- New year brings inventive laws and this round-up lists some of the more interesting ones. [fark!]
- Eyes on the road — not on the screen details California’s new ban on using a laptop or watching TV while driving. I’m definitely against the law. I think idiots should be allowed to do whatever damfool thing they want in their cars. And when they drive into something, they should be held responsible for the damages. Sadly, cars are mostly safe enough where natural selection alone won’t do the job. [gizmodo]
- In Fire and Steel, sdb explores the Jacksonian core of American spirit, and explains some of why many
silly people
were convinced that America had grown soft and weak before 9/11. And why that misconception seems to recur about every thirty years, followed by a major war in which the US shows that perhaps we aren’t so soft and weak after all. - Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: Goodies are a few handy favelets for doing web design and points to CSS Vault has a gallery and a bunch of useful resources. [zeldman]
- Here’s an analysis of a spamvertized cd with e-mailaddresses and what kind of actual quality the spammer is selling. The short version is that the CD doesn’t provide what’s promised, and includes a number of addresses that are actively bad to send to if you’re a spammer (such as abuse@domain).
I didn’t make a lot of progress on the home-front this week. Rather than getting more things unpacked and some of the smaller tasks done around the house, I spent time dealing with bugs in some software I’m trying to finish up. The most annoying thing is that these aren’t bugs that have been introduced recently, but rather problems that have been lurking in the software for months and have just recently been found. It leads me to think that maybe there’s a business opportunity out there for teaching organizations how to actually test their products. Of course I’m going to have to figure out how to sell the expertise I’ve picked up over the years, and more importantly, the expertise of my employee who’s really good at quality assurance (because he’s more obsessive-compulsive than I am).
One of the things I need to figure out around the house is how to get the grates for the cold-air returns fixed up. They’re nice wooden lattices, but because they were made while there was carpeting in here, they’re now about ¼″ too thick, so I need to buzz some wood off the back sides of them so I can fit them back into the floor again. I was thinking that the floor guys would do that with their big belt-sanders, but apparently I was confused, so they’re the one bit of flooring-related work that’s remains to be done on the ground floor. Anyone know someone with the right tools to finish that job? Professional help would be fine. Drop me a note, please. I need to get them fixed before I can have the house-warming, since having people falling into the heat ducts would be a bad thing.