I fear RSI the way major league pitchers fear torn elbow ligaments. Paul Bissex has discovered a neat little application that monitors your keyboard and mouse usage and lets you know when you could use a break called AntiRSI. I’m going to give it a shot.

BetaNews reports that Yahoo and MSN are going to announce plans to provide interopability between their instant messenger networks. It remains to be seen whether this is a step toward the one true goal of joining all of the major instant messaging networks. Hopefully this is the first step in an industry-wide move toward interoperability and not just side taking for an impending war.

The window for filing for assistance from FEMA after a disaster is 60 days, which certainly doesn’t seem like enough time for the residents of New Orleans who haven’t even been back to see their homes since they evacuated initially. The Center for American Progress has launched extendthedeadline.org to help people to petition FEMA to add another 60 days to the deadline. Seems reasonable enough to me.

Could this be the reason why Netflix has done so well and Blockbuster has done so poorly?

I just read that at one time, Blockbuster could have bought out NetFlix for $50 million. They chose to do a deal with Enron to distribute video via broadband instead.

Not sure what to post about the earthquake in south Asia over the weekend. Natural disasters are certainly fresh on my mind, as I just received pictures of fallen trees laying on top of the house where I grew up. As horrible as Katrina and Rita were, these earthquakes were worse. The papers are reporting that in many place, no aid has arrived. Hopefully Americans (and the American government) will be generous in helping Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan cope with the aftermath. Everyone should have their own favorite aid organization by now, and I urge you to give.

This tragedy also highlights the need to give money to these organizations to use where it’s most needed rather than to respond to a particular disaster. Since Katrina, we’ve seen Hurricane Rita, Hurricane Stan, and now the earthquake in Kashmir. Choose a reputable relief organization and let them decide what to do with your money.

The Business 2.0 weblog has a recap of Sergey Brin’s talk at the Web 2.0 conference. Here’s my favorite quote:

The No. 1 factor that contributed to our success over the past seven years is luck.

One of the biggest mistakes people make in assessing their success or failure is discounting the effect of luck. People prefer to think that they are masters of their own destinies but the truth is that in large parts we are victims of circumstance. Yes, you should avoid problems that you see and make the most of the opportunities that you are presented with, but luck is the main factor. Heck, I was born a white male American with responsible parents who placed a high premium on education. Furthermore, I was born during the period of time when a natural curiousity in computers and the Internet could lead to a decent career. That alone makes me luckier than a huge majority of the people in the world. People are fools not to take those sorts of things into consideration.

Jeremy Zawodny has a great post explaining why Oracle’s acquisition of Innobase Oy is a huge issue for MySQL and MySQL customers. Innobase provides the InnoDB storage engine for MySQL. It’s the one that supports foreign keys, transactions, and all that stuff that made MySQL a useful option for real applications. I use MySQL pretty much exclusively these days, but this deal is at least going to prompt me to look a bit closer at PostgreSQL. Fortunately for me, these days I’m using Hibernate and Ruby on Rails for most of my database work, so the specifics of which database I’m using are largely abstracted away.

Tristal Louis has an interesting post looking at the flow Weblogs, Inc generates in relation to how much AOL paid for them, coming up with a dollar value for each inbound link. The analysis is fascinating and does nothing to disabuse me of the notion that hard cash is being spent on vapor already … very early in what looks to be a growing bubble. Of course, the real question we have to ask is how long it took Tristan to run all of those URLs through Technorati to come up with his numbers? He has the patience of a saint.

One interesting aspect of the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is all of the reading of tea leaves going on to see where she stands with regard to various litmus tests. Right wingers want a pro-life judge who is opposed to gay rights. Liberals want someone who’s as liberal as possible given the circumstances. Since Miers has never been a judge and has a background mainly in corporate law with no experience arguing federal appellate cases, and given that nobody expects her to answer questions about her beliefs in her confirmation hearing, everybody is doing their best to look for clues from her past that tell us what she thinks. William Saletan has a good piece at Slate today explaining how her supporters are getting the word out to the right wing that she’s one of them, and that they don’t need to be afraid. Elsewhere I’m reading about her work at the American Bar Association promoting what seem like liberal ideas, donations to Al Gore, and her sponsorship of a feminist lecture series at her alma mater.

Of course, in theory what really counts is her legal philosophy and not her ideology, but nobody expects things to work out that way. In many ways it seems like this is why simply choosing the most qualified candidate makes the most sense. We can guess at the extent to which John Roberts will bring his ideology to bear on his court decisions, but his credentials to serve as a Supreme Court justice are beyond debate. The ideal nominee is an experienced, respected judge with a solid reputation for rendering fair and impartial decisions. Unfortunately that seems like way too much to hope for.