Wow. Just reading up on some IDiocy, and I found this letter to the Kansas school board. It has a hilarious quote from Nancy Pearcey giving a Congressional briefing: "Ever since Darwin's day, people have been concerned that his theory undercuts morality in the traditional sense - and they are right. If you listen to radio, you might have heard a song that's climbing rapidly up the charts these days by a group called The Bloodhound Gang. The song has a refrain punched out over and over: "You and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals; So let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel." A video for the song features band members dressed as monkeys simulating sexual relations with one another." Wow. So we ought to teach Intelligent Design because the alternative is, err, The Bloodhound Gang. 
Google Reader is providing an 'attention interface' for it's users. I've just been looking at mine. Butterflies and Wheels, Pharyngula and Scripting News are my top three 'starred' feeds. Instapundit is my most read, followed by my friends Flickr stream. I do most of my feed reading at 3-4pm and most often on Fridays.
New research has found out that if you piss your customers off, they sometimes get in to a rage. There's a surprise.
Now, this is how things should happen! Adam posts a blog entry about Placeblogger's terms of service and within a few hours, Lisa has changed the terms of service to a copyleft CC licence (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-Alike). I work on the basis that putting an OPML file out there is an implicit licence to link to it in an outline, since that is part of the specification. The mashup I'm hoping to build from the Placeblogger data will be CC licenced.
Wow, these headphones look terrible. Why can't someone just build some decent, extensible Bluetooth headphones. This means that they can connect to my iPod, phone and computer. And they have a removable microphone extension which can connect to any of those three devices to talk on the phone, record audio notes on the iPod and connect to the standard audio input on the computer.
Experience 
I just looked through the results from an annual survey performed on all students taking psychology of religion courses at my college as to their religious experiences. I managed to find the response I handed in to the question "Do you consider your experience to be religious? Why or why not?". My answer was a 'no', and the reason was "can be explained by drink, poetry, tiredness and suggestibility". This is describing an experience I had when I was living up in the Midlands.
I had drunk a fair bit of Bacardi with orange, was rather depressed and had been reading some beautiful words. I was looking out of my window late at night when I saw the lights from a police car that was pulling in to the drive across the way from where I lived. At that moment, my brain did some kind of freaky thing where it suddenly felt very relaxed and active at the same time. The result was optimism and a certain amount of resolve in an important decision I had to make.
My late grandma once thought she had an out-of-body vision or experience when all these cryptic orange lights invaded her room at 1am. Turned out to be a grit-spreading lorry driving by - you know, when Britain still got snow rather than just endless dreary rain.
Cut the marketing
A friend of mine sent me the promotional fluff for a new Samsung hard drive.
To store and play back a limitless amount of digital media content on the web, you need a drive that provides fast and reliable data transmission. From movies to music, SAMSUNG SpinPoint drive answers all your AV needs...
How about letting me decide what I want to do with my hard drive. I may want to use it for movies or music, but I may want to use it to store unfinished code on, or pictures of cute kittens.
I just wish advertisers would stop trying to sell me a lifestyle or a particular use of a product. I have an iPod, but I spend most of my time listening to things other than music. But Apple's TV advertising features only the ability to listen to music. No mention of podcasting - which is what I think the iPod is actually best for.
Just be more specific, and don't try to guess what I'm going to use your product for.
And stop being annoying. Advertising that is annoying is advertising that may as well not exist.
