One of the three nights per year (the others are New Year’s Eve and Halloween) when everybody and his brother seems to think going out and getting boozed up is mandatory.
Yesterday saw more work coming my way. On top of everything else, I’ve got some website updates I need to do for a client. It’s probably just a single afternoon’s worth of work. A nice little diversion some day when I’m tired of programming. I think that’s one of the good things that’s come out of my quest for work lately. It looks like I might have a decent mix of things to work on, which is what makes me happiest. It’s nice to be able to concentrate on one job sometimes, but when you get stuck or bored with it, it’s even nicer to have something different to do for a bit so you can be productive even when you’re stuck.
- Kim’s No Irish Need Apply was fun to read this morning. Earlier this week, I had completely forgotten that St. Patrick’s Day was coming, until I was asked if I was going down to First Ave to See BiL. I’m pretty sure it’ll be a good show, but I’m equally sure that with all the stuff I have to do today, including a couple meetings, and snow that’s supposed to start falling in the afternoon, when I get home, I’m just going to curl up with some Vitamin B for a quiet evening around the house while watching the snow fall outside. [kim]
- The Unicode Consortium is working on Security Considerations in the Implementation of Unicode and Related Technology. Basically, they’re trying to sort out how to help users tell the difference between paypal.com and pаypal.com. I understand why the Unicode Consortium picked code-points they way they did, but I’ve always worried about the fact that two different glyphs may have the same representation on a page. And this one is an example of where that can be a problem. [schneier]
- Paul Graham has some ideas about What the Bubble Got Right. There’s a lot it got wrong too, but I think his list is a good one, and we’ll be feeling the effects of the changes that came from the Bubble for years. [flutterby]
- Shelley says Steve Levy, Dave Sifry, and NZ Bear: You are Hurting Us and says that blogrolls are bad. I’m inclined to agree with her on that and yanked mine this morning, but I don’t like seeing things in terms of divisions. I know I don’t link to a lot of women, but part of that is because I don’t find as many articles written by women that I want to link to. And when I do, I don’t (consciously) think about whether it’s a man or a woman who wrote the article. I think about the reaction I had to it. If the current system is broken (and I think Shelley makes a good argument that it is), I don’t think the solution is to tear it down, but rather to build another system that’s less broken.
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A Good Schwag Bag
Doc says he likes schwag bags (the free bags full of crap they give you at conferences). I end up using the cheap little cloth bags a lot more than I do the elaborate backpacks or briefcases. The latter are too big for daily use, and hold way more than I want to carry. About the only time they get used is hauling things home from the conference where I get it, as much because I don’t want to throw the bag away as for any other reason. The small cloth bags are small enough that I can put things for a single task in them and just grab whichever bag I need to do that task. Why think about this today? Well, conferences are coming for me, and I’ll be lugging some of those bags home again before too much longer. Plus Doc got me thinking. Oh yeah, he’s a white male. [doc]
A Bad Scwhag Bag