Nothing and Some More

Demographers puzzled

Some numbers on the Bay Area population

Chinese Green Cards in Use This Year

The "green card" will be granted to foreigners with senior management or technological expertise, and foreigners who have invested heavily in China, and the cardholders will be allowed to stay in this country permanently and to enter China without a visa.

Chinablog, a blog about China.

Viet Nam, on a motorcycle, diary of a traveler.

What is home?? (while you're there, give a read to Men, please take note!)

Of PowerPoint and Pointlessness

Attracted by the same slick interface and easy learning curve that drew the corporate types, educators and students are employing the presentation software in classrooms in ever-increasing numbers. For some teachers, the computerized slide-show format is deposing the blackboard.[...]To critics, PowerPoint serves largely the same role in the classroom as pre-processed snack food does in the lunchroom: a conveniently packaged morsel that looks good but doesn't match the intellectual or corporeal nourishment of, say, a critical essay or a plate of steamed spinach.

You can choose the best entries from the 256 bytes html compo. Lots are IE only. Too bad. (via Milov)

Interview with Larry Wall on perl and other things

Systematic theology is an oxymoron. God is not a system. Christians are fond of asking: "What would Jesus do in this situation?" Unfortunately, they very rarely come up with the correct answer, which is: "Something unexpected!" If the Creator really did write himself into his own story, that's what we ought to expect to see. Creative solutions.

Other interviews worth a read: Woz and David Crane (remember Pitfall, right?)

Xopus is out: editing XML in your browser in a cross-platform way is doable, now, using only DOM. And it's open source. There is a mailing list (via W3 Future)

Interested in building a RSS aggregator in Python? (via Brett Morgan's <strike>Insanity Weblog</strike> Zilla)

Why LiveJournal is not perceived as a blog community: Further down the LiveJournal spiral. As a - often frustrated - reader, I have the feeling french blogosphere is too much of a journal, not enough about links and the world outside. Is it the culture, stupid ??

Most LiveJournal pages are chronicles of the mundane: movies watched, friends seen and the occasional dispute with parents. There is little to attract would-be voyeurs. But for most journal writers, strangers are not the intended audience, said Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at New York University's interactive telecommunications program who has studied LiveJournal's approach to building an online community.
"It's not for readers — it's only for participants," Mr. Shirky said. "Most people's lives are boring to anyone outside of a small circle of friends."

French quarter: Jerry Lewis was too ill to perform in London. And Michel Fournier, a french guy ready for the big jump: from 131,200 feet, reaching supersonic speeds.

Learning english while reading comics gesundheit (via Baby blues)

And some good SciFi to be read from this year's Hugos.