Hixie at google

Good stuff from Hixie on life at Google, micro-formats, and Monopoly games. I have to say that, unusually, I find myself in agreement with everything he says. Ya' gotta love the whole "rent-sharing" ideas in Monopoly.

I've often thought that the genius of Monopoly was that it offered a basic framework for a kind of game, but did not openly restrict variations on that basic structure. I mean, come-on, what other board game has a designated space for 'nothing' (i.e. Free Parking) which almost invariably gets overloaded with some set of custom house-rule?

Most experienced players have already thoroughly digested the bible and know all of the default probabilities for landing on each space (highest is B&O Railroad) and the profit margins for development on each property set (most profitable is the light-tans just before Free Parking).

There's nothing like layering on your own rules to add spice!

Dude, next time I'm in SF, we gotta play--I call dibs on the top-hat piece.

Pixar shorts

All of the classic Pixar full length shorts are available for $1.99 each on iTunes now. My favorites are Luxo Jr. (obviously) and For the Birds. Boundin' seems to fall far short of their usual narrative standards IMHO.

Screw the Nano?

Ex Sun COO and current Motoroloa CEO Ed Zander is quoted in this Yahoo article saying "Screw the Nano".

??!!

I know that the public reception of the Apple/Motorola ROKR phone has been less than expected, but, jeez way to make nice with your business partner there Ed.

For the record, I also don't feel that anyone needs 1,000 songs, but the issue is the seemless abundance of the Nano experience. The idea that, for all practical purposes, you really don't have to worry about the capacity of your Nano. Mr. Zander should look-up the simplicity/pleasurability duality for device interfaces Donald Norman's works. It's one-less-thing to have to think about which gets quadratically more important the less features you have to begin with.

Thomas Keller's butter

Wow. Talk about having high quality ingredients and promoting a relationship with your purveyors (via Kottke). I've eaten at a bunch of fine restaruants over the years--including quite a memorial stay at one of the kitchen tables at the Little Inn, but I've never eaten at a Keller joint. That will change in 2006.

Zen and Poker

A neat article by Howard Lederer (of Poker fame) on similarities between Zen and Poker. I have been reading about Buddhism , particularly Zen, as of late and this struck me as a wonderful distillation of some of its key concepts.

Busy, busy busy

Just recently finished up work for a client in Arlington. The addition to their existing large-scale/very high-page-view website should go live sometime around Halloween and, we hope, increase their monthly page-views for key demographics. It was a tough battle, but I do believe that our efforts will pay off greatly down the road for both their business objectives and their in-house software development practices.

Between this work, teaching some classes in Maryland, a likely Struts/Tomcat complete code audit, and some potential work incorporating the Google Maps API in a very innovative way, I've not had spare cycles for posts as of late.

My appologies.