I haven’t watched much CNN or other major network news since they started putting way too much data on the screen. I’ve maintained that if you think you’re getting more news faster that way, you’re wrong. Now there seems to be data to back that up. From a recent Kansas State University study “Our conclusion has been that if you want people to understand the news better, then get that stuff off the screen…The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content”

Steven Johnson drops an excerpt on us from his book. It’s meant as a thought experiment about playing video games vs. reading books, and succeeds. Here’s a snippet… “Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.

Sorry to bother y’all again, but I’d appreciate it if you would stop listing trackbacks at the end of every blog post. In many cases, the most interesting parts a post are found in the comments, but wading through the trackbacks is as annoying, and usually less useful, as wading through a half-dozen Google ads. On this site it would go something like this… I say “foo” in a post and it is well-written and terribly interesting…

I’ve seen a number of rants recently complaining about HTTP misuse, many of which were triggered by Jon Udell’s End HTTP abuse. The problem isn’t that they’re wrong, the problem is that much of the real world doesn’t care. I’ve written APIs which use HTTP GET to alter server resources. Guess what, it worked! It’s not technically correct (at least not read-the-RFC correct), but it got the job done, and continues to do so.

Please don’t highlight table rows on mouseover. Thank you very much.

I don’t think the Adobe buyout of Macromedia has anything to do with Flash. Does Flash actually generate any significant revenue? I admit that I don’t really know, but I doubt it. I don’t think Adobe gives a tin shit about Flash. It’s not like they’ll ignore it, I just don’t think Flash is the reason they’re here. Same for Dreamweaver. They were never that interested in making GoLive any better, why will it be any different with Dreamweaver?

Well I’ve narrowed it down at least. It went like this: I’d used Firefox on Windows since it was like Phoenix 0.5 and never even considered IE after that. It kept getting better and better, with oodles of extensions to keep me busy. No problem. Then, I switched to a Mac, thinking Firefox would follow me along, and it did – for a while. Funny thing about Macs is they remind you that software that “feels” good is more fun to use.

I started using OmniWeb instead of Firefox a couple months ago and so completely missed GreaseMonkey for Firefox. In case you’ve been living in my neighborhood (ie a cave) then you should really try it. From the site… “Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML (“user scripts”) to any webpage to change its behavior. In much the same way that user CSS lets you take control of a webpage’s style, user scripts let you easily control any aspect of a webpage’s design or interaction.

For as long as I can remember, 90% of my meals have included ketchup packets and a less than heartfelt “have a nice day” from the young person smiling blandly through a drive-through window. Not good. Recently I’ve been trying to turn this around by actually cooking my meals. So far, it’s been fun and somewhat successful. I have cookbooks and there are plenty of helpful websites. Pictures help! One thing that many cookbooks lack is practical instruction on the actual food preparation.

Hoo boy. Every day I am, like it or not, reminded that I really don’t know sh*t about a lot of things. Most things, if we’re being honest. For example, I just want to be able to take a decent photo, interesting to me, and make a nice digital print out of it. To this end, I follow a number of mailing lists and news groups, such as the DigitalBlackAndWhite Yahoo group.

I’ve been considering wearing a watch again, but all the watches I want are too expensive. For example, I want this one. Can I borrow $137,000?

Image by alan taylor Neato photo found on flickr showing what it looks like to be near the spot someone Googlemaps.