Patterns for Personal Web Sites :

"There are many personal Web sites. The vast majority are mediocre. Some are bad. Fewer are good. An extremely small number are excellent.

These excellent sites -- and I use "excellent" subjectively -- fascinate me. Why is finding a new one such a delight? What distinguishes them from the rest? What unnamable yet instantly recognizable quality do they possess?

This is my attempt to answer some of these questions. My method is to distill the qualities of the best personal Web sites (and my own) into a set of patterns."

[ via laughing meme ]

<note type="self">every day you reach down to press "play" on the answering machine to listen to the messages. without fail, once a week - usually on the weekend - you forget that you need to give your head enough clearance to get past the corner of the cupboard. typically you'll bash your head a mere inches from you temple and exclaim, "FUUUUUDDDDDDGGGGGGEEEEEEEE!!!!!! why do i do that every week?" as humourous as you might find this, it's wearing a little thin. you're better than the fish who keeps forgetting she's a fish. really. you can do it.

i'm hoping you remember this, because i'm not sure the weekly head bash is doing you any favors, if you know what i mean.</note>

i normally try to refrain from linking to things seen on metafilter on the assumption that you've already seen them, but i'm making a rare exception for this hilarious footage of LSD being tested on British troops.

i had no idea dean kamen has been talking about his long-rumoured stirling engine development project:

"According to the Web site for Kamen's Manchester-based company DEKA, the Stirling Engine has always had high potential for thermodynamic efficiency, but has been plagued with problems, such as limitation of materials. But technical advances over the last 150 years have allowed all aspects of the engine to be modernized, turning it into "a high performance, high output, efficient machine of the 21st century.""

[ via john robb ]

why yes - thank you very much. i'm aware that if there were more people like david mccusker life for enterprise blogging evangelists would be a little easier. see, david writes elaborate introductions on his first day of work that detail how he's going to use blogging to make his work-life productive, fun and interesting.

but alas, david's an outlier of freakish proportions [ albeit an outlier that would be fun to work with ].

plaxo. stupid. crazy. or hiding something?

heroic. heroic proportions, i say. very little pain today. who knows. maybe i'll be able to abuse myself by running on a regular basis soon. much to the horror of my general practitioner.

interesting mefi thread on biodiesel made all the more interesting by my recent purchase of a vw jetta turbo diesel wagon.

maybe someday soon you'll know i'm coming down the street when you smell french fries.

as many of you probably figured out, i never did run the chicago marathon, due past injuries coming back to haunt me. but today, several months after being told that i'd never run again, i ran three miles. we'll see tommorrow whether or not this was an accomplishment of heroic or outlandishly stupid proportions. perhaps a bit of both. but for now, i'm feeling pretty good.

rick klau has written up a great piece detailing his exerience with rolling out a klog pilot at work and it's a mixed bag:

"At the end of our first month, it's not a slam dunk. To be successful long-term, we will need to expand the number of people with access to Radio as an authoring tool. We will need to define our objectives - with more specificity than simply identifying how we can improve communications. But this was a helpful start - and a good first step to better understanding how weblogs might make us smarter."

i've had similar experiences in my more limited attempts to evangelize blogging in a work environment. it's a real eye-opener that will level-set any delusions that blogging will revolutionize knowledge sharing in organizations. it takes alot of persistance and i heartily "second" his recommendations. while rick gives his own co-workers the benefit of the doubt, in many ways, the lessons are no different that those learned in more traditional knowledge management arenas. you can lower the barriers to entry to near-zero and find that most people simply don't want to share for all the usual mundane, institutionalized reasons.

as rick says, you "must have a problem to solve", "reward participation", "define what you're looking for" and "ensure senior participation". and that's just for starters. otherwise it's blank stares and business-as-usual.

i'm probably the last person to know this, but until i read this chicago tribune article , i had no idea that there was a cheapo way to mimic the telezapper:

"Here is how to do it: If you call a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service you will hear 3 short tones, "doo...dah...dee", thanks to Ma-Bell. Each time you Refresh this page you should hear, "doo...dah...dee". The actual frequency of these tones are 985.2 Hz, 1370.6 Hz, and 1776.7 Hz. Guess what the telemarketers' software does when it detects these 3 tones at the beginning of your outgoing message? It thinks it has reached a line that is disconnected or is no longer in service. So, it disconnects and does not log your phone number as a working number. BINGO!

NOW record these onto you outgoing message or voice mail announcement, and start exterminating telemarketers. Try this example, but use your own name, "doo...dah...dee, Hello, This is Alan Carlton". It must be at the beginning of your announcement to work."

i don't know. the schwag hasn't exactly been flying off the shelf. maybe a classic thong would do the trick.

scraches chin. The Growth of a Smart Mob into a Wireless Community of Practice :

"Most communities of human beings evolve over time, changing their membership as well as their fundamental purpose and social structure. Smart mobs, enabled by portable communication technology, are a new cultural phenomenon and as such little is known about their evolutionary process. Do smart mobs evolve over time? What stimulates them to change? What do they change into? What are the technological tools necessary for these changes?"

[ via boing boing ]

Incorporating Rendezvous into Your Cocoa Applications, Part 1 :

"Editor's note: In this first part of a short multi-part series, Mike Beam discusses some of the thinking behind Rendezvous (ZeroConf) and the hooks in Cocoa to implement its functionality into your application design. In next week's part two, he shows you how to build a simple chat program that attempts to provide functionality similar to iChat's Rendezvous chat feature."