Solipsism Gradient

Daniel Steinberg kindly pointed me at Tim O’Reilly’s comments on Phil Wainewright’s piece about Google and Microsoft occupying different spaces:

Google’s turf is the Internet. It’s not interested in devices that don’t connect to it – Microsoft is welcome to that market. It simply wants to extend its reach to any device that does go online.

…Microsoft’s business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google’s depends on everyone exploring what’s new in their computing environment every day.

This illustrates my original point very well. Google isn’t trying to compete with Microsoft at all (although Microsoft may be trying to compete with Google…)

Merlin over at 43 Folders always has useful advice, but this one on Writing Sensible Email Messages is essential reading:

Before you type anything into a new message, have explicit answers for two questions:

1. Why am I writing this?

2. What exactly do I want the result of this message to be?

If you can’t succinctly state these answers, you might want to hold off on sending your message until you can. People get dozens, hundreds, even thousands of emails each day, so it’s only natural for them to gravitate toward the messages that are well thought-out and that clearly respect their time and attention. Careless emails do not invite careful responses.

I get an awful lot of emails myself, and I wish more people considered making them easier to read… and to respond to.

I’ve been remiss in updating my blogroll here, but it’s finally done. I’ve had to cut down severely on my RSS feed reading, so some links had to be taken out – I hasten to add that, with very few exceptions, this should not be taken as a negative judgment. Currently I’m updating the feeds once a day and read about half of them immediately, and the rest if and when I have the time.

I’ve been following news about the evolution vs. creationism/ID debate with fascinated/horrified disbelief… until a few years ago I wouldn’t have believed that it’s even an issue!

Anyway, I think the best thing to come out of this whole mess is the flying spaghetti monster and its worshippers, the Pastafarians. Here’s my favorite logo for the FSM so far, designed for boing boing by Jim Leftwich:

Let’s hope that the FSM creation theory is given due attention as a perfectly valid alternative to other “creation theories”. RAmen.

The Presurfer (and several others) pointed at this nice “make your own magazine” facility. So here we go:

The image is by jvzeuss73, by the way. Great photo.

Posted by Nando:
Quite impressive blog you have going on here Rainer. And, as expected, marvelous articles and texts. I will add a link to this Weblog on my site, if you don’t mind.

One of my favorite bloggers, John Walkenbach, asks for links. There you are, John!

Posted by Kent:
Sadly enough, I scored a 93…oh, my

Kent