well, now you can find out exactly where you fit in the global pay distribution. it’s an effective way to drive home a simple point. [ via blackbeltjones ]

so maybe norman vincent peale was onto something
with all that

power of positive thinking

talk. scientist apparently finding more clues that

positive thinking may have a health benefit:

“Researchers at the University of Wisconsin are
reporting today that the activation of brain regions associated
with negative emotions appears to weaken people’s immune response
to a flu vaccine.”

yes, that’s right. i’ve actually updated the photo gallery. thanks to “scanners and mac os x”, i discovered that there is now a plugin for my canoscan n650u. this means i can use the perfectly capable graphic converter application to get my photos out of the shoebox and onto the web.

in a move that will surprise exactly nobody, i have more than a few dog pictures in the queue. here’s a few from winter 2002.

ever wondered what it might be like to regain
your sight after being totally blind for 43 years? apparently,
it
takes a little getting used to

:

“I found it very distracting to look at people’s faces
when I was having a conversation. I can see their lips moving,
eyelashes flickering, head nodding and hands gesturing. At first, I
tried looking down, but if it was a woman in a low-cut top that
would be even more distracting. It was easier to close my eyes or
tune out the visual input.”

for the annotated bookmark bin – moblogger:

“This application runs as a background process that monitors a POP3 email account for new email, then downloads it, detaches any files such as pictures, sound or video, uses the Blogger API to post the text in the email to your blog and uses FTP to post the files to your server. Send the email from a phone and you immediately start “moblogging”.”

i don’t normally do this kind of thing, but i’m
going to wax enthusiastic about my hosting provider,
cornerhost

, which touts itself as
hosting with a human touch

. this is no mere marketing euphemism – devoid of any spirit – for it
doesn’t take long for a new
cornerhost

customer to see the immovable force behind the company,
michal wallace

, performing his characteristic brand of understated, yet
unparalled, customer support.

a case in point. recently, a peculiar and difficult to track down behavior began
to appear in
ids

, the image management script that i use to power my
photo gallery

. i spent a little bit of time trying to track down the cause of
the problem but didn’t have time to really dig into the root cause,
so i decided to lob a barely coherent email to the private email
discussion group for
cornerhost

customers.

24 hours

later, michal had not only tracked down the bug, but had proposed
several alternative solutions
and

actually modified my script to get it running correctly again! i want you to pause for a moment and think of what would happen in you asked your hosting provider for help with a script that they didn’t officially support.

michal

obviously has a deep understanding of how to run what would
typically be viewed as a commodity business. now, i can hear all
you freshly minted mbas screaming that “high touch” customer
support isn’t
scaleable

and you’re right, to a certain extent, it’s not. but it has been my
experience that
cornerhost

cultivates a relationship with its customers that discourages
abusing the system and the support takes place in a semi-public
forum where any number of smart people can jump in if michal is to
busy to respond within 24 hours. and, of course, he’s probably not
unaware that after one of these superhuman feats of support, a percentage of his customers
with a little google juice are probably going to be more than happy to step
up to the plate and give him a good-old-fashioned unqualified
endorsement.

so, if you’re in the market for affordable hosting with a human
touch, look no further than
cornerhost

.

now, i don’t know pat metheny that well. o.k. i don’t know him at all. and it’s not like i’m a big fan of kenny g, but i’m still surprised to see pat crack open such a mean can of whoopass on kenny:

“But when Kenny G decided that it was appropriate for him to defile the music of the man who is probably the greatest jazz musician that has ever lived by spewing his lame-ass, jive, pseudo bluesy, out-of-tune, noodling, wimped out, fucked up playing all over one of the great Louis’s tracks (even one of his lesser ones), he did something that I would not have imagined possible. He, in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, shit all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music inspired by the standards of grace that Louis Armstrong brought to every single note he played over an amazing lifetime as a musician. By disrespecting Louis, his legacy and by default, everyone who has ever tried to do something positive with improvised music and what it can be, Kenny G has created a new low point in modern culture – something that we all should be totally embarrassed about – and afraid of. We ignore this, “let it slide”, at our own peril.”

[ via anil ]