Why I always check in on Rebecca Blood:

"Things I have learned:

• Someone loves me.
• It always gets better.
• Take a chance.
• Everyone can make a difference; everyone does make a difference.
• The map is not the territory.
• Embrace the unexpected; cherish the routine.
• I am blessed."

This is an ugly, smoggy, hot day in Seattle. Beautiful.

Web Sites That Shorten Long URLs: "The following free web sites can take a long URL and give you back a shorter URL without requiring registration. Any of these services will do a good job, but if you want to study them before you pick one, here is an informal survey of the competitive landscape."

Bob Hope one-liners on politics:

"Richard Carlson: 'A zombie has no will of his own. You see them sometimes walking around blindly, with dead eyes, following orders, not knowing what they do, not caring.'
Hope: 'You mean like Democrats?'
— from 'The Ghost Breakers' (1940)

Nydia Westman: 'Do you believe in reincarnation, you know, that dead people come back?'
Hope: 'You mean like Republicans?'
— from 'The Cat and the Canary' (1939) "

Poynter Online - The Design Desk: "Are you feeling uninspired? Maybe your work has become routine and doesn't hold your interest. It may be time to get back in touch with the things that first inspired you. The life you build and things you do outside the newsroom are key to being creatively charged in your job. "

Poynter Online - The Design Desk: "If you're still using the Web-safe color palette of 216 colors, here's a better solution -- More Crayons. More Crayons is a site developed by Kirk Franklin that expands the Web-safe palette to a 'Web-smart' palette of 4,096 colors. "

Newspapers should let reporters blog away, says OJR editor: "Online Journalism Review editor Michelle Nicolosi would love to see Orange County Register science reporter Gary Robbins get into blogging. 'He knows so much, he's finding things out all the time' and many items that don't get into the Register would make good blog entries. Nicolosi tells Dan Rohn: 'More papers should think about setting up reporters with blogs. Working on them should be optional -- not mandated -- and reporters should be given the freedom to have a little personality in their blog, to link offsite, to post pretty much as they see fit. If they do a bad job, cancel it.'"

“If hypertext really becomes available, especially in the fancy versions now being talked about -- where words, sounds, video, computer graphics, simulations and more are available at the touch of the screen -- well, it’s hard to imagine anyone capable of preparing the material. It will take teams of people. I predict there will be much experimentation, and much failure, before the dimensions of this new technology are fully explored and understood.” -- Donald A. Norman: The Design of Everyday Things (1988)

How to make a "Golden Section."

What's the "Golden Section"?

Mark Hollis (1998): "Before you play two notes learn how to play one note -- and don't play one note unless you've got a reason to play it." [via chim chim]