I found the following article quite fascinating.

Songs we hear as teenagers tend to remain lifelong favourites because they become hardwired into our memory during a critical time, a memory conference has heard.

[...]

“You recall more memories from the period of 10 to 25 [than previous or subsequent periods] and the bump has a peak between 16 and 20,” he says.

“The brain works at its optimum in that period. It’s a sponge and it soaks up everything.”

To name just a few songs that will remain with me forever: “Tonight” by Blackstreet and a couple of renditions of “I Can’t Go for It”. I tend to associate — mentally that is — album covers with certain songs that eternally stay in my head.

NLY a few days ago, Netscape and AOL offered money for people to participate in their on-line portal. Having created a Digg copycat, they were willing to pay some generous sums of money for influential Diggers to defect and help create a larger and healthier community elsewhere. The cited article views these recent events in a rather objective way.

Dollar signs went off in the blogsphere Wednesday, as blog pioneer and recent Netscape recruit Jason Calacanis offered up to $1000 a month to woo volunteer posters away from popular reader-generated link sites like Digg and Reddit.

[...]

“I’m just surprised that he feels like he had to steal people away from Digg,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief at SearchEngineWatch.com. “Certainly it’s starting to feel forced now. He’s looking for leaders in his community. None of them have emerged apparently, so he’s hoping to bribe them away from another place.”

[...]

Will the cool hunters in the Digg community take the bait? Reached via e-mail, Digg’s second most popular user, Dirtyfratboy (also known as Henry Wang), told Wired News that he was torn.

“Mr. Calacanis shows up this week and informs the world that users can receive payment for their work. I’ve stayed by Digg’s side ever since the 2.0 birth, but I’m in real pain right now. I would rather break my arm than to dismiss Digg, but my college tuition doesn’t pay for itself.”

Even to me this was tempting. Out of curiosity I got in touch with Calacanis and tested the ground, so to speak. They seem interested at the time, but this truly conflicted with my principles. It would also be awkward, if not a poor strategy altogether. Paying people to do what others already do voluntarily? A couple of days later this led to quiet riots by existing Netscape.com fans. So, I imagine the plan has been fully conceded by now.

The best find du jour is the following set of Linux commands and their real responses in the shell. Below is a snippet.

Actual UNIX commands and responses…

% make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.

% got a light?
No match.

% sleep with me
bad character

[....]

have always said that I would never write blog content while drunk or even tipsy. I think I made the exception only once. Today I have a compelling reason to make an exception, too.

I have just returned from the night club and, on my way back, I witnessed a violent scene (although I did not see it frontally or directly). An innocent Northern Irish man was assaulted by three bullies and then left lying unconscious on the ground, having had his mobile phone stolen. His head was visibly injured. I saw him lying there without moving while other witnesses fled the scene. Soon afterwards I had the ambulance and the police come to assist. I spent about an hour with them, providing evidence.and rough description of the criminals. I am yet to be contacted for further information by the police (or at least that’s I was told by the officer).

But here comes the scary part: as I was leaving the police vehicle I was yelled at by a bunch of guys whose appearance resembled the criminals. I walked back home through an alternative route watching my back like a paranoid. I don’t expect to sleep well tonight. It’s 3 AM and I need to wake up early for work. Quite unnerving. The policemen said that they had captured those three who assaulted, but I begin to doubt it. They could have lied to find reassurance. In fact, now that I think about it, I will go downstairs immediately and phone the police, again. They could not have found the criminals as quickly as they arrived at the scene of the incident.

UPDATE (after phonecall): it seems possible that they only captured one or two of the criminals (probably one).

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

nice old writeup from Tristan Miller (someone whom I first met on UseNet) explains why it is a poor idea to send Word files. I explored his site at deeper levels in the past as his opinions broadly intersected with mine. I also happened to find this funny ‘scientific paper’ with an hilarious followup.

Returning to the subject at hand, the true nuisance is mail that contains Word attachments. It is a plague that appears to be reaching its end. Funnier (or coversely — more annoying) experiences include the embedment of nothing but plain text (or even a single image) in a Word files which is attached to a blank-body message. Some people just never learn. Here are some effective E-mail signatures that I have come across in the L_yX mailing list.

I do not have a copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
I have no plans to buy one.
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use proprietary data formats,
encouraging consumerism by forcing us to purchase new licenses
every time they “upgrade” their secret formats.
Send plain text, rich text format, html, or pdf instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Or a shorter version thereof (one which honours the 4-line signature limit)

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are unreliable, unmaintainable, and unsafe.
Send plain text, rtf, pdf, or W3C html instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

There is now the ODF argument as well. ODF has recently become an ISO-approved standard.

NE thing that keeps striking me as surprising is that people’s habits supersede all logic. I will provide an example from technology.

How can anybody argue that drive A for floppy disk and C for primary hard-drive is more rational than the rhetorical and self-explanatory /dev/floppy/ (for floppy device) and /dev/hd0/? This comes the prove that it is all just a matter of habits. People refuse to accept new things that they are not already used to, irrespective of their reasoning. In fact, the hierarchy of a computer (abstraction) in the *nix world is far more robust. It may also be easier for a new user to ‘digest’ and everything stems from the root of a single tree.

The following is a mind-stimulating fragment from a post that I recently read in the Linux advocacy newsgroups. Judge it for yourselves.

(In a derogatory reference to Linux) “Anything free is worth what you pay for it” - Robert Heinlein

What? You think it could be worth less?

He also said:

“Certainly the game is rigged. Don’t let that stop you; if you don’t bet, you can’t win.” - Robert Heinlein

Which should be the unwritten motto of the OSS community.

And finally one for you to ponder:

“Your enemy is never a villian in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate–and quickly.” - Robert Heinlein