I’m so happy not to have to be beholden to my own prison of writing only about blogging that I can’t help but note a few great things I’ve found. It’s all excitement and a rush of freedom, which must feel a bit like how the colonists must have felt right after they kicked the British our of the 13 states. Here’s a smidgen:
Here’s a fascinating little chart (page down once there) about the number of folks who are upgrading to Panther, the new OS from Apple: Daring Fireball: Graphic Communication
Over the weekend, I found the most powerful book yet on the life of Anne Frank, called Anne Frank: Beyond the Diary. The small paperback details the very modern life of her family with superb photos, diagrams of their living quarters, and reproductions of signs and signage seen throughout Amsterdam at the time. It provides a fascinating chronology of her childhood in context and is just a very good and unlikely read.
Lastly, I’m happy to be using Rancher software’s NetNewsWire for RSS feeds. In a nutshell, it allows you to easily see the most recent stories posted on websites and weblogs without having to type in “http://www.blahblahtripleblah.net” every time you’re interested. A very nice, very simple application with mojo.

I receive emails nearly every day from India, Romania, Russia, and Poland mostly, for Web development services, but today I received one from India, which offered me a price of $6.00 per hour for the following:
PlatForms : Windows, Linux, Unix, SunSolaris
Languages/Scripting : JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, ASP, VB, C++, Cold Fusion etc.
Database : MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MSAccess etc.
Graphics: PhotoShop, Flash (Database Driven Application) Gif Animation etc.
In the old days of Web development, I worked with 21 year olds who were paid six digits for the same skills (and they did excellent work).

I’m anxiously (or is it eagerly) awaiting the first delivery of our odd FreshDirect order. I find the whole thing of shopping for produce and other food online both clearly disruptive and sadly seductive. Here are my questions to myself, as I wait the free, tip-less delivery:
– What does it mean that I’d rather tap out this missive rather than squeeze the grapefruit, smell the fresh cinnamon, or sample the cheese?
– Why don’t any of the supermarkets around here allow you to squeeze the grapefruit, stock fresh cinnamon, or sample cheeese?
– Is this one more abstraction away from the real and toward a denial of time-based, space-based pleasure? Is shopping online fulfilling or demeaning the pleasure of shopping generally?
– How is pleasure delineated on the FreshDirect website? Have they found a way to substitute the look and feel of food for the “look and feel” of a website?
– Will my actual diet be better off with FreshDirect and will the extra food we undoubtedly ordered go to waste?

Holy cow. This is a website that I really, really, really love.

This site is barely reachable right now because so many are clicking, but take a look at britishpathe.com between the hours of 10 pm and 7 am. It’s a collection of 12 million images that have been produced from every second of film from 3,500 hours of 35 mm movies. In brief: it’s a phenomenal phenomenon of phenomena.

I was interested in reading Kottke’s recent piece on Google and AdSense, which lays out the stupidity of marketers in relation to their tech-savvy clients. For a long time, I’ve thought that Google was wolf in sheep’s clothing, though I use it all the time for all my searches and have done so since it was born.
More recently, the NYT wrote an article in its business section about Google’s placement of counters on select “customers” Google home pages so that they can keep track of how many or what searches take place on a more minute level. Why is the curse of dishonesty so strong for large companies?

This is a page of amazing optical illusions that I have never seen before. When I first clicked on it, I thought, oh, more Flash-based abstractions. But no, these are not Flash, they are still images that move because our eyes are perfectly imperfect. This site, making the rounds on many blogs right now, is a perfect antidote to the sadness and inanity around the September 11, 2001, commemorations.

I know this one has been making the blog rounds of late, but this is a truly beautiful Flash website of animated photographs of London’s Streatham Cemetary taken by photographer Jonathan Clark. While images of cemetaries are generally ridiculously trite and can border on the hilarious, these lusciously and lovingly detailed miniature movies about death in life are admirably crafted and lend themselves to their subtly animated Flash container.