I am driving one handed while I fumble for my cell phone. Quick glance, select the number, press 'Call'. Put phone to my ear. It rings.

"Hello?"

"Anita, it's me. I am driving down Pine and guess what I just saw in the sky?"

"What? Oh, the Concorde. Very cool! It was supposed to come in at 3:00."

"Ya, I think it was on final approach to Boeing Field."

"Well, now you have something to blog."

Nelson Minar thinks so. According to him Python has reached the point that you can create the same kind of quick and dirty Windows applications VB is best suited for. He has pointers to lots of good Windows Python tools.

Via Ted Leung.

Some time ago SF writer Bruce Sterling gave up his blog on my friend Eileen Gunn's webzine Infinite Matrix in order to start a new blog for Wired magazine. This trend towards subsidized blogs is an interesting one and I hope it brings enough value to continue (and perhaps be extended to 'regular' bloggers like myself).

I spent my High School years here in the Seattle area, in the days before Microsoft, Amazon and Starbucks. Back then Boeing was king and one rite of passage for young men was going to a dance at the Sons of Norway hall and (this was extra points) eating some Lutefisk without puking. (Note that you didn't have to be a son of Norway to go to a Sons of Norway dance, there were plenty of that sort around and they would always invite their friends. Probably so they could laugh uproarously when the

Left in Front thinks that /. is too ugly to link to and goes on to opine that "In this day and age, superficiality most times supercedes content." Brendyn then goes on to beg the /. people to overhaul the look and feel.

Notes Toward a Moderation Economy is a fascinating Kuro5hin article that takes an economic view of moderation/reputation systems like /. and Kuro5hin.

Processing is a Java based language and environment that translates to Java and compiles to run on the standard JRE. Processing has syntactic sugar for a wide range of built-in multimedia and 3D run-time APIs and the rest of the language has a clear, clean syntax. If you are developing cross-platform or browser-based multimedia apps Processing should definately be in your toolkit.

Say it isn't so! After 150 years Levi Strauss & Co. is changing the fit of their classic 501 jeans. Apparently they are making the legs and rear a bit wider.

I predict Jay Leno is going to be all over this. "What is happening in this country? Are our butts so big now that even Levi's has to do something?"

Chris Phoenix has published a design for a personal 'Nanofactory'. Quote: "This paper describes the mechanisms, structures, and processes of a prototypical macro-scale, programmable nanofactory composed of many small fabricators." It seems this design could build many products, including a duplicate nanofactory. Of course it would be even more cool if the nanotechnology existed to create the first one...

I feel like a freaking idiot...

I have been waiting for more than an hour for an important call, an over the telephone job interview. I was all prepared, with software already loaded on computers, reference materials handy and plenty of caffiene. But no joy: The phone never rings. Did they forget? Did something else come up? Did they have the wrong number?

Finally I checked the telephone. The power cord was pulled out just enough that it wasn't working.

Crap!

Kathryn Cramer is reporting that SF writer Hal Clement has died.

As has been noted elsewhere, Microsoft has released the C# 2.0 draft specification. (Joey deVilla did an HTML version.)

I found this months ago, but somehow forgot to blog it: In part IV of 'A Conversation with Bruce Eckel', Bruce talks with Bill Venners about the way the Python language itself acts as a kind of 'tipping point' for programmer productivity.

Also don't miss parts I, II and III.

YAML (aka YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a human readable format for serializing and storing data. There is even an HTTP transport RPC mechanism (similar to XML-RPC) defined for YAML called OkayRpcProtocol.

I seriously think this is something which could change the Internet drastically 1. I also think it is something the 'powers that be' 2 will be very concerned about if it does gain critical mass.

1 I suspect this change will accellerate the 'Balkinization' of the Internet as users start creating private zones of the like-minded. Among other things of course.