The Sheer Power Of A Friendly URL

The equation goes something like this: Mattishness + Search String in URL ~ Fox or Reuters with a lot of garbage in their URLs

Tim Ferriss - Meet Graham Greene

Tim Ferris makes a lot of sense, even if he is a bit of a huckster, runs some kind of a borderline 'nutraceutical' business, and pads the page views on his website by auto-refreshing every minute or so.

Graham Greene was famous for making his friends feel inadequate through his ruthlessly precise and efficient work habits:

"His friend Michael Meyer observed him at work during a trip to Tahiti in 1959, when he was writing “A Burnt-Out Case”:

He wrote in longhand with a fine pen in a very small, almost illegible script, for two hours each day; no more, no less. In those two hours he would write seven to nine hundred words, the equivalent of two to three printed pages. . . . At 9 a.m. he would stop. This was when I got up, and as I walked along the verandah to the shower room he would look up and say, somewhat complacently I felt: “Nine hundred words this morning,” or, even worse, “Finished my work for the day”—a depressing remark with which to be greeted when I hadn’t yet begun and the thermometer was climbing towards ninety."

-Ruth Franklin, The New Yorker, 2004.

I love work efficiency!

Delay - Via SFJ

Sasha Frere-Jones pointed me at Delay through his New Yorker blog

I'm pretty in to the tracks on his Myspace page - they remind me of Dead Ringer vintage RJD2 - particularly Rise N Brass - which is incredibly high praise in my book!

On Being Yourself - Cocteau

Last night, at a little bistro, I became engrossed in one of those deep, this-is-the-kind-of-person-I-am and this-is-what-I'm-all-about conversations with my best friend for several hours while we ignored our small check waiting to be paid.

Good times & What are friends for!

Coincidentally, this afternoon I came across a fabulous quote from Jean Cocteau buried deeply inside a lengthy examination of Joyce Carol Oates in the current New York Review of Books. So, without further adieu:

"What the public criticizes you for, cultivate: It is you."
- Jean Cocteau

Love it!

Thomas Friedman Redeems Himself

I've never been much of a Thomas Friedman fan, too often he's just riding his facile, corporate-speaking-engagement-friendly flat world horse, but this piece is super funny - and even much better because it encourages Americans to put themselves in the shoes of Iranians:

Intercepting Iran’s Take on America

Well done, Tom! Huzzah!

Invention Vs. Refinement Over At blist

Kevin let me loose on the blist blog this morning - so, clearly, I recommend heading over there and reading my post:

Web Office 2007 - Refinement Vs. Invention

By the way, the invention in the diagram above is:

SALUTING DEVICE
JAMES C. BOYLE
patented march 10, 1896

blist - The Reference

Mark Hendrickson at Techcrunch referenced blist yesterday in his profile of web-page creator, Doodlekit. I love this - it means that, for a few people, in a preliminary way, we are really becoming a reference product and company. Thanks, Mark!

"As the WYSIWYG market develops, I’d like to see companies like Doodlekit leverage easy database creation/management tools like upcoming Blist. Then, a wider range of people will be able to collect, manage, and publish their organizational data online without needing to rely on web developers."

Doesn't that look like a blist t-shirt? Want one? Convince me :)