Very annoyingly, my mobile phone number has changed — I used to have two phone numbers that worked, now one of them no longer does. Check my “About” page for the right one.

Case in point:

1978:

2003:

Nobody else has a voice like that.

Update: Another one, from 1979:

Now I need to get back to work.

Geoff Arnold:

759 pages in six hours.

It took 12 (user hours), spread over 60 (elapsed hours) for me — even though my UK version only has 607 pages ;-)

From the great Presentation Zen:

[A]s you examine your work from previous talks remember this rule of thumb: if your presentation visuals taken in the aggregate (e.g., your “PowerPoint deck”) can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?

I’m more and more convinced that presentations should not have slides with more than maybe a dozen words on them, and preferably less — obviously they won’t be very useful for someone taking a look at them afterwards, but that’s not what they’re for.

Tim Bray writes about Douglas Hofstadter’s new book, I Am A Strange Loop. I can’t comment on the review itself, since I’ve just ordered and not yet read the book, but Tim also writes:

Having said all that, I’m pretty sure that Hofstadter’s finest work, and the one most likely to have intellectual currency a few centuries from now, is Le Ton beau de Marot, which is at once stimulating, entertaining, erudite, beautiful, and tragic.

I couldn’t agree more — Le Ton Beau de Marot is, by far, the best (non-fiction) book I’ve ever read.

Ich habe diese Petition “unterzeichnet”; die Stimme der Freien Welt hat mehr Infos.

Sehr interessant dazu der Bericht des CCC von der OB-Wahl in Cottbus (Hervorhebung von mir):

Fast alle befragten Cottbusser bringen den Wahlcomputern und den handelnden Personen grenzenloses Vertrauen entgegen, und obwohl etwa jeder Dritte von der Manipulationsanfälligkeit der Geräte aus der Presse gehört hatte, schloss auch diese Gruppe von informierten Wählern jede Manipulation kategorisch aus, ohne dies sachlich begründen zu können. Die zur Entdeckung einer etwaigen Manipulation erforderliche kritische Distanz gegenüber dem Wahlsystem war nur höchst selten anzutreffen. Die wenigen Wähler, die sich über den Einsatz von Wahlcomputern empört zeigten, waren von Beruf ausnahmslos Informatiker.

I’ll be attending RailsConf Europe from September 14-15 — a conference I’m really looking forward to. Let me know if you’d like to meet there …

I’ve just upgraded our MovableType installation to version 3.3 and will now fool around with the layout until further notice. I only promise to keep the Atom feed working - no guarantees for anything else. In case you’re using the RSS 2.0 or RSS 1.0 (RDF) feed, I suggest you switch …

Update: I’ve restored all of the templates to their MT default, even the style sheet - which is why everything looks nice, but highly generic (like any other MT or TypePad blog). I’ll explore MT 3.3’s features, especially around tagging, and then re-introduce the original modifications bit by bit. Please do let me know if anything is broken.

Scott Adams:

Speaking of social security numbers, I think the government should send spam to all citizens. If someone like Barney tries to buy a miracle pill, the government erases his social security number from their records so he can’t vote. It would solve a lot of problems.

+1 :-)

This sounds like good advice … I’m guilty of checking my email and newsreader way too often, maybe I’ll try this out. [via John Gruber]