When I become a filthy rich eccentric – which will probably not be until late 2003 at the earliest – I will lavish myself with a few key niceties. I will wear a new pair of socks everyday forever.

I’ve thought about putting some kind of charitable spin on it, like giving my ‘worn-once’ socks to charity, like Michael Jordan does with his shoes – but I don’t think that the same good karma would come if it were socks instead. Perhaps I’ll just give cash (I will be rich at this point anyhow).

As this dream of mine (not to become wealthy, but to wear a new pair of socks everyday if I ever do) is well known to my family and friends, I do well at Christmas. This year, I would estimate I received approximately 20 pairs of socks. January is going to be a good month.

What will your wealthy eccentric traits be?

UPDATE: Checkout what I think is one of the funniest replies yet on aov – if this was indeed written solely for post here on aov, then I’m very impressed. If not, it’s still funny.

Who else is browsing the web on Christmas morning? Show yourselves!

Don’t pity me though. I just spent the last three hours opening gifts with my family.

The animal computer book cover series by O’Reilly is consistent, unique, memorable, and beautiful. The brainchild of Edie Freedman, now O’Reilly’s creative director, the books have become as recognizable as the Dummies series, at least to their own more self confident audience.

I’ve long admired the covers for the beautiful illustrations and the strong and well balanced white space and solid color block design program that houses them. The animals started as 19th century wood engravings, but most are now drawn by one of O’Reilly’s own editors who is also a part-time illustrator.

For more information and background on the O’Reilly animal book covers, see Animal Magnetism: Making O’Reilly Animals and Edie Freedman’s own Origin of Species: A History of O’Reilly Animals.

Discovered at the last minute: Design Your Own O’Reilly Book Cover. Here’s mine.

We are honoured to be included with our inclusion on the Kottke.org links b-list. Those chumps on the c-list can suck it.

Struggling with the thought that there could be others better than ourselves, I checked out kottke.org a-list of links.
Most I was familiar with (Harrumph, Evhead, a.whole, etc.) but some were strange and new.

The best of the pack is Stewart Butterfield’s Sylloge.com. Stewart (along with Eric Costello of the very cool glish.com) runs the infamous but wonderful 5k Contest. His personal blog is absolutely beautiful.

Speaking of beautiful weblogs, see fellow kottke b-lister Dollar Short.

I found a great link at Coudal Partners (home of the photoshop tennis circuit). Shockwave slot-car racing. You actually build your own track! It’s fantastic.

Just drag the track pieces from the top of the page to build your track (make sure it plugs into the power piece at the bottom. When your track is done, click the flag, and race.

It’s harder to make a good track than you’d think. I have much more respect for those Coleco engineers now. So far the best in-office track design award goes to iZak for this beauty. If you design a better one, send it to me and I’ll post it.

I’ve just come from the theatre. It’s nice to work at an office that shuts down for such important occasions.

My expectations for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring were high and I was not disappointed.

Today the good mailman arrived. He demanded $8.32 but had no change to offer (is that even legal?).

However, he also brought with him a big bag of goodness containing Sam Brown’s (of explodingdog.com) new book “Wish for Something Better”.

I suspect that you do not own a copy and that I am cooler than you. Buy one, they are beautiful. It’s a small square book (about 6″ x 6″) and the printing looks great. It will make your coffee table way cooler than it was yesterday.

I’m all about doing whatever it may be that’s the latest “thing to do”. Where I am these days, using XML-RPC to ping Weblogs.com is the thing to do (odd, I know).

So, I’m doing it. Actsofvolition.com now pings weblogs.com whenever it’s updated.

Props to the good people at Userland Software on their work with the XML-RPC protocol. For an Adbusters subscriber, I’ve always been quite sympathetic to Microsoft (I even like Clippy – seriously), the work being done on the SOAP and XML-RPC protocols by Dave Winer and the other folks at Userland may well save us (and Microsoft) from the Microsoft world.

What the hell does this mean? Well, in of itself, not a whole lot. It means that every time one of the geniuses around here makes a post, Weblogs.com will be notified and show our site on their list. Then, other sites can sort-of syndicate that list – for example, they could have a ’10 recently updated sites’ list that would grab its content from the master list at weblogs.com.

This is not a big deal, but it is just the tip of the iceberg. The more important thing is that I called a procedure on another web server and passed information in an understandable format – a simple, but powerful concept. Hopefully this simple experiment will be the begining of some more interesting and useful applications of this technology (more to come as I experiment further with this).

I often complain about the use of acronyms, so I appologize for this post. XML-RPC stands for Extensible Markup Language – Remote Procedure Calling. SOAP stands for Simple Object Access Protocol.