I have too much stuff. Too much software, too many hobbies, too many books, too many pens, too many cameras, too many tupperware containers, too many shoes I can’t wear, too many jeans that don’t fit, too many half-completed projects, and, some would say, too many dogs. I want to do something about all this crap, really I do. But it’s hard. It takes commitment and time I’m convinced I don’t have.

Neato. A terminal that “…emulates a 1970s terminal monitor, complete with flaws in brightness, warped display curvature, and flicker. It even simulates baud rate lag.” Full-screen mode is just too much fun. [Link]

Leeloo-Jess.jpg Malcom Gladwell’s piece in _The New Yorker_ isn’t specifically about Pit Bulls, but my new puppy happens to be a Pit Bull mix, so the article hits home anyway. Actually, she’s a Pit Bull, Rotweiller, German Shepherd mix. Ooooooh Scary! Not. If thinking about muscular terriers as pit bulls is a generalization, then thinking about dangerous dogs as anything substantially similar to a pit bull is a generalization about a generalization.

American Book Review lists their 100 best first lines from novels. They missed my favorite, from _Skinny Legs and All_ by Tom Robbins… “This is the room of the wolfmother wallpaper.” Wait, that was the Preface. This is the actual first line of the book… “It was a bright, defrosted, pussy-willow day at the onset of spring, and the newlyweds were driving cross-country in a large roast turkey.” Oh what the hell, here’s a bit more…

While looking for a Greasemonkey script to kill IntelliTXT, I ran into Flickrbox, which uses everyone’s new darling Lightbox.js to enhance viewing thumbnails on Flickr. It works as advertised and I like it.

There’s an insidious, disturbing form of advertising sneaking its way into way too many of the sites I frequent. It’s called IntelliTXT and it’s worse than popup ads. Why? Because I can dismiss popup ads. I can ignore banner ads. What IntelliTXT does is put the advertising directly into the content. Publishers, resist the urge! [Update]: Found a Greasemonkey Script that disables those horribly annoying double-underlined links, sort of.

I love comedians. Probably because they’re funny. I’ve always been more impressed with a good stand-up comic than with, say, a doctor. Becoming a doctor is easy, you just go to school for a long time and pay attention. You can’t learn funny. Speaking of funny, iTunes now has a sprinkling of Comedy Central “Stand-Up” episodes. Mitch Hedberg was a genius. For example… I don’t own a cell phone or a pager.

More here

I’ve been struggling with my G5 iMac at home recently. A number of applications just refused to run and others crashed at strange times. I repaired permissions, trashed prefs, uninstalled “extra” crap, ran AppleJack, but nothing helped. Poking around I found that the ownership on my ~/Library/Application Support/ directory was set incorrectly (501 instead of jbaty (503)). A quick… `find /Library -user 501 -exec chown jbaty:admin {} ;` …did the trick.

For those of us who like wikis and other online documentation/collaboration apps, Stikipad has launched. It’s a nifty Rails app which is a bit like Backpack from 37 Signals. So far it feels pretty good.

I never noticed, but someone else has: Brad Pitt always morphs into whomever he’s dating at the time. It’s creepy… Link

Timesonline’s Jeremy Clarkson goes off on the frivolous over-use of various and sundry super-duper-unnecessary words. And grammer stuff too. If you send a letter to a client saying “my team and me look forward to meeting with yourself next Wednesday”, be prepared for some disappointment. Because if I were the client Id come to your office all right. Then Id stand on your desk and relieve myself. [Link]