information. We'll invite you to first work with us so we know exactly what you want to achieve. Talk to us, join us in making wireframes/click demo's and writing user stories. You'll be surprised at the advancing insight you will develop while going through this process. There will be things you didn't think about, while some other essential features seem to be redundant. We can use the outcome of this process to base an estimate on, and it can be used by you to obtain more accurate proposals from others....Every project consists of three attributes, also known as the "project triangle" or "triple constraint". There's scope: the features your app has. There's time: how long will it take to build your app. Finally there's cost...During the initial phase of the project — when it becomes clear what you really want — they will say that's not how they interpreted the scope for some feature. Now you're faced with a few options. You can alter the scope so the cost remains exactly the same: the feature will be dropped, it will not be developed the way you wanted or you need to slim down the scope later on. Or you can decide to pay more to get what you wanted in the first place. There the flat fee goes out of the window. A few weeks later the same situation occurs. First there's a conflict, then there's choosing between building something you don't really want, or paying more."
• How to write a game in GWT - not pretty, but an interesting exercise.
• I should make Eryn do an exercise where she doubles pennies on a sheet of paper.  Not because it's a learning experience, but because I think it would be funny to have her count one hundred million+ pennies.  I wish I had a million dollars to bring home the lesson in style.  Maybe if I win the last Powerball of the month for the corporate powerball pool.
• BigDubb pointed me at The Curve of Talent - "The more that you manage people in your career, the more you’ll find that it is very hard to find people who can execute well on what they are asked to do... It was a very candid moment of talent assessment in which the bar of performance wasn’t innovation, but simply competently executing the expected job."  That describes my whole career arc from contractor to manager.  I am competent.  If I don't feel I'm competent, I make myself competent, no matter what it takes in terms of personal time.  If there's something that needs to happen, I try to make it happen, and in an informed manner.  Everything else is extra.  I very much like the reference in the article to The Peter Principle, which The Hairy Swede and I recently used for a Snrky.
• Getting Real by 37 Signals - if for nothing else, the chapter on uninterrupted alone time (f - I almost typed interrupted) sums up 99% of what's wrong with software development in a large corporation.
• Don't Plug Your Leaks When You Got No [Fucking] Boat - points you back at Getting Real by 37 Signals and 15 Criteria - don't build shit that fulfills what you think is important but doesn't fulfill a sizable customer need.  This applies to software products and software developer stickfigure cartoons.

Bikes and Ice Cream

101 Frightening Ice Cream Flavors - squid, sweet potato, wasabi, curry, shrimp, chicken wing, beet and corn, fried pork ring...yes, most of them come from Japan.

Typography - Write a Bike - I think I need one.

Geeky

I found this Tiobe Software programming community index fascinating.  I wouldn't have guessed C and C++ outdistanced C#.  Or that Groovy was all the way down at 36.  I might have guessed VB.NET was .263%, but I know at least two people who can program in VB.NET, so that puts me well above that number in my "community".

Thoughtworks has an interesting pdf talking about the state of software as they see it.  The death of Java?  Really?  I don't see it.  Then again, my company loves Java, and I don't always trust their technical direction. Is that a horrible thing for a manager to say?  I trust MY technical direction and I'm part of the company, so perhaps that suffices.

These HTML5Rocks slides, which are written in HTML5/CSS3 and both explain and demo the HTML5 features, are cool.  I recommend Chrome if you're headed over there to check them out. I just finished Brian Hogan's HTML5 and CSS3 - the book and the web site complement each other nicely.

Tall Brad sent me this link about spelling autocorrect humiliating people.  People should be humiliated if they can't spell.  Enjoy.

Danny MacAskill video from my parents.  BIKE GEEK!  Sweeeeet...  Background music is Wax and Wire by Loch Lomond.  Even sweeter.


What kind of nut pays money to bike up Mount Lemmon?
(pilfered from Google)

Kyle is searching for flatulence deodorizers. He found one.

jne

I don't think I've done a miscellaneous posting list in a while. Now that I have an iPad, I have a habit of just twittering the links so I can comb back through them any time I please. But there are a few items I've found particularly interesting lately.

• How Pac Man's Ghosts Decide What to Do (via Boing Boing)
• Why I Didn't Like Riding the Bus as a Kid (e.g. Nazi Bus Ride) by Oatmeal
• Dilbert's Confusopoly - hits a little close to home
• The benefits of unemployment $ vs. tax cut dollars (Taylor)
• Tea Party Nation President Proposes Taking Away Vote from Tenants (funny if you have a duplex you rent)
• The Winter 2010 Intelligence Report (SPLC)
• Anti-gay Groups added to SPLC hate groups
• Loop Optimization (via Dr. Dobbs) and Loop Optimization Theory on Wikipedia
• Adam Savage Mythbusting TSA Airport Security (video)
• The SPLC Hate Map (one of my favorite links)
• What the f*** are you wearing - I include this because I can't decide if it's funny or obnoxious.  Likely both.

Links and Things - Bicycling, Netflix, Christine O'Donnell

I hadn't noticed, but John pointed out that you no longer need the disk for Netflix!

Secrets of the City/MNSpeak links to the Minnesota Daily article about Minnesota bike laws. I didn't know about the lights law. I thought as long as you had a reflector on back and a light on the front you were fine. And the news about Phyllis Kahn pushing for yield rules with stop signs for bicyclists was news to me.

And Christine O'Donnell's ignorance of the first amendment (among others), despite being a candidate for a party that claims to be more in touch with the Constitution, while probably overplayed, is still worth repeating. She should have an iPhone or an Android (developed by the mother of one of Eryn's classmates) so she could grab a Constitution application to read between questions. Or is that not allowed?

A Few Good Links

Tea & Crackers by Matt Taibbi, about the Tea Party (via Taylor)

Jesus is not here to be satirized for the amusement of heathens (via Pharyngula)

The Guild (webcast, and well worth watching) doing Do You Want to Date My Avatar. I don't know how I missed this despite watching The Guild and that it has over 12 millions hits.


From Greg, MondoDB is Web Scale. I'm not sure if this is funny unless you're a geek. But if you're a geek, it's very funny.

A Few Favorites

Most of my favorites things to read/watch today came from Pharyngula:

• Christine O'Donnell on evolution
• Richard Tillman on his brother's relationship with God
• The bad science of evolution in science fiction, including the Star Trek Voyager episode, "Threshold", that was apparently incredibly bad that I never saw.
• In combination with the Badger Trail coming out of Madison, the Grand Illinois Trail may be my bicycling target of choice for next year.
• Erotic Monster Manual entries via Boing Boing.
• 2010 Hugo Award Winners

Awkward

Because I prefer to post things for my blog readers rather than for all those Facebook people I know, some special links, just for you.

Awkward Family Photos - watch for the tall guys that are in photos that, no doubt, share many similarities with photos of Tall Brad or Klund. She Says. Can you find the photo that reminds me of your husband?

Awkward Boners - no more need be said. Really. No more. You know what's at the other end of that link, and it's probably nsfw.

Lynktopia

Lynktopia. Like dystopia, but not as soul searingly painful and sans the boot to the face.

Instantwatcher.com (via ReadWriteWeb) - a mashup to track instant viewing options on NetFlix, including most popular, least popular, and expiring.

Eagan Community Indoor Garage Sale - this Saturday, January 31, 10 a.m. - 3 p.m.

Twin Cities Bike Swap - February 8, 9:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. in Blaine

Eagan Daddy Daughter Dance (additional info) - February 10, 6:30-8:30 p.m. February 1, 5:30-8:00 p.m. and now called "Daddy's Little Sweetheart Dance". Eagan needs to update their html schedule to 2009.

Facebook murder via ReadWriteWeb - fits in nicely with an earlier post where I mentioned I know someone who switched their Facebook status from married to single.

Weekend - Political Links and Whatnot

I'm trying to ignore the fact that we had to take my dog to the vet yesterday for bloodwork and x-rays because her back leg quit working and she can't walk - dire signs for a 13-year old pet. And I'm trying to ignore that I'll be spending the next two days of the long weekend flipping rental property. So, this is what I've been reading this morning over coffee:

• VPILF.com - "Just a heartbeat away from being PILF!" (via Fimoculous)
• Schiek's (local strip club) gets ready for the RNC convention (via MNSpeak)
• The RNC raids have begun (via Majikthise)
• Speculation about Palin's daughter...granddaughter? (via Taylor)
• Hell's Kitchen (in Minneapolis) is moving underground to where Rossi's was (via Taylor)
• Some consideration of what the selection of Palin says about McCain by Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris