Rambles at starchamber.com

I did a little more shopping around, and this is much better free desktop planetarium than the Cosmic Thing: Heavens-Above. Endless [free] content unrolls before your eyes. Here’s the view from my back yard.

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stating the obvious has an entertaining piece about uber-geek Jamie Zawinski. I remember thinking how annoying he was when I first saw his Netscape internal web page that blared out “my cubicle is cooler than yours.” I work with people like this every day.

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Truly one of the great applets of all time: J-Track 3D for keeping track of satellites. Speaking of astronomical applets, AJ’s Cosmic Thing will tell you what’s in the sky at any given time.

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Usability on parade in FEED: Listen to the usability rock stars talk about how the famous Palm Beach ballot was flawed. And if you want the anti-rockstar view on usability, listen to Frog Design designer Valerie Casey declare “usability is dead.” Or you can order your own What would Jakob do? mouse pad.

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New Scientist magazine has a good article in its November 11th issue, Surf like a Bushman, about biological foraging theory and the hunt for information. Searching for food and searching for information are strikingly similar. I can relate; I feel the primal rush of a successful hunt after tracking something down on the web. The [...]

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The December issue of The Atlantic Monthly is just terrific. I’ll buy a magazine if it has one interesting paragraph in it, and this issue has two big meaty articles worth savoring in detail: a report on wine critic Robert Parker Jr. and an article on people who deliberately amputate healthy limbs by Carl Elliot. [...]

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I love Books on Tape. I used to be embarrassed to admit it, but I’ve given up. Now the only question is whether to say, in idle conversation, that I “read” such and such a book, or to say that I listened to it, but hey that’s just as good. I have a half hour [...]

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Charts from Hell. Someone has gone to the trouble of collecting gruesome stock price charts of dot-com failures. It’s voyeuristic but riveting to click through them. You can practically hear the sound of a lot of money being lost.

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The Joe Cartoon Co. has been around for a while, and if the humor is pretty adolescent, the artwork and animation are inspired. Check out The Boss, a recent Flash animation at the site. The voice characterization on the brown-nosing gerbil is just brilliant.

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Fun blog: dack.com.

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