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Category Archives: General

Happy Birthday Mr. Blog

The Blog was apparently the eight years old on the 22nd.  He has been pestering me for a content distribution network but I’m afraid that will have to wait for another year. Happy Birthday kid! I’ve enjoyed having your around more than I ever expected I would. FYI – I will be in paris tomorrow [...]

me sue me

So I was inordinately fascinated by a paragraph in Schelling’s paper “Enforcing Rules on Oneself”.  This is a paper about personal rules, i.e. the rules we all adopt to reign in our behavior against the pest that is hyperbolic discounting.  Since Schelling’s wrote the paper for a law journal he needed to outline why the usual tools of [...]

The Misery of Opportunity

Fun video by Barry Swartz author of “The Paradox of Choice – Why More is Less”. Why choice makes people miserable: regret over the choice not taken, and fear of that future regret, the cost of managing a portfolio of options, the benchmark for success is raised higher, i.e. expectations escalate self blame, when the [...]

And, GUIDs are the mark of the devil

“… It’s long been our belief that REST and Roy Fielding has been palling around with Hypermedia. He barely denies it. But, my friends, let me tell you that no washed up PhD dissertation will dictate our request/response. He says it, in his own words – he talks about ‘constraints’, he toys with the idea [...]

Complements v.s. Competitors

Fifty!

Congratulations Mimi!

Restructuring an Industry

Thomson-Reuters raises the stakes and then calls the bluff of the Academy. “For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex [...]

What to do!

Finally actionable advise on how individuals can address the current market turmoil: If you had purchased £1000 of Northern Rock shares one year ago it  would now be worth £4.95, with HBOS, earlier this week your £1000  would have been worth £16.50, £1000 invested in XL Leisure would now  be worth less than £5, but [...]

Mushroom

Never seen anything this scale before.

Gas Shortage

Sometimes there is too much news.  The southeastern US is suffering from serious shortages of petrol.  I wonder what it would take to get them to lower the speed limit; organize some ride sharing; provide some discounts on public transportation. I’m reminded of how in the depths of the recent and horiffic drought in that [...]