Dave Winer is geeked about the new SOAP interface at Google. He should be. He also stumbled upon a phrase describing what’s been missing from my professional life recently… “The intoxication of a new idea every day”. http://web.archive.org/web/20060613003025/http://davenet.userland.com:80/2002/04/11/googleIsJustTheJuice

Dave Winer: “One of the sweetest things about life is that you can always learn, right up to the moment you die. And that’s part of what’s most enjoyable about being human. For some reason, if we can find the pure learning, it’s a joyful thing, whether or not we ever get to use what we learn.

Speculations on Armed Conflict In a Time of Free Silicon Research paper describing Martin Libicki’s version of the future of warfare, taking into consideration technological and informational advances.

The Mirror Project is a collection of photographs taken of themselves in “all manner of reflective surfaces.” (Thanks to Tracy for the link)

If I wasn’t so afraid of N. Korea, this bit from The Onion would be even funnier. Quote: Kim said his nation is “way more deserving” of B-52 deployment than Iraq.

It’s been a long week, but she’s back. It’s good to miss someone, but even better to be missed. I think maybe that I was – a little.

Good question. “But once the grunge bands took over in the early 1990s, the pompous guitar god quickly was rendered as obsolete as a mullet hairdo.” Damn that Nirvana!

The Interface Revolutionary Interview with Jeff Raskin – father of the Macintosh. He’s sick of current operating systems, and he’s fixed them before.

Online Economics 2001: David Wins, Goliath Loses Daniel Rutter writes hardware reviews. Pretty funny too. His latest piece (published at shorewalker) is not about hardware. It’s about the 2001 web economy. “So there’s only so much gold in them thar hills. Big companies may be able to get hold of more of it by digging a big expensive mine, but it turns out that single people squatting by the river with a pan end up with better margins.

U.S. News: Some gadgets aimed at simplifying life just drive us crazy (1/15/01) The problems with the gadgets and such discussed in this usnews article also apply to software and websites. Keep it simple, stupid. According to a recent study by the market-research firm Gartner Group, 43 percent of the time Americans spend with electronic appliances when they first get them is devoted to fiddling or figuring out how they work; even then, hardly anyone figures out all the functions.

Web Sites Begin to Self Organize A piece describing sites in which content is contributed by users, and the best content is automatically moved to the top of the heap. Sites like Slashdot, TheVines, Everything2 and eventually of course, Pipchip.

2000:December:Column:Invisible Architecture Chris Locke, more of the same, but still true. Companies donÂ’t have values or voices, only people do. Fortunately, your company has lots of people. How many stories does your building have? Before you can answer, you must understand what a story truly is. To do that, you first have to find your own. If you canÂ’t, youÂ’ve got nothing to say worth listening to. And your audience is listening.