While summer doesn’t officially start for seven days, it may as well have. It is beautiful where I live. While Matt from MetaFilter plays in the sun, I’ll toil in a stuffy basement (I love it here).

Nothing marks a beautiful pre-summer day like a set of random links. Enjoy:

• Kirby Ferguson, formerly of IslandEdition.com fame has a new site brewing at KirbyFerguson.com
• Signal vs. Noise links to an astounding satellite photo gallery
• Slashdot links to SPACE BLIMPS! Didn’t they lose one of these on Mars?
• One of the coolest websites in the world (explodingdog.com) linked to us when their Red Robot showed up on our site.
• The same guys who did the satellite photos did this very cool MegaPenny Project (click all the way through, it’s worth it).

A friend of mine recently cast off his American birthright to become a Canadian citizen (actually, he just became a dual citizen, but casting off birthright sounds very cool). He was given the choice of either swearing or affirming the oath of citizenship. He was told that “you are encouraged to bring the holy book of your choice”.

He put it nicely: So politically correct, it offends everyone. Does this not seem a little odd? Mind you, I don’t have any better suggestions. It’s just interesting to see that we have no universal standard to hold each other too.

In the same super-politically-correct, you have to pledge allegiance to the Queen of England!? It is just plain bizarre. I was born in Canada and have apparently tacitly agreed to all of these things.

Swear to your god. If you do not have a god, just promise.

Behold a visual history of Hard Drive icons in the parallel worlds of Windows and Mac. Notice how they get more and more realistic without becoming more meaningful. Personally I prefer the balance between abstraction and a tactile feel found in the Win9x/W2k and MacOS 9 versions.

The old Mac (v6 and before, I think) icon is pretty impressive and to someone who hasn’t opened up their computer, just as meaningful as any of the other icons.

Photorealism is the dumbest idea of all. So that’s what a hard drive looks like.

UPDATE:
Here’s the equivalent chart of folder icons. Very similar parallels, problems, and progression to the hard drive icons.

A reminder that we are not marching towards a blissful and peaceful future: The U.S. executed Timothy McVeigh today.

What do you think of that?

A few low quality videos from last summers evening stress release activities at work.

• Keyboard, Buick, meet North River Road
  (1.3Mb MPEG)
• Keyboard, meet Buick
  (1.3Mb MPEG)

For those who find the grocery store (and stores in general) claustrophobic and frightening like myself, I recommend waferbaby’s how to survive the grocery store.

There is a special place in hell for a browser that reloads a page every time the user resizes their window (try building a web-based application on this rickety platform). Netscape will soon take it’s place in that special place. Netscape 4 has less than 10% of the user base and the number is dwindling fast. I will not miss it.

While many would correctly assert that Netscape died when Internet Explorer 4.0 was released, it’s good to see Netscape admit it themselves. They have announced that “We’re in Media, Not Browser Business Now“. Shut up and die.