??New York Times??: …but you’re “being followed”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/24/arts/design/24isla.html?ex=1285214400&en=6dfe4a7185bc612f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss. Too funny (“via Alissa”:http://www.alissaclark.com/archives/2005/09/ahh_art.html).

Have you looked at the Podcast directory lately in “iTunes”:http://www.itunes.com? There’s some really interesting stuff in here that you can download to your iPod on demand:

* The President’s Weekly Radio Address
* NPR Coverage of the Robert’s hearings, Story of the Day, and Weekly Technology reports
* ABC News Nightline
* Fox clips of The Simpsons and Family Guy (!) — Er, whoops. This looks like show _descriptions_, not audio clips. Bad move, Fox. Clips from the shows would be _much_ more interesting.
* WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show

Of course, current favorites already include:

* Buzz Out Loud from CNET
* Acts of Volition Radio
* Inside Mac Radio
* InfoTalk (which has great tech interviews)

I just realized that it might be interesting to just randomize these in a playlist and let it play throughout the day: like your own customized radio channel. Hmm.

??Business Week??: “Troubling Exits At Microsoft”:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_39/b3952001.htm. Who would have thought during those anti-trust trials that Microsoft would eventually sink under its own weight, rather than be torn apart by the Federal Government?

Update: and then “this happens”:http://news.com.com/Microsoft+to+reorg+Allchin+to+retire/2100-1014_3-5874926.html?part=rss&tag=5874926&subj=news.

??The Onion??: “Hey, You Got Something to Eat?”:http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40091. This had me on the floor.

Say, I’d like to eat a little something. You got something? What you got? Any kind of food is good. I just want something to eat. You must got something. I ain’t desperate or nothing like that. Don’t think I’m begging. I’m just asking here. No pressure. I just want to eat something. Wondering if you had something maybe. No big deal.

??PHPNerds??: “Building a Secure Contact Form”:http://www.phpnerds.com/article/building-a-secure-contact-form. It appears that some jerk on the web has been blasting our “Contact form”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/contact at The Village Church in order to exploit a buffer overrun error and spam people from our website. How do you like that? I know the easiest way to take care of this is to provide some server-side validation of the information before it’s passed through to email–and it probably wouldn’t hurt to start tracking incoming IP addresses, either. This is just one more thing that I don’t need keeping me up nights.

Anyone run into this issue before?

Update: Mike got me thinking about a WP plugin and a quick Google turned up the “WordPress Contact Form plugin”:http://ryanduff.net/projects/wp-contactform/. Looks like they’ve had their own spam issues and are working on solutions to those. This might be helpful for our situation with The Village Church.

Second Update: We’re using the plugin here. Feel free to do some “User Acceptance Testing”:/contact.

“Entrepreneurship: Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid”:http://www.businesspundit.com/archives/002240.html. (“via”:http://photomatt.net/2005/09/09/entrepreneurs/) Great quote:

I bring these up to highlight a key point – you don’t get investment for just an idea. It’s extremely rare. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop believing that ideas matter. That isn’t what entrepreneurship is about. Entrepreneurs aren’t idea people, everybody and their brother has ideas. Entrepreneurs are people that exploit ideas by matching them to market needs, executing them despite scarce resources and designing a business model that makes the idea profitable.

Speaking of Apple, did you *see* this yet?

“The iTunes 5 Announcement From the Perspective of an Anthropomorphized Brushed Metal User Interface Theme”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/09/anthropomorphized. I don’t know if it takes a certain kind of user interface geek to appreciate this, or if it’s just all-around-geek funny. Either way, I was on the floor. (To the sensitive-types: watch out, f-bombs aplenty).

“Watch your back Citigroup, Kenneth Lewis is after you”:http://www.thebusinessonline.com/Stories.aspx?StoryID=D700C62B-7DE1-4A4A-8B09-9856A42D24ED&SectionID=F60D3E05-7185-44CB-BB45-97AC94420FD5. Good article about some fascinating, driven people. I think banking has technology beat for amount of drama involved.

??Slashdot??: “Balmer Vows to Kill Google”:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/03/0515250&from=rss

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At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: ‘Just tell me it’s not Google,” Lucovosky said in his statement. Lucovosky replied that he was joining Google. ‘At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office,’ Lucovosky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. ‘I’m going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I’m going to f***ing kill Google.’

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