New realms of suckage

Microsoft's new whitepaper on benchmarking Vista performance caused me to say that it could be useful for determining whether add-ons (like antivirus software) were responsible for dragging Vista performance down into new realms of suckage.

One of my co-workers liked the phrase. I thought it was a Buffy-ism, but a google search for it revealed zero hits.

This post should change that. :-)

(Update 8/12/2007 - Yes!!! I now ownz3rs "new realms of suckage"! w00t!)

Open Library demo site

The Open Library has a demo site up. This is going to be amazing....

To get a taste, look at this.

Want to know more? Take the tour.

Things to do in Seattle in the summer

For friends visiting the first week of August:

Check the Seattle Weekly's calendar to see if there's anything interesting going on. Also check The Stranger's calendar.

Early August is mainly Seafair here. I think the Blue Angels might be buzzing Seattle while you're here. The fleet may be in as well (at which point downtown fills up with sailors and everyone - well, at least those who are into sailors in uniform - goes all a-twitter).

Let's see, there's also First Thursday - monthly art gallery etc walkaround in Pioneer Square. Guess what night that is....

If you have an urge to ride in a ridiculous vehicle blowing a quacker, Riding the Duck is actually a nice way to get a tour of parts of Seattle.

You can also take one of the ferry tours, but to be honest, just taking the regular WA DOT ferry round trip over to Vashon or Bremerton, wandering around on the other end for an hour or three, and then taking the ferry back, is better imho. Very nice way to spend a morning/lunch, but the weather has a better chance of being sunny later in the morning.

Pshew! Ok, somebody else pitch in some ideas, I'm empty for now.

(Mel says the underground tour.)

Marc Andreessen, lovin' on social networks

I think this is a good post, not so much because of Ning itself, but because Marc sees what's happening here. (But you don't know what that is, do you, Mr. Jones?)

Why Ning?: "After 12 years of experimentation, when I and a lot of other people tried a lot of experiments to try to figure out how people everywhere were really going to use this marvelous collective invention, I think it's becoming crystal clear what some of the defining characteristics of the Internet really are.

Giving people the ability to communicate in many new ways -- making geography finally irrelevant.

Giving people the ability to express themselves in many new ways -- the impact of the printing press, magnified a millionfold.

Giving people the ability to create their own worlds for everything they care about -- and connecting with everyone else who shares the same interests, goals, and dreams.

These are things that previous technology and media -- telephone, telegraph, paper mail, fax, television, radio, newspapers, magazine -- occasionally approached in sharply limited and fragmented ways... but now with the Internet are available to over a billion people worldwide already and a lot more every day.

And I think that over the next several years we are going to see an unleashing of creativity and innovation in this realm that will make the 1990's look like a sideshow act.

It's a magical time, and I couldn't be more fired up to be a part of it."

(Via blog.pmarca.com.)

The question for me is, with all these wonderful tools, will it change the way people behave? (Both individually and as a global society.)

I'd love to see our world get some basic project management and architectural abilities:
- identify major sources of risk and ways to evaluate and mitigate those risks
- define goals - what the hell you want to accomplish
- understand implications and future effects of things we are planning to do, and things that are already part of the system