I have always considered the Illiad or the Odyssey to be among the best of love stories. True, there is lots of violence. True, the characters are mostly men. Love is the motivation and driving force behind the heros and why each is able to overcome and win. If they were written by women, then…
The Smalltalk Question (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought): One of the minor puzzles of American life is what question to ask people at parties and suchly to get to know them. “How ya doin’?” is of course mere formality, only the most troubled would answer honestly for anything but the positive. “What do you do?” is…
In the web design and web application world, Internet Explorer is always the Elephant in the Corner. The most popular web browser is one of the more cantankerous and annoying web browsers to design HTML and JavaScript for use inside it. For a long time a few web designers have preached a need for Web…
In this article, Rands describes the building of a company culture in getting a software product to 1.0. Company culture has become a topic of interest to me lately. In taking a new job in a place with a very different mindset, I want to better understand my component in this machine. Thoughts in my…
One of the fun things about Google is they change the logo at their search page (and the smaller one for the results) whenever there is something special about that particular day. Christmas and Easter are pretty obvious. However, they get things like the Olympics, election days, and other things one might know. On rare…
Maybe this is my stint working in a library back as a college student. There were some shady folks who came into the library to look up pictures of women with huge, obviously fake breasts. Plus the gutteral laugh at the ones where each had twice the volume of the woman’s head. They did this…
Only recently have I come to accept toolbars as something quasi useful. Previously, the trouble they caused more than outweighed the benefits. A web page on how Google works has me considering recommending the installation of the Google toolbar on all local computers (~3,000) with seeded bookmarks, cache, and temporary files for our web sites.…
An old friend has changed his name. His new name is mostly (if not fully) maternal in origin. He will retain his middle name which he now goes by as his given name. His old first name and surname came from his dad’s family. As he and his dad rarely get along, changing the name…