For a long time, I resented, despised and otherwise looked upon me-first, terrorist-loving commie Hummer owners with utter disdain.

Then as one of the bastards cut me off yesterday, I realized that I may have been wrong. Men don’t own Hummers by choice. They own them because they have to. It’s the only thing that could possibly compensate for having no cock.

…but I want one! (http://www.csbcommodities.com/)

I’m not a Java guy, but there is such a thing, and many of them are drinking the Ruby on Rails kool-aid.

Take for example Jason Hunter, who’s written books on Servlet programming and generally seems like smart fella. Jason’s piece, The Innovator’s Dilemma: It’s Happening to Java discusses what many believe to be happening - “… Rails today looks poised to eat Java’s mindshare on the web tier.”

“I heard today from someone involved with Java at Sun that Ruby on Rails “doesn’t scale”. Exactly! It doesn’t have to. It’s not as good, but it’s easier (read: cheaper) and good enough for most. Like all disruptive

technologies, it’ll only get better. It will scale better. It will add two-phase commits and fancy message queues. In the meanwhile it’s getting interest and winning converts with the promise and delivery of cheapness–mental cheapness.”

From the MSN Money article…

“If your money is invested in common stocks and you achieve the average compound annual rate on large-capitalization U.S. stocks, 10.7%, your account will grow to $9,378 at the end of the fourth year. You will be 20 years old. Invested in the same way, with no additional savings, the account will grow to:

• $25,917 by the time you are 30

• $71,625 by the time you are 40

• $197,943 by the time you are 50

• $547,037 by the time you are 60

• And $1,114,423 by the time you are 67

And you will have started and finished all of your saving before turning age 21.

I wish I’d thought of that 25 years ago.

[Update] I left out the initial investment amount of $2,000.

Here a nice article about identifying falsified images

My dad, godluvim, just stopped at my house and took all of the wood parts off my old gas grill. Says he was bored and thought he’d strip and restain them - make it look goodasnew.

This of course coincided with a wave of guilt and regret. Why didn’t I do that? Why is my lawn a mess and when am I going to clean the spare room in the basement? Am I just completely lazy?

I calmed down and looked at what I’ve done so far today.

• Got up, showered, made breakfast, cleaned the kitchen and checked my email.

• Read all of my RSS feeds

• Posted a short blog entry

• Cleaned up my Ruby script which updates our Darcs repositories and synchronizes them to a backup location

• Wrote rationale and design goals for re-developing our in-house content management system using Rails

• Began a project template in Circus Ponies Notebook

• Researched fast, wide prime lens options for my 20D

• Began work on a script for mirroring our Darcs repositories to Subversion repositories so we can continue using Trac

It’s 1:20 in the afternoon, so no, I don’t think I’m lazy after all. It just looks that way from the real world. I just have a different way of touching things up, is all. Now, about that laundry…

In a post titled Hurry! Seth Godin discusses the common failing of doing what’s urgent rather than what’s important.

“The easiest thing to do is to allow the urgency of the situation to force us to make the decisions (or take the actions) that we’d rather not take. Why? Because then we don’t have to take responsibility for what happens. The situation is at fault, not us. The beauty of the asymptotic curve is that at every step along the way, running ever faster for the plane is totally justified. The closer we get, the more we’ve invested ourselves. The more we invest in making our flight, the easier it is to justify running like a lunatic to make it.”

The idea is that if you do the important stuff first, there will be far fewer urgent issues to deal with. The trick of course is determining what’s important.

Boing Boing offers $1,000,000 to anyone who can “…produce empirical evidence which proves that Jesus is not the son of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.”

Have you been touched by his Noodly Appendage?

It’s amazing how my perception of a particular piece of software can change over time. Some apps have tricked me into liking them, only to eventually fail. Others I’ve tried and hated, then grown to love. An example of the latter is Circus Ponies Notebook.

I’ve tried this critter twice before and hated it. It looks like a spiral notebook for crying out loud. How can I take that at all seriously? Besides, I thought we were past silly metaphors.

For some time I’ve been putting absolutely everything into DevonTHINK Pro. Project notes, PDFs, documentation, you name it. It’s a truly great app, but what I found is that while DevonTHINK is great for storing and searching, I don’t like it for creating or organizing stuff.

Then, a funny thing happened. I started using real notebooks - a lot. So, when I started looking for an outlining/list-keeping/note-taking app to supplement DevonTHINK, I thought I’d give NoteBook another shot. This time it clicked immediately.

Suddenly I had a place for journalling, list-keeping, storing project information and all sorts of other things I’m just beginning to explore. After about a week with Notebook, I’m still finding little things that make me glad I gave it another shot. If you need a place to organize, write, collect or otherwise manage the digital bits and pieces, give it a shot.

As a big fan of Roger Ebert I was delighted to find a list of his most hated movies

Joe Dirt, check. The Waterboy, check. Armageddon, I’m witchya. Tommy Boy… wait a *#&$%ing minute! Tommy Boy?!! I can be a little bit of a film snob, but damn Rog, how dare you claim that “There are no memorable lines!” I use a line from the movie practically every day and my daughter and I can have entire conversations built upon bits from the movie.

Richard: Can’t hear you, you’re trailing off and did I catch a niner in there? Were you calling from a walkie-talkie?

Richard: I can practically hear you getting fatter.

Tommy: You know a lot of people go to college for seven years.”

Richard: “I know, they’re called doctors.

Richard: I don’t remember eating that.

Richard: I think your brain has a thick candy shell.

Tommy: Your… Your brain has the shell on it.

Richar: Are you talking?

Tommy: Shut up, Richard.

Well, you get the idea - comic genius.