<blockquote>
    <p> Sharing is important &#8211; we&#8217;re all communication junkies. [But]  We have an incredible bandwidth disparity (easy to take in, hard to give out); our devices have the reciprocal disparity (hard to take in, easy to give out)&#8212;<a href="http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&#38;story=Creative_Think.txt&#38;sortOrder=Sort%20by%20Date">Allen Kay, 1982</a></p>
</blockquote>

<p>Wow.</p>

I’ve learned a lot of technical usability basics from Jacob Nielsen. His latest article goes way beyond technical debates into website strategies for selling to large businesses. He is amazingly correct about helping people inside an organization sell your product.

I’ve been programming since seven this morning - fourteen hours (with mealtimes, driving to and from work, and playing a round or two of IT game). That’s what I get when I work fixed hours and one place, and then besides that have two different freelance clients who really need something right now. It’s been like this for the past week or so. I’m finding it hard at the end of the to pull back from a world of abstractions and elegance and relate to the real world, or to people - I just want to be a hermit.

Today I have thoroughly immersed myself by turns into:

• PHP
• Java
• ladder logic

The “app launcher” Quicksilver has just replaced LaunchBar on my computers. That’s saying a lot, considering both that LaunchBar has long been on of my most loved programs, and that I’ve paid for LaunchBar and Quicksilver is “just” free.

Quicksilver has oddly just moved from open beta into closed beta. While to me it seems stable enough, I think the developer wants to be able to continue development without the miles of bug reports that will come from the hordes of user that are coming as the word spreads about how cool Quicksilver.

Gush - Looks like a very slick jabber client and newsreader. For OS X and Windows XP.

It’s the next Google. It’s a site that does something so well, and so cleanly, that it just becomes a part of you. “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us/ is a social bookmarking site.

I find an article that I want to remember, so I press a bookmarklet in my browsers tool bar. A small window pops up, and I add a half a sentence highlighting why I bookmarked it. I press save and go about me work. Later I check my del.icio.us, and see that four other people have bookmarked that particular article. I look at their bookmarks, find them interesting, and subscribe. As they go about bookmarking articles and sites, the bookmarks come into my rss reader.

This is real social software.

And it’s scary like Amazon. The first time I ever used Amazon, I was wanting to point an acquaintance towards a few of the best military strategy books I’ve read. I searched on amazon for each, and then passed him the url. When I was done I looked down at the recommended books list. There were two hard to find, excellent books that I had been wanting to own for months, and third that I owned and loved. Hundreds of thousands of books on Amazon, and it showed me the ones I wanted and trusted.

On del.icio.us I will see my “friends” posting links to the exact articles or sites that I have found useful. I subscribed to “gerryg’s links”:http://del.icio.us/gerryg a few days ago. He “bookmarked”:http://del.icio.us/gerryg/2004-04-08 the Lipsum generator that I’ve been happily using for a almost a year now.

I just hope del.icio.us can keep it free.

Using lava lamps for broken builds - extremely cool. I’ve been wishing for ethernet controlled lighting as environmental information radiators. I’d not thought of just using X10 equipment before.

Google looks oddly unlike itself this morning. For an eighth of a second, I thought some evil software had highjacked the search bar in my browser.

This is very unusual for Google to roll out many visual changes at the same time.

Beth points to a great website that allows you to see who in your neighborhood donated to which presidential candidate.

Looking at my area I see 27 for Bush, 4 for Kerry, and a wide spread for the other democratic candidates.

Giving great interviews: Concrete things to do when speaking to an editor. (No, it’s not about job interviews, though on thinking about it, most of the article applies to job interviews as well)