Jon Carroll has a poetic column today about how the Nature Conservancy hacks the land development system.

A survey revealed that a lot of doctors are willing to lie to HMOs to get them to authorize tests and procedures that they feel their patients need. I wish someone would publish a list of those doctors so that I could switch to one of them.

Hey, they made AltaVista look even more like all of the other search engines. Enemies of distinctiveness rejoice!

The Wall Street Journal has an article about email killing conversation. If the author thinks email is bad, wait until she tries out instant messaging.

Here’s a story in the local paper about the project I worked on for the better part of 1999. Unfortunately, I wasn’t interviewed.

Microsoft’s showed a profit of 2.19 billion dollars on 5.38 billion dollars in revenue for the last quarters. That’s a 41% profit margin for the monopoly, if you’re counting.

The Industry Standard is running a long feature article about univirsities pimping their names by offering courses through “online universities.” One hopes that a Duke MBA obtained through an online course doesn’t count the same as one obtained by actually attending classes and interacting with other students. Actually, what really bothers me about all this is the idea of higher education falling into the hands of for-profit companies. The quickest route to profit is attracting more students, and handing out more degrees. It’s a slippery slope toward turning university degrees (perhaps even from prestigious universities) into worthless pieces of paper.

I just read in NTK that version 1.0 of Mutt (the ultimate non-graphical email client) was released.

Do you find the Weather Channel a little boring? Check out the Operational Significant Event Imagery Web site from the NOAA. All disasters, all the time. They have an image of the day page, too.

People who have to deal with HTML generated by brain damaged Microsoft applications will appreciate the demoroniser, a Perl script for cleaning up the mess these applications leave behind.