the geek bomb-diggity

2004.05.03
Update of the Moment
In yesterday's comments, Max expressed surprise that techies/nerds would look down on plain old text files on the desktop for "to do" tracking....Au Contraire! Check out the notes from "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" -- text files are the geek bomb-diggity, especially because they're so non-proprietary.

Supposedly some geeks like excel, but I think it's pretty evil. Just unfriendly and clearly designed for office dronefolk, not with an engineering mindset. For that kind of thing, I either use tab delimited text files with Perl to do my dirty work, and I also made this one really fun online database that makes it trivial to make small one-table databases, complete with custom UIs. I keep meaning to get that in release-able shape.


Proclamation of the Moment
A Proclamation:

By the Power invested in us,
We, Sofia Lemieux, declare ourselves
to be Sofia I, Empress of Cantabrig-
ia, (the territory formerly known as
Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the
United States of America.)
In the interest of maintaining local customs upon meeting us, bowing is not required.
Her Royal Highness, Sofia I, Empress of Cantabrigia
This was posted near Harvard Square, and put on the windshield of many cars parked there. Somehow, it increases my desire to live closer to Cambridge once I sell the house. I'm sure Waltham has its own crazies, but they're generally not as productive as this.

Nice eyepatch. I wonder if she traded it for wisdom like Odin, or just lost it in some kind of fight.


Science of the Moment
Tool Use in Animals (from Dr. Robert Cook at my alma mater Tufts.) Neat stuff.


Pop Culture of the Moment
Slate's Guide to Gurus. The UI is annoying (I would have preferred one big table) but the content is worth a browse.