Saturday, September 4, 2010

There is more wisdom in your body...

I thought Art of Noise's 1999 album The Seduction of Claude Debussy was the best musical work I had heard during the entire decade of the 90s and it remains today one of my favorite albums.   This video press kit for the album's release is a nice introduction to the band and this particular work.

The Seduction of Claude Debussy by Art of Noise - Highly recommended

Ryan Allis shares the ten most important business lessons he's learned.  (#1 - Have a bias toward action, don't get stuck in analysis paralysis.)  Paul Pedrazzi shares his four favorite talks from Business of Software 2009: Kathy Sierra, Geoffrey Moore, Don Norman (my favorite), and Paul Graham.

RoundedCornr is an on-line tool for generating HTML and CSS and images for rounded corner effects on your web site.

Airventure 2010 is a video salute the world's greatest airshow at Oshkosh.  Lockheed Martin posted a video of the F-117's first flight on 18 June 1981.  Super cool photo of a double rainbow in the wake of an F-22 Raptor.  And the last of this week's aircraft pr0n: a photo of a C-5 being transformed into the C-5M.

They don't make 'em like the B-17 anymore but the C-17 comes close.

World history for the internet generation: World War II on Facebook.  (It's actually funny.  "Germany: headed to Poland's in T-0 days, partay bitchezz.  England: srsly wtf dude!... we gotta talk.")

This is going to need a closer look: OpenDocMan, a standards-based open-source document management system.

If you're trying to choose between UserVoice, GetSatisfaction or other tools to create an on-line customer forum these posts on OnStartups may help you make up your mind.  Do you know your Twitter BFFs?

Here are 27 suggestions on how to write better for the web.  (#22 Triple check that every proper noun is spelled correctly.  Does that meen anything gos when it cums to verbs?)  And Hubspot shares their advice on how to write a whitepaper.

There are a lot of fun ways to play the theme music from Super Mario Bros. but playing it on a pair of Tesla coils is gamer-science nerd mashup awesomeness.

The Symposium of Solid and Physical Modeling, co-sponsored by ACM SIGGRAPH and SIAM Geometric Design, will be held 01-03 Sep 2010 in Haifa, Israel.  A similar but different conference, the joint SIAM/ACM conference on Geometric and Physical Modeling, will be held in Orlando in late 2011.

Blue Ridge Numerics released CFdesign 2011. Red Bull Racing uses FieldView to help make the most out of CFD.  OpenCFD released OpenFOAM v1.7.1.  Pointwise pals ISCFDC designed aeroservoelastic trim tabs for an unmanned seaplane.

This is so calming I could look at it all day and if you're also anal-retentive or OCD you may feel the same way.  Things organized neatly

Copyblogger suggests three key elements of email subject lines but I got confused about exactly how many suggestions they were making.  3?  4?  5? 10?  Regardless, IMO the article cites four key elements: useful, ultra-specific, unique, and urgent.  Putting their ideas to use, an email announcing this blog post might be "[Horse Bits] This week's gibberish to delight and amuse is now online."  They do a bit better with a brief guide to whether your headlines are good or bad.

The folks at Regus are offering you the chance to win an office makeover in their Show Us Your Office contest.  Start by sending them a photo of your current office.  (Hmmm.  Who do I know that does that?)

Not a double rainbow but sweet nonetheless.  This photo of a complete rainbow over Fort Worth is from 02 Sep 2010, the day on which we received the most daily rainfall of the year so far: 1.77 inches.

This list of developer productivity tips had me going (#1 Get seven hours of sleep each night) until the author recommended using Emacs for everything.  Go vim!  (Note: this is a joke and not intended to start an editor flame war which my experience has shown can evoke more vitriol than arguments about religion or politics. (Actually, I just wanted to use the word vitriol.))

Whoever decided to post this list of the lamest Godzilla foes (#3 Mothra) is entirely missing the point.  They were all lame - that's part of the movies' appeal.  How many hours of my childhood are represented here?

Stack Exchange now has a User Interface forum on which the current hot topic is "What objective qualities make a user interface intuitive?"  I tend to follow Cooper's lead on this: a UI isn't (and perhaps cannot be) intuitive - rather it should be idiomatic.  (No, this is not just an excuse to use the word idiomatic.)  Not to be outdone, there's also a Stack Exchange for Wordpress.

Skip this paragraph if bodily functions disgust you.  Everything's going green, even urinals.  This award-winning urinal design features a sink at the top so the waste water from washing your hands flushes away your pee.  At the other end of the spectrum, Slate brings us this article on the age-old dilemma: sit or squat.  This is not the first time I've read about this.  Back in college in my mechanical design class I recall reading about why the throne is too high.

Serbia hosted this year's World Testicle Cooking Championship.

Students: avoid repeating these job hunting mistakes.   (#1 Emails with no content but just an attached resume.)  Let me distill a lot of these mistakes into one idea: your resume is used against you as a rejection tool.

Uncrated is the Dallas Museum of Art's blog.  The Toledo Museum of Art won the America's Favorite Art Museum tourney run by Modern Art Notes.   I checked out selections from their modern collection and wasn't really blown away.  Next time I'm back in Ohio it's probably worth a visit.

Brian Eno has a new album, Small Craft on a Milk Sea, coming out in November!  Wired has the supposed track list but I'd pay money for a 30 second mp3 preview.

Expedition Titanic is worth visiting if only for its excellent home page.  I love this almost as much for its description as for its content and visualization: the modern science subway map presents "500 Years of Science, Reason & Critical Thinking via the medium of gross over simplification, dodgy demarcation, glaring omission and a very tiny font."

Do you know how I know these six little known facts about The Dick Van Dyke Show are good?  They stumped the TV Queen even though the show is one of her favorites. Got a tune stuck in your head, otherwise known as an earworm?  Get it out with Unhear It.

Perfect use of teh interwebs #3.1415927: vintage calculators.

News flash: Osama bin Laden is a U.S. spy.  Source: Fidel Castro.  You do the math.

...than in your deepest philosophies. ~Friedrich Nietzche

2 comments:

Francis Shivone said...

I love lists and the 27 writer's tips is a good one. Thanks.

John said...

Francis:

I like the tips about not using "very" and insecure words. They are a hard habit to break. Speaking on behalf of engineers, we have a bad habit of producing stale, dry writing.