“My Best Friend is a Pit Bull”:http://www.cafepress.com/badrapstore.17028358. *Love* this t-shirt.

“An Unofficial Enhanced Version of Textile 2.0b”:http://www.solarorange.com/projects/textile/. I’ve been using this on TVC WP migration project. The Textile plugin that comes with WP doesn’t play nice with HTML definition lists (which I use extensively on the site–just “view source here”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons). This plugin fixes that by making the @==@ escaping work properly.

“Tennis Ball”:http://textism.com/oliver/daily/2005/07/18/. This is why we love dogs.

“Backstroke of the West”:http://americaninlebanon.blogspot.com/2005/07/backstroke-of-west.html. A coworker and I were discussing recently the possibility of a “translation engine” that would convert English on one end of the connection to Japanese on the other. I argued that language itself — not the mechanics, but the meaning and nuance — is often too difficult for two native speakers to get their points across to each other, let alone having a machine do it for them and translate it into another language. This hilarious bootleg Chinese version of Revenge of the Sith (translated by *real people*) might just be the final evidence give credence to the idea that there will never be such a translation engine.

I’m trying to work out a way to post these links faster, in the meantime my link-queue has over 40 links in it. That’s pathetic. So, as they say, all good things come in unordered lists.^*^

* ??NPR??: “Freud’s Nephew and the Origins of Public Relations”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4612464. There are levers in your head that can be triggered to make you believe whatever the PR firms want you to believe. This is scary stuff.
* ??RiskGlossary??: “The Enron Debacle”:http://www.riskglossary.com/link/enron.htm. Sarah and I saw the _Smartest Guys in the Room_ documentary when it opened in NYC and Houston. It was good, but light on details about Enron’s crimes. This helped fill in some of those gaps. Also, “here’s more”:http://www.fortune.com/fortune/specials/2003/1027/enron.html from ??Fortune Magazine??.
* “Enron commercials”:http://www.rtmark.com/enron/: anyone know how to get these playing on a Mac?
* “What it’s like to work at Pixar”:http://aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=19658#1
* ??Curt Hibbs??: “Rolling with Ruby on Rails”:http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2005/01/20/rails.html. Rails is a new MVC-based design framework for a programming language called Ruby that’s gaining a lot of ground thanks to brilliant web applications like “Basecamp”:http://www.basecamphq.com.
* “Backpack brings Ajax to Rails”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/05/04/backpack-brings-ajax-into-rails/. Speaking of Ruby on Rails, 37signals has come out with an intriguing product called Backpack. No kidding: you need to go get an account to Backpack (takes 2 minutes) and check this application out. At first, it may not immediately be clear how Backpack is useful–this is because it’s actually useful for almost anything. I’ll be writing more extensively on how I’m using my Backpack account, but, if I had to boil it down to a few words, I’d say that Backpack combines linking ability of hypertext with the flexibility and simplicity of a notebook. “Check it out”:http://www.backpackit.com/.
* “Google’s corporate philosophy”:http://www.google.com/intl/en/corporate/tenthings.html
* “MIT threw a time-travelling convention.”:http://web.mit.edu/adorai/timetraveler/ Of course, this information would only be relevant to you _now_ if you _were_ a time traveller.
* ??Forbes??: “It’s No Party”:http://www.forbes.com/personaltech/2005/05/02/cx_ah_0502aapl.html?partner=yahootix. The recent release of OS X 10.4 Tiger has done little for the stock in the past few months, but why is this analyst looking for the cheap thrill of a price spike? As ??Steve Jobs?? notes in his “recent keynote”:http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/wwdc05/ (which is excellent, by the way), Apple has released a new version of Mac OS X _every year_ for the _last five years_. A much more helpful analysis would look at these releases and stock performance over the long haul. If you want to see how the stock performs relative to these releases, “this chart”:http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5y&l=off&z=m&q=l would be a much more helpful indicator of how investors respond. Apparently, they’re much more interested in the iPod phenonmenon than they are in Apple’s OS innovations.
* ??Slashdot??: “Apple switches to Intel”:http://apple.slashdot.org/apple/05/06/06/1752234.shtml?tid=118&tid=179&tid=3. Apple continues to innovate their product line even in high times. Was I bummed to buy a Powerbook just weeks before this announcement? Not really. As ??John Gruber?? “points out”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/bombs_away, anything I would have bought this year would have been obsoleted by next years’ product anyway.
* To wit: “Macrumors Buyers’ Guide”:http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/. See where each Apple product is in its release cycle in order to minimize your buyers’ remorse. Indispensable: this site is almost expressly why we bought my Powerbook when we did and why we haven’t purchased Sarah’s future iBook yet.
* ??John Gruber??: “Together We Can Rule the Galaxy”:http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/rule_the_galaxy. There is a certain contingent of Mac nerd for whom this is depressing. That made me laugh out loud in Starbucks.
* ??Apple??: “Dashboard Widget Downloads”:http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/. I actually find I’m not using Dashboard too often. What are your favorite widgets? Have you found anything really useful out there?
* ??Wikipedia??: “The history of the Pulaski Skyway”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulaski_Skyway. We take this roadway every time we head into New York City.
* ??Fast Company??: “The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings”:http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/02/meetings.html. I’ve been conducting a lot of meetings in my new job. Even after having led Bible studies and being in the corporate world for several years now, my meeting-leadership chops could still stand lots of improvement. This article helped. I’ve actually found Fast Company to be a great all-around resource for all things corporate–they really _get_ a lot of what it means to be doing information work in the 21^st^ century.
* “An interview with ??Chris Thile??”:http://www.nickelcreek.co.uk/reading_articles_us_05-02.htm. As a young songwriter, it’s unflattering to try and act like you know something. Chris came out with a “new album”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002ZDX2K/ref=pd_art_ftr_1/002-1666968-3446454?v=glance&s=music this year that’s very experimental. It took a while, but I’ve been digging it a lot lately.

^*^Okay, nobody actually says that.

NewsFox–a lightweight RSS reader plugin for Firefox that doesn’t suck. I’ve been using NewsFox for a few weeks now and have been pretty happy with the results. NewsFox is a no-frills approach to download the latest headlines fast and get on with life. Which is good for me, because I’m realizing that I do way too much of the former, and not enough of the latter.

Dive into Greasemonkey. I’ve not been paying much attention to Greasemonkey–in part because of the dumb name. Now that Mark has written something, I may just have to learn more.

A brief history of Word. I found this article when I was looking for answers to common Word problems. For instance, why is it every time I use a style editor, Word insists on bulleting every line of text in my document–and this in several versions of Word, on several different machines?

Benefits. She said, ‘Paul, what can you do? I’m one of the poor people in America now. At least I’m not alone.’ And she’s happy for me that I have entered the insured class and can enjoy the blessings of my benefits.

As told by John Gruber: Given that the Bush administration would likely approve a merger of the entire Fortune 25 into a single corporation, we’re quite confident this transaction will go through. Seriously.