Both my dogs are sick and exercising my clean-the-crate-and-carpets-twice-daily skills, but I don’t mind because dogs are cool. Especially this one

Control Room: A film about the differences between American and Arab journalism before and during the war in Iraq. Absolutely riveting. Watching journalists from Al Jazeera and the US networks sitting across from each other and commenting on (then current) events both puts things into and takes things out of perspective. One of the best examples is the reporting by Al Jazeera of the toppling of Sadaam’s statue in Baghdad. Instead of the cheering “crowd” we were shown, it looks more like a half-dozen teenagers following a script.

Finally, I’ll be able to upgrade to MySQL 4.1.7, as it’s now officially a “production” release. Everybody say “subqueries!”

To sum up…. Surfed (or tried surfing) on a beautiful beach near Pescadero for a couple days. Slept in Palapas with no doors or windows to speak of, and of course dogs walking in and out. Drank the world’s greatest Margaritas in Todos Santos – a tiny town with a ton of fun hidden within it. Great food too. Ate breakfast at Rosita’s, a tiny “restaurant” that in the states one would probably not even drive by slowly.

I’m leaving for surf camp in Mexico tomorrow morning. Yep, you heard that right, surf camp! Boo Yaaaa! If I get eaten by sharks, blame Steve and Bryan, it was their idea. Hang loose mi amigos.

Carry one of those tiny USB drives and use it as a boot disk

The Man in Blue, responding to a long thread triggered by D. Keith Robinson, writes about the overzealous way some web developers cling to a validate-or-die mentality. “I also don’t freak out when I find that someone else’s site doesn’t validate because they accidentally posted a URL on their site which has an unencoded ampersand in it. Why? Because I don’t know why they have that ampersand there. It might be because in order to change that ampersand they have to reconfigure their entire CMS, which would entail a change to their quality system, requiring the re-training of over 200 staff, which would affect their inventory output for the month of October, causing them to lose their biggest client and sending the company into financial collapse.

When dealing with software development, the urge to add every feature asked for is almost impossible to resist… “Can it do such-and-such?” “Sure, I’ll add that this week” “Cool, thanks!” Bad idea. With that attitude comes bloat, incoherent interfaces and other nasties. Steve Jobs, speaking about innovation in a recent interview said “…but it’s only by saying no that you can concentrate on the things that are really important.” I like that.

Wow, even our action figures are getting fatter

I was going to write a long rant about the negative impact that email has on productivity, but this post pretty much nails it. What this means is that if you need something by the end of today, a phone call would probably be better. I’ve stopped checking my email every 30 seconds. You should too.

The coolest car I ever had. Sold it for like, 600 bucks.

Okay, there’s a big ole picture of me on the Flickr blog. Wierd.