Blue Sky On Mars

Here’s an interesting interview/debate with Kent Beck of Extreme Programming fame, and Alan Cooper of Interaction Design fame. There are some fundamental differences between their strategies. I have a feeling that each strategy works well under certain circumstances.

Wallace and Grommit are going to be back this fall in a series of 12 one minute shorts available on the Net.

New here? This post gets a fair bit of search engine traffic. I just wanted to note that it was written in 2002. It’s obviously outrageously wrong. Who cares? I was just having some fun. Read on…

J.K. Rowling told reporters that she has already written the final chapter of book 7 of Harry Potter. The chapter tells of what happens to the main characters after graduation. This is doubtless going to be one of the most sought after documents on the Net, and there will be many fake variations that surface. I thought I would make a pre-emptive strike and release my version of the last chapter of Harry Potter. Feel free to post a link to your own Potter final chapters.
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The Garden of Spam lists a number of amusing spam messages that one particularly lucky guy has collected. There’s even a great bit from a guy seeking the help of time travelers or nice aliens.

Scientific American brings us an article about stupid patents. If you thought One Click was a stupid patent, how about “3D Pie Charts” and “Training with Manuals”? I hope the people who won these patents didn’t make any money off of them.

The NY Times has an editorial about “crony capitalism”… the basic premise is that there are people and companies making millions (if not billions) not on the basis of good products and marketing, but on the basis of political connections. Enron is just one (huge) example.

Slow Wave is a weekly comic drawn by Jesse Reklaw. Each comic is based on a dream, often submitted by readers. It’s a neat, visual look into the surreal world of people’s dreams.

In general, I like movies that I watch to be good. However, The Smithee Awards has given me an appreciation for just how fun a bad movie can be. Bad Movies.org serves up reviews of a bunch of bad movies, including photos, sounds and sometimes movie clips. Check out Star Crash for an example of how entertainingly bad a movie can be.

#2 on Blogdex today is a page with links to opt out of popup ads from many of the large advertisers. What a great thing.

One question that comes up more and more (particularly as media companies are consolidating and joining with tech companies): where do you draw the line between news and advertising? C|Net’s got an article about TimeCanada breaking Apple’s embargo on news of the new iMac. The part of the article that I find more interesting than the embargo breaking itself is where they talk about the Time story about the new iMac. When a mainstream publication goes all gushy over a new piece of gear that’s not that exciting, something is amiss.