The rumors are true: Bloglines is now part of the Big Butler. The grand internet land grab continues...

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but since so many of my friends have an interest in the Winchester Mystery House I thought you'd be interested in this Wired article about Jeremy Blake's artistic interpretation of the mysteries of Sarah Winchester and the house.

I just got this and wanted to post it, but I'm working and will write more later after I read and digest.

I work at one of the most accessible repositories of information on the planet, but now and again I come up with a simple information need that current search engines can't satisfy. It's not that the question is difficult, it's just too underspecified for search engines that presume you know at least a little bit about what you're looking for. What do I do when I have a question like that? I post on my blog, confident that you guys will answer my question within a matter of hours.

As it happens, today I have two questions I'm hoping you can help with:

First, what are those little fuzzy toy animals called, the ones with the big feet with stickers on the bottom, that sometimes have little flags coming out of their nethers that say inspirational things? You know, the things that magazine companies recruit child labor in the form of elementary school students to sell subscriptions in exchange for points which can be exchanged for, among other things, these little things I want to call Weeble Wobbles, but which aren't?

Second: There's a song playing on the radio a lot now, only I don't listen to the radio. The chorus is a woman's voice singing "I'm sorry, so sorry, I'm sorry something something". I only know the title has nothing to do with the words "I'm sorry".

Have at it!

Driving to work on 280 this morning (at normal I-280 speeds) I watched a woman in the emergency lane, pedaling away on her tenspeed, headphones on and colorful hemp purse over her shoulder.

Cupertino and Sunnyvale have as many bicycle lanes as anyplace I've ever lived. Why tempt death pedaling 5 feet from vehicles travelling eight times your speed? Besides, the first highway patrol car would land her in the back seat and her bicycle in the trunk.

I feel the urge to blog something, I don't know why.

There's this corner on the way from my cube to the snack center where I can trim four or five steps from my path if I walk through the 'copy center', an oompa-loompa tv-studio white-linolium flourescent copy room/avenue that cuts the corner. Every time (every single time) I walk this path I have to make the decision 'do I cut through or do I go around the corner?' On one hand, if I cut through and someone else tries cutting through at the same time from the other direction it's a slightly narrow hall for two people. Also, if someone's actually performing printing, copying, or faxing tasks, I'm getting in their way. This is the most minor decision I'm conscious of making several times a day, and yet it lingers.

Yesterday I was walking the path (I went around because I was carrying lunch back to my desk from the cafe. I always go around when I'm carrying food (I've found that my subconscious doesn't count chai as food) because food is messy and the room is clean) and I was thining about how I never blog stuff, and how I could blog this. No. That's stupid. There's a whole subscript of things in my life that are only of marginal interest to me and don't affect anyone else at all. That would be the worst kind of thing to blog, worse even than talking about having gone to see a movie with friends the night before. At least that matters to the friends.

Then I did a mental accounting (ironically due to time afforded by the extra 4 or 5 steps I had to take back to my cube) of the posts I'm more proud of, specifically the Laundry Story, and how there's a Seinfeldesque quality to blogging about nothing.

I ought to go blog about the corner, I thought.

But looking back, it looks like I blogged about the second-order experience of blogging about nothing.

This post is less than zero.

I've noticed when watching people (as it is often my wont to do) that lots of people I know have default faces, the faces they show when they stand in the elevator going to lunch while trying to remember what they ate for lunch the day before, or reading a book, or stopped at a stoplight. These faces can be happy, pensive, dour, vapid, or intense, and I get the feeling that most people have no idea of what their own default face looks like to other people, or the giant effects that other people's impressions of their default face have on the course of their lives overall.

Do you have a default face? What do you think it is? Ask around. Are you right?

Those of you who've taken a look at Randompixel can tell that PostSecret is a project so cool I wish I made it. The only downside is that anyone can submit a secret, so the liklihood of made-up secrets from the attention-getter set skyrockets, but at least the attention-getters tend to be artistic. The premise is simple. Write your secret on an index card and mail it in. Fair warning though, there are a few disturbing pieces in there.

What's your secret?

Rachel and I spent a quick couple of hours at the last day of Macworld Expo to see all the new goodies and do a little research. MWSF (Macworld San Francisco) is a tradition for me for over a decade, starting when Ben and I drove up from Los Angeles when I was in 11th grade, when nobody had CD-ROM drives and a color scanner cost $5,000.Boy have times changed. With the uprising of the Internet, the tone of expos has gradually changed until there are pretty much two kinds of vendors: the huge corporations with exhibition palaces and small quirky companies with science-fair booths. Rachel and I both brought our cameras to the show, and I'm happy to link you to our second joint album.

While I've been working on my own spamproof comment system, the commentspammers have been steadily plunging the depths of fury's posts, adding commentspam for all kinds of awful things.

This morning, as some may noticed, they got up to speed and commentspammed all my current front-page posts. I'm not going to take the time to remove them all right now, as it would be tatamount to bucketing out the sinking ship at the expense of plugging the hole. Anyhow, apologies for the graffiti. I'm workin' on it.

Want to go to the expo, but you're not in the Bay Area or cant get off work? As is so often the case nowadays, Flickr members offer the next best thing.

Check out the Flickr slideshow of all images tagged 'macworld'. I'm going on Friday and will be sure to contribute a few pics of my own.