Links: Business card cubes, more tech/less work

Ned Batchelder: How to make business card cubes
Making cubes out of business cards is easy, and will impress your friends!

Wired News: Work More, Do Less With Tech
"Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research."

Links: Clipmarks, screensaver, quantum computing, & personality tests

Clipmarks | What Is Clipmarks?
"Manage the stuff you find on the web
With the Clipmarks toolbar you can clip, tag and save snippets of content from the web, without having to bookmark whole pages. Then sign in to clipmarks.com from any computer to organize your collection."
(the clips stay on the clipmarks server, so you don't have to store them locally. a busy ui, potentially useful)

Download Free Screensaver - Holding Pattern
"Holding Pattern turns your idle computer screen into an airplane window, complete with a moving aerial view. Each time the screensaver plays a unique sequence."

New Scientist: Quantum computer works best switched off - News

Interactive Johari Window - Mapping Personality Visibility
"The Johari Window was invented by Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham in the 1950s as a model for mapping personality awareness. By describing yourself from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of overlap and difference can be built up.

and on the flip side...

The Nohari Window - Personality Flaw Map
"The Nohari Window is a challenging inversion of the Johari Window, using antonyms of the original words. By describing your failings from a fixed list of adjectives, then asking your friends and colleagues to describe you from the same list, a grid of perceived and unrecognised weaknesses can be explored."

Wikipedia:Unusual articles

This page has been making the rounds of the blogosphere. I like the made-up Simpsons words and many of the other links.

But one of my favorite entries not listed here is on Florence Foster Jenkins, which features a sound sample of the woman "who became famous for her complete lack of singing ability." If you have the Rhapsody music service, you can hear the entire album of this very painful warbling. (Like rain slurping down a rusty gutter, as I remembering reading somewhere.)

But one of the fun things about traversing Wikipedia and the web is finding that Jenkins' page links to a bigger page on Outsider Music, which links to this fabulous collection of 365 MP3 files of "outsider music."

Best Desktop Pictures Ever

In my humble opinion, of course. These are from Zeldman's old site, courtesy the Wayback Machine.

His new ones are great, too, and are certainly more uniform in size and polished in quality. But that demonic clown and the electric blue trapeze artists just send me.

Addendum
The Beauteous Liz reminded me of another set of desktop pictures that appeals to my sensibilities: the Daze of Our Lives archives of Victorian etchings wallpaper. Note that there are archives for different years and there are varied sizes. My personal favorites are the Fornasetti Girl (2002), the Snowy Trees (2002), the Cowboy Band (2001), and Hand Kisser (2001),

The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters

Perhaps a case of the web answering a question that no one had asked, still, that's a lot of work and one sits on one's ass, impressed to the gills.

My personal goddess is Promethea.

Skinhead Hamlet

Skinhead Hamlet: Shakespeare's play translated into modern English

Our hope was to achieve something like the effect of the New English Bible -- Eds

What do you know now?

This is a page I ran across years ago when Mistress Krista's site was in an earlier stage of development. At the time, I was into lifting weights and trying to find the "right" way to do it. Krista's advice is pragmatic, funny, and no nonsense; she's a great teacher.

Here's how she describes the page of pithy quotes and hard-won experience:

"Recently, the folks on misc.fitness.weights were asked the following question: What do you know now that you wished you'd known five or ten years ago? Here are their responses and ruminations about training and life in general."

I always hated the term "knowledgebase." Semantically, it meant nothing to me. When you have a "wisdombase," I'd say, then come and talk to me. Until then, pages like this (much like The Commonplace Book of earlier centuries) will be the places that capture our personal wisdom and experience for others both to benefit from and laugh at.

Betty Jo's Valentines

Susie Bright has a lovely blog entry on finding a scrapbook of valentines her mother, Betty Jo, received as a child in the late 1920s-early 1930s. It's a poignant story.

Susie has slaved over a hot scanner to create a gallery of these wonderful paper ephemera that hail from a slower, different time, where even the paper goods had quality and charm and sparkle.

Trackback

Great parody of pharmaceutical advertising

MERD | Panexa (Acidachrome Promanganate)

via