I know, you’re aware of the Steven Poole piece. You’ve used WriteRoom for _years_. Everyone heard the Mark Cuban thing before I mentioned it, and so on. Sorry ‘bout that. The cool thing is that almost every time I link to something useful or interesting, someone will write to thank me for pointing it out. Surprising how few people have heard of the things that “everyone” already knew about.

Steven Poole’s “Goodbye Cruel Word”:http://stevenpoole.net/blog/goodbye-cruel-word/ describes a pretty good set of reasons why he dumped Word for a couple of fantastic Mac editors: “Scrivener”:http://literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html and “WriteRoom”:http://hogbaysoftware.com/projects/writeroom. If I were a writer, I’d do exactly the same thing. If everyone else did the same maybe I’d finally stop getting things mailed to me as Word docs. I don’t have Word either. Never did.

See!

There appears to be a bit of backlash against bringing laptops into meetings. An example from Rands’ piece, The Laptop Herring…  Everyone wanted to know if there was a situation where it was OK to whip out the laptop. My answer, over and over again, is “No.” The argument, as far as I can tell, is that anyone with a laptop open will spend the entire meeting Facebooking or otherwise not paying attention.

I used to smoke. For about 10 years I averaged 2 packs of non-filtered Lucky Strikes every day. I was damn good at it; Chicks dug me. That photo was taken in 1984 and is one of the rare shots of me as a smoker. I quit about 10 years ago. Times sure have changed. Tonight I went out for dinner at a local restaurant and spent most of my time complaining about the guys smoking at the table next to us.

I can get a little crabby. I don’t mean to, but it sometimes just happens. Today was the kind of a day that I thought was destined to go on forever, yet not move an inch. That makes me crabby. Then, Bryan sent me “this, from JibJab”:http://www.jibjab.com/starring_you/receipt/417339. All better (I tried embedding the video, but it crashed both Safari and Firefox – hard. See, now I’m crabby again, dammit!)

I’ve tried to like Second Life, really I have. Not happening, which is what makes this video even funnier… [Via “Pharyngula”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/]

I’ll just go ahead and say it, Tinderbox is the most useful app on my Mac. Period. I’d love to write an in depth review sometime, but for now, the highlights…. Things I love most about Tinderbox Deep as you need. Spend the time, and when it comes to information management, there’s not much Tinderbox can’t do. Incredibly fast to use. I mean, just hammer away with the keyboard, learn about 4 shortcuts and you’ll be in a note-taking frenzy in no time.

As an almost fanatical Gmail user, I’ve always ignored Yahoo mail. The new Yahoo interface must be worth a look though, eh? I’m usually up for something new so let’s give it a whirl…. Never mind.

This looks handy, especially since it works in Safari (‘cause I’m not using Firefox if I can help it.) bq. “XRAY”:http://westciv.com/xray/index.html is a bookmarklet for Internet Explorer 6+, and Webkit and Mozilla based browsers (including Safari, Firefox, Camino or Mozilla). Use it to see the box model for any element on any web page.

Iain Levison has an interesting take on Drunk Driving and its enforcement bq. Most of us think we can have a few beers and drive safely. You know why we think that? Because we can! Only two types of people can’t…teenagers and alcoholics. Teenagers are still learning how to drink and drive, and alcoholics can’t control their drinking. Virtually all drunk driving accidents…by some accounts as few as 5,000 a year… are caused by these two groups.

So Mark Cuban thinks that “The Internet is Dead and Boring”:http://www.blogmaverick.com/2007/08/24/the-internet-is-dead-and-boring/. Finding little evidence to the contrary, including the fact that those goddamn “LOLcats”:http://icanhascheezburger.com/ just won’t go away, I have no choice but to agree. *Update:* Seems Techcrunch made the “same connection”:http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/25/is-the-internet-dead-and-boring/