from the disoby nonsense network is an article at a RPG site called The Lazy GM - while it is specifically about how to create a fulfilling rpg adventure with little preparation before hand i think the advice can be applied in multiple settings. basically the author, ozzie, says that he is lazy at preparation but produces great times because he listens to his players and learns what they want and slowly evolves his game to be what that is. if you switch up some of the words you could say: To Create A Great Application, Listen To Your Users/Your Test-Cases/etc and Evolve The App. In The Desired Direction. (Capitalizing each word is essential)#

a new alertbox from jakob nielsen called ''"Gateway Pages Prevent Prevent PDF Shock":http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030728.html'' - this is a follow up of his alertbox on the Bad Usability of PDFs. ''For thirty years, one of the most fundamental tenets of human factors engineering has been that you should not blindly computerize the way something was done in the past. Existing processes are usually suboptimal and designed under the old technology's constraints. New technology alleviates these constraints and offers us different ways of solving the problem, while introducing new constraints that we must address for the new solution to work.'' - read at it.#

backuping up data to the moon. at PC Magazine from KurzweilAI.net and also at Byte And Switch - pretty great silly idea, a colleague of mine said, ''This begs us to ask the question: If the Earth is an unsafe place for your data, then is the data really that important anymore - seeing as no one is around to use it?''#

also from kurzweilAI.net is an article about space elevators. cool space dork stuff.#

peter lindberg writes about the difference between "scientific" and "unscientific" theories, and how theories are ways of abstraction through metaphors. he says the difference is that a scientific theory is rigorously tested and has an explanation behind it, versus an unscientific theory which tends to work out well but there's no real formality or explanation. this is kind of like design patterns, "Things to do in code that seem to work out nice" but with no numbers behind them, (the lack of numbers is because quality and productivity are not quantitative#

from 601am is a blog post called "The Gayification of the Guido" that is about how the Italian "guido" fashion style is very similar to the "gay" fashion. the comments of the entry talk a lot about how straight men everywhere look like gay men did five years ago and that they 'steal' the image. as a note, the latest Details has an article on this exact thing. there's a picture of a guy and it says "Gay or Guido?" and points out some ambiguous elements of him. funny.#

dr. frank has another great post about recording this time he tackles the time honored task of tuning. tuning trials turn to terrible: everything can go wrong and it often does. a funny quote: ''Maybe you're hitting the guitar too hard; maybe too softly. Maybe its the humidity or the temperature in the studio. Maybe you should change the strings. Maybe you shouldn't have changed those strings, that sounds even worse. Maybe there's just something wrong with your ears. Man, you should have just gone to graduate school after all. Forget this rock and roll stuff.''#

susan mernit blogs that AOL 9.0 is too late and that many of the "features" are too easily found on the free internet. poonder?#

from richard talent, who continually pumps out great content, is an article about the effort to make speeding laws be realistic and credible. richard says, ''In a democracy, laws that make most people into criminals should be recinded, since they: (a) only serve to create indifference to the law, and (b) create two articifial classes of citizens--those with the spare money for a fine and those without.'' - rad.#

charles miller advises programmers to be better about making version numbers. the key is that you should plan what will be in versions before you have them - the idea being that many programs never make it to 1.0 because they are never "perfect" and since the author didn't plan versions they just increment them whenever. good advice. also remember to "Release Early, and release often" har.#

james blogs on les blogging about whether a laptop or desktop is better for doing development. les says its nice to have a lightweight movable thingy and james says that's nice but likes the screen real estate of a desktop. i think the answer is bad ass docking stations, so i just sit down with my laptop at my desk at work and plug one thing in (rather than spending 10 minutes getting everything plug in right) so that i can have a big screen when i'm sitting down somewhere for a while but move about when i want/need to. the only problem is, what if you want to develop at home and at work - two 23 inch flat screens? meh, you're no worse of than with the desktop but it just feels a little wasteful#

jeremy advices that if you want to start a fire, do it when there is a fire alarm test anyways... people won't have the foggiest.#

don park writes that what he calls "Brix" (or blog bricks) will be the key to having weblogs turn in to just web pages. the idea behind it, and many programming methodologies, is that if you make one thing very good and self contained than if you can combine a bunch of these things together you'll be successful. i think he's right but... interoperability is the plight of nations. although, there are already a few portable weblog components - if I were behind Moveable Type I would launch the "Mutable Type" project to implement it. and cross my fingers that i pick the right language so people won't reimplement it in several incompatible languages.#

moxie on her friends - ''If my life were a sitcom, it would have been cancelled 10 episodes ago. No one wants to see a cross between Fear factor and Friends. '' - hehahaha, and she links more funny - the a list revealed!#

dan blogs on the op count of parrot. is more or less better? as we know, parrot is supposed to look CISCy so having very few is not a requirement.#

john gruber and nathan irons both blog about the price/performance ratio of various apple components. basically, don't buy the big thing, buy two little things and use them together to compliment each other. interesting. sometimes you're too hypnotized by the beauty of apple stuff to look at the numbers.#

response - is "Hide Others" then "Hide Me" not good enough?#

charles miller points out that some people make a group very cool to be in and then jump ship for the next group because some lusers start lowering the quality. he calls it "The Devolution of Online Communities"#

tony doesn't need an stinkin luck.#

dan hon links some new information on panther.#

kirstin tells a good story about how people don't listen to you when you try to help them at a retail store. i don't think that people really listen ever when you are telling them something that may make them look bad. usability clients don't want usability advice, and retail shoppers don't want retail shopping advice. if i were to try and buy shoes from kirstin i would do whatever she said and not glare.#

from carly is a time article by joe klein on Bush. ''Why is no one helping us in Iraq? A simple answer: Why on earth should they? The situation is a mess, in large part because of American arrogance.'' and ''Help will not come easily. "You can't have burden sharing without power sharing," a diplomat told me.'' - interesting.#