Dave's Picks

Dave Polaschek's collection of interesting links

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1 week 6 days ago

March 1, 2010

04:57
Back at the beignning of the month: More from Scalzi on the Amazon/Macmillan battle: All The Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed the Weekend. Yeah, Amazon was full of fail that weekend. Now the dust seems to have settled, but frankly I just haven’t been following it. Or buying from Amazon.
04:57
From Wired: 100 Quotes Every Geek Should Know. I don’t know that all of them are essential, but it’s still a good enough list.
04:57
Derek Lowe has a list of Things I won’t work with. Oh man, is it funny, even if you’re not a chemist.
04:57
I don’t check kuro5hin all that often anymore, but every once in a while I do. And I find neat stuff like this story about Building Houses–One Bullet at a Time in New Orleans. No wonder the place is still screwed up.
04:57
Hmm. Not a happy thing: Amazon and Macmillan go to war: readers and writers are the civilian casualties. Also, from John Scalzi, A Quick Note On eBook Pricing and Amazon Hijinx. In It’s All About Timing, Scalzi goes into it a little more, with an explanation of why Amazon would do this on a Friday. Unfortunately, the weekend is when some of us spend more time online, so I’ve been watching this quite a bit, and have had time to get fairly steamed with Amazon. Finally, in a note To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community from John Sargent, head honcho at MacMillan, he explains that this was Amazon’s decision.
04:57
A long article from the New Yorker on The rise of the Tea Party movement. Interesting!

January 13, 2010

10:53
10:53
Interested in your privacy? On Facebook? Then Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee is probably something you should read.
10:53
Want to avoid the mandatory insurance of ObamaCare? Here’s a loophole: Amish families exempt from insurance mandate. Others with religious objections to insurance should be exempted too. Might be time to start a new religion…
10:53
Mark J. Rebilas’ 50 favorite photos of the Decade has some darned cool photography. Well worth a few minutes of your time.

January 5, 2010

09:13
Cooking and sex in one simple post: HOWTO make the perfect fudge and get laid. All sounds good, and funny, too. Though I might substitute the Chocolate Chip Cheesecake I’ve made a couple times now (with tasty results). Any takers?
09:13
Here’s How to use Facebook with a feed reader from jwz. Way more convoluted than it should be.
09:13
It’s not every economist who’ll ask Who Cares About Unsexy Men? It’s interesting to see what sorts of answers a question like that will bring.
09:13
Stephen Haynes has a very disturbing Conversation with an American Cop. If you’re a photographer who can get past the (NSFW) photo of the nekkid lady at the top of the article, you should probably go read it. Just make sure to not have too many breakables around.
09:13
A friend wrote a note for the new year titled Have Fun, Be Free. Sounds like pretty good advice, but which also meshes with an article titled Class War in this month’s Reason (not available online yet) which pointed out that with government employees (all levels combined) being nearly half of the voting-age population in the US, there may be no way to turn back big government. It’d be cause for despair normally, but heck, even my state senator counseled me, back when Minnesota had banned buying more than 10 days worth of sudafed every two weeks, that sometimes the best thing to do was just ignore the law and avoid getting caught.

December 28, 2009

09:19
Rands has a good article on Gaming the System as you approach shipping a product (aka the end game). Sounds like it would work, and might be a lot better than the metrics currently in use at my workplace.
09:19
Hear about the Sex Laws Still On The Books In Minnesota? Made national news. And “my” legislators wonder why I don’t have much respect for them.
09:19
Teehee! Unintended Consequence of Technology: New LED traffic lights can’t melt snow I got a giggle out of this one. I wonder how much carbon gets used to send out a truck with a guy using a brush to clean out the lights.
09:19
A lawsuit filed by the State of Washington alleges that DirecTV thrives on 'deception.' Doesn’t sound unreasonable to me as a (former) customer.