So I have to decide by the end of the day today whether or not I'm going to go skydiving on Saturday. There's no question that I want to, but there's fear involved, and having stood on the platform of a 250 foot crane and faced the prospect of intentionally stepping off, I can't imagine that jumping out at 14,000 feet would be any easier.

I want to feel the wind rush by me at 120mph. I want to glide on a parachute with nothing to hear but my heartbeat. The problem is I don't know how much I'll enjoy the fall, knowing that I won't feel safe until the chute opens. Jumping out of the plane would be hard, but 60 seconds of freefall? Terrifying.

I have 8 hours to convince myself that it's terrifying in the good way.

Wow. Not only have I made 14 posts in the last 8 days (a bit more than usual) but for the first time, every post has comments. Err, well, it'll be 15, and they all will, as soon as someone comments on this one.

Everyone get their income taxes filed? (Err, that is, if you're in the US and made any money)

So I spent the evening (and, err, morning) compiling a CD.

The MetaFilter Cd Swap project is a list of a few hundred MetaFilter readers who are making custom mix CDs and sending copies to the five randomly-selected people from the list that the MeFiBot spits out at them.

I got my first CD yesterday, and it was such a kick that I got into gear to make mine. Here's the Album cover I made for mine, with the track listings sorted into the album's three distinct flavors.

Anyhow, I'd like to share with all of you, and so I'm opening up my meager home bandwidth to make a shoutcast streaming MP3 server playing the CD on infinite loop.

My server's playing at a paltry 40Kbits (128Kbits is CD quality). At that rate my bandwidth will support three simultaneous listeners. Heck, better three than none. have at it! Click here to listen to the CD in streaming mp3 and be sure to comment to tell me if it's working for you or not!

Oh god this stuff is great. Last week I commented about the greatness of smalltime video on the web, and even posted a couple quicktimes of my own, but the folks at Ingredient X have got the art down to a science. Everything I've seen there so far is great, but the one that's stolen my heart for the evening is "You Buy Stuff."

Anyone else have a favorite?

Just as I'd hoped, the video age is starting to hit its blogger stride.

Witness:

Derek's effigic threat to Ben Brown.

Be amazed amused by:

Ben Brown's retort.

God, but weekends with video cameras are great.

Jonah Goldberg of the National Review Online wrote what, in my opinion, is a very clear statement isolating the moral ambiguity that's been bothering me lately. Without saying whether our military actions are good or evil, right or wrong, it does a great job of pointing out exactly how an ambiguously defined war can be worse than no war at all.

(thanks MeFi)

When you're replying to an email, and your email client handily underlines the misspelled words, and you notice misspellings in the message you're replying to, do you correct them?

Is it better to pretend you didn't see them, or just not care, or is it better to fix them, to save the person the embarassment of reading over their own quoted words and seeing their mistakes?

Is there a difference between personal notes and professional correspondence? Does it matter whether it was that the writer didn't know the right spelling, or just totally messed it up via typo?

(I'm not spellchecking this post, just to help the conversation along, btw)

Yahoo announced their quarterly earnings yesterday afternoon.

In the days leading up, analysts estimated that Yahoo's earnings would exceed their expectations (go figure out the paradoxical logic on that one), and sure enough, they did.

What's more, Yahoo upped its estimate of next quarter's earnings.

So why did a major analyst downgrade the stock this morning, sparking a 15% tumble?

To be more specific, why did they do it this morning? The reasons they gave were truer yesterday than they are today, and making any upgrade or downgrade immediately after an earnings release sets the tone for telling investors what they should think of that release. There goes a hard quarter's work...

Another example of sensationalism:

In no fewer than three articles I read about Yahoo today, they had some version of the graph on the right in the article.

That graph shows yahoo stock over the last five years, and is only shown because it looks pretty 'ooh! look at that!'

On the other hand, a graph of the last 12 months tells a different story, of a stock that dropped 50% in value and has fought its way back up.

Now take a look at the graph for the last five days of Yahoo trading. This is the one that fits the story, talking about the earnings release and subsequent dive.

This is a particularly good example of how looking at the same stock at three different levels of granularity gives three completely different stories to support whatever point you'd like to make.