I don’t want to have to do this living. I just walk around. I want to be swept off my feet, you know? I want my children to have magical powers. I am prepared for amazing things to happen. –Richard Swersey in _Me and You and Everyone We Know_

According to Tim Pennings, dogs calculate the fastest way to retrieve a thrown stick using some form of canine calculus before they even start running. Seems Zim only *looks* dumb. !/files/zim-calculus.png! “Thus,” he adds, “in swimming to shore he was not acting to minimize his distance to the stick as quickly as possible. Instead he did in fact apparently make a ‘global' decision form the outset as to what path would get him to the stick most quickly.

So we did pretty well at the ADDY awards last night. A couple of Silvers, a Gold, and Best of Show. On top of that, our own Dan Tobolic walked away with his own Gold, Silver, and Best of Show in the Student category. Exciting stuff. Nice work everyone.

I’ll start by saying that I don’t believe for a second that the 9-11 attacks were some sort of scheme cooked up by a group of Bush’s buddies in order to hang onto the petroleum economy. However, the conversation at lunch today did reveal a few interesting points in favor of something being not quite right with the whole thing. As it happens, the Village Voice yesterday ran an interesting piece about the theory, and theorists behind the so-called “9-11 Truth Movement.

Just to reiterate, I think Stikipad is the best hosted wiki implementation I’ve used. It helps that I can email the developers, ask for something, and have it 2 days later. They’ve recently changed the features in the free version, so give it a whirl. Second is 9cays. Yes, they’ve unfortunately chosen another [0-9]+[::alpha::]+.com domain name, but I’m getting used to it. The idea is that you can have a normal email conversation with a group, and have copies of all messes held in “Conversations” at 9cays.

I was reading about foldera and found this… “Foldera has raised $13 million since its launch. Last week it completed a reverse merger into an existing (shell) public company, raising an additional $8.5 million. It is now a publicly traded (OTC) company with a market capitalization of $70 million.” The thing hasn’t even launched yet! I’m beginning to believe the folks who claim that Bubble 2.0 is upon us.

An old Philip Greenspun quote I just ran into… “If you want to know why computer programmers get paid less than medical doctors, consider the situation of two trauma surgeons arriving at an accident scene. The patient is bleeding profusely. If surgeons were like programmers, they’d leave the patient to bleed out in order to have a really satisfying argument over the merits of two different kinds of tourniquet.”

From Creating Passionate Users, a tribute to the clueless… “The clueless accomplish amazing things–not necessarily because we’re bold, brilliant innovators, but perhaps because we just don’t know any better. We see the simplicity of the forest while Those Who Know are overanalyzing the complex subtleties of the trees (and miss the point). Sometimes NOT knowing about a “problem” weakens (or eliminates) it.” It’s a good read. Link

All of you Rails developers using the wonderful Textmate editor may want to sit down for this. Duane Johnson has been on a roll creating the greatest Textmate Bundle ever – _syncPeople on Rails_. Why so great, you ask? I’ll tell you. Rails enforces a rather strict MVC file hierarchy which does wonders for code consistancy. It rather sucks, however, when trying to edit related code held in 3 or 4 different directories.

The new Adobe Lightroom beta 2 has recently been made available and it’s even better than the first. One of the “new” features, believe it or not, is the Crop tool. The interesting thing is that the new tool works completely backwards from what most of us are used to. I totally didn’t get it – at first. The way it works is if you click and drag from inside the crop rectangle, the *image* moves, not the crop area.

I like Seth Godin because he always makes me consider or reconsider something previously assumed. His latest piece lists a number of reasons for the way things are. Some obvious, some not. Some are funny, like this one… The reason you have a front lawn is to demonstrate to your friends and neighbors how much time and energy you’re prepared to waste. I must not waste any time!

I’d used the beta of MeasureMap for a while, but once Google Analytics hit I started using that instead, and wondered what would become of Veen’s baby. Now I know