Note To Self: Read "On 'Wealth of Nations'"

As Audrey Rouget said to Tom Townsend:

Audrey Rouget: What Jane Austen novels have you read?
Tom Townsend: None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author.

Talk about HYPER-efficient! I love it. Any how, here's a great opportunity to do the same (if not save 700 pages as well):

Dumb Invention Gets Produced - Film at 11

 

What the hell? So someone said "I need to make sure that our deleted backups stay safe... I've got an idea, I'll scratch the discs!" However, I see two flaws with this.

#1) Using something free (bending, scissors, keys) is just as effective.

#2) THEY'RE DOING IT ON THE WRONG SIDE.

Little known fact about CDs. Did you know that the shiny label on the top of the CD is actually all your data. With no protection what so ever? I promise you, five scratches across the top with a screwdriver, making sure to go all the way from the center to the outside and hard enough to see through is plenty.

Their website claims - "Do you have any old or confidential CD-Rs lying around? Quick 2 second operation beats cutting, breaking, or shredding!" How, exactly, does this beat cutting, breaking or shredding? One thing they talk about is that the particles become "eWaste". Remind me again what the particles came from? Oh yeah, the CD? THE CD IS ALSO EWASTE.

So then they go into DVDs, and they explicitly talk about putting the polycarb side up. I don't get it... do these guys even know how CDs & DVDs work? Like I said, a screwdriver enough to see through the disc anywhere is plenty.

Thanks Gizmodo... I think.

Sadness ... about Television

You know, I talk about this every few months, but here is a wonderful list that just makes me miserable. At least 10 of the 13 shows on there I personally watched and loved. There's got to be for these guys to make money off me, can't you just charge me something to make sure shows I like stay on the air?

Speaking of for pay television, I nearly had an orgasm looking at the shows upcoming on HBO before last nights Sopranos. Two words for you: David Milch. Three more words for you: John From Cincinnati.

Aebleskivers

What is it about fried sweet dough covered in sugar? Perhaps its popularity results from the fact that it is FRIED SWEET DOUGH COVERED IN SUGAR. Anyhow, I remember having these in 5th grade, during an absolutely awesome six week long exercise called "City Government". I loved that class. I was the head banker because I was "good at math". It was my job to track people's accounts. I was absolutely horrible at it, mostly because I was lazy. But man that was fun. One of the things we did was people could have products that they would make and come in and sell. One guy had an Aebleskiver machine and brought it in for a breakfast every Friday morning. That thing could not have been a bigger success. Lines out the door. Looking below it seems obvious why.

If I was a [h|w]ealthier, this is exactly the kind of thing I would have made for me every morning. As it is (aka because I am not in shape and poor), I will simply look at the above picture and marvel.

Parsing through a long list of blogs to read

There have been a bunch of resources I've kind of been sitting on, intending to read for a while. My storage location is currently a tab group in my favorites. This isn't really scalable, but it's very difficult to find some place to store something that might be useful "in a while". I know I said I'd post these on my blog, but I'm not sure how useful that really is. Even if I'm posting it just for myself, I would only go back and look at it if I got particularly nostalgic some time. But I guess any public place is better than a tab group, so I'll just dump these one at a time over the course of the next couple of days:

Interesting history of Interviewing Technical People - One thing I particularly like about this is it's not just a littany of advice, it's just a history of this individual's experience. Take as much or as little as you might like from it.

I must have hit my head or something...

What was I thinking, making Google reader my favorite reader. Google reader, you lose!

I know Scoble is obsessed with j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j,j. I hate it. I like the space bar. I like the space bar for going to the next page (no matter how many stories are on it). I like the space bar for going to the next feed. I like the space bar for going down my giant newspaper view of all my feeds grouped by feed source on a single page with nice big dividers between them. If you can do this in Google, I haven't found out how. You want to know how to go to the next feed on the keyboard in Google?

  • Space/j to the bottom of the page or until you're bored
  • Shift-A (to make sure that feed is all read)
  • Shift-N (to open the next feed)
  • Shift-O to open the feed

I can see why that would be much more efficient than a simple spacebar. Any how, bloglines, take me back, please!

I feel a bit like l.m.orchard :)