darling girl, writes about her problems writing her book. a desire for perfection is often not rewarded. she says, ''I have no idea if my back-assward labors will ever pay off. Today, for fiction by a woman to be considered marketable, it has to be about a sassy Prada-clad nanny/editorial assistant trying to find love in Manhattan. I don't think a slim novel about a bulimic high school physics teacher who's obsessed with amusement parks qualifies as "hot fic" these days. '' - everything is supposed to be Bridget Jones huh?#

kottke's grocery shopping will never be the same#

richard gabriel reports on a talk that Larry Lessig gave to a group at Sun. He talks about the idea that one benefit of an open source platform is that no one can strangle you in the future if they see fit - he offers the idea that the platform be put into a conservancy which will protect it. coool. It contains this great quote: ''Larry's talk also pointed out a fact I always love to hear: Disney's Mickey Mouse was created for Steamboat Willie, which was a parody of Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill Jr. The best part is that both the parody and original were released in 1928, which means that the Disney company knows of what it speaks when it worries about people ripping off the success of Mickey Mouse.''#

ryan talks about lowering restrictions on advertising and the general "puritanic feel" of the country. #

tony deals with being very popular and thus not being able to write what he really wants. maybe he'll make a secret blog? i agree with him about how it's strange to be too first personal and personal or write about dating. and tony does have the best disclaimer ever.#

peter lindberg muses about creativity. this was brought on by Bob Hope and jokes, obviously. ''There's always selection in creativity. I've thought about this regarding photography. Some photographers can visualize an idea, set it up and shoot it, while others have to shoot lots and lots of pictures, and then select the good ones. You can't say that either way is better; they're just different: the selection takes place at different times.'' - You may notice that lots of designers (architects... software and otherwise, etc) have design books that they keep all their ideas in. this is essentially the same idea as taking lots of pictures. by doing paper implementations and rough designs we can get a clearer idea of what doesn't work or what we can think about.#

kim points out the differences between _quality_ and _robustness_ and talks about how when you lower quality to decrease costs you can't skip testing or completely leave out key features. eye candy she says, is expendable.#

from kuro5hin to confessions of a g33k to the smoking gun is the best legal document ever. it is an essay on the word "Fuck" - very entertaining#

kuro5hin article on the "Gay School" in NYC.#

from kim is brad delong writing about purple america and linking similar pages - this interesting because it shows how things really work rather than creating some sort of class/regional struggle between the "Bible Belt" and the "Money Sucky Northeast" and "Heathen West"#

Tom Coates writes that sites like Blogdex and Technorati not only tell us what is being written about, they are also a source for things to write about. so there is a snowball effect (or a self fulfilling prophecy, whichever you prefer) that these things will get lots of coverage. interesting.#

dan refines why you should, or rather would, care about how many ops are in parrot. dan also explains why he decided to go with CPS for Parrot after meditating about it for so long#

boing boing links a gallery of "technical documentation weirdness"#

from use perl (and i think it was also on perl.com and slashdot) is the new Exegesis from Conway, number 6. It's very nice the way it slow builds up functionality and desire for the functionality. and the final section on how you would have to do it in perl 5 is very revealing.#

southern california sounds great.#

the loony blog warns bush that crazy bills, will be big embarrassments in the future. dam#

aaron got a letter back from donald knuth after reading a book and finding some errors. knuth is a very interesting guy. browse around his site#

aaron also writes about ways to make record companies and current pirates happy. i like his explanation of Nielsen ratings. I'm glad I now know what they mean.#