How to lay people off
Guy Kawasaki tells CEOs how to fire people, he makes an interesting point, although I've never worked somewhere going through layoffs, and hopefully never will.
Goat demoted
It must be a hard life being a ceremonial goat, especially when you can be demoted for trying to "butt the drummers nether regions".
It seems to me that most people don’t save enough for retirement
This article seems to confirm that my parents generation isn't saving enough for retirement, and I think that's true of my generation as well. The problem is that it simply isn't sexy to save money in a super fund, or a 401k as they're called in the US. I think it's even worse for the average American though, because the cost of living in the places with the jobs is a lot higher, 401k saving is optional (so people don't do it as much), and you get direct control over your investments (which means people make poor choices like putting all their money in Enron or Vonage). Oh, and don't start me on the complications of earning retirement income in US dollars when I retire. I don't even want to think about that at the moment.
419 scammer conned into carving wood
Most fantastic 419 reverse scam ever. Scammer conned into carving, among other things, a wooden C64 keyboard. (Via BoingBoing).
Mental note: Don’t ride unicycle in the snow without chains
Snow chains for your unicycle, so useful it's indescribable.
Bluetooth GPS data logger
I have a bluetooth GPS now, but to log routes I need to take my Ipaq as well. This bluetooth GPS with a data logger built in looks like a pretty cool alternative to what I do now.
Build your own cables
PSP remote control cable and Canon EOS 350D (Rebel XT) remote cable release.
Two things
One, wikipedia rocks. Especially for technical topics I previously found hard to research like image encoding formats like YUV. Kudos to those who write pages there. Secondly, is it just me or is the history of television formats fascinating. For example: The adoption of SECAM in Eastern Europe has been attributed to Cold War political machinations: Western TV was popular in the East, authorities were well aware of this, and adopted SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in West Germany. This did not hinder mutual reception in black&white, because the underlying TV standard B/G remained the same in both parts of Germany. However, East Germans responded by buying PAL decoders for their SECAM sets. Eventually, the government in East Berlin stopped paying attention to so-called "Republikflucht via Fernsehen", or "defection via television". Later East German produced TV sets even included a dual standard PAL/SECAM decoder. In any case the majority of TV sets in East Germany were monochrome (black & white) until well into the 1980s.
Mental note: get an eccentric father
Then I too can get out of traffic fines.