Aw, hell. Kurt Vonnegut passed away last night as a result of injuries suffered in a fall a few weeks ago. Thanks for everything, Kurt.

The allure of golf lies in the fact that all shots cost one stroke. It doesn’t matter if you tee it up with a wood and blast it 250 yards down the fairway, or you tap in a putt from 3 inches away, it’s still one stroke on the score card. A day of brilliance for a professional golfer can fade away if they push that easy uphill three footer past the cup and lose by a single stroke. If you don’t believe me, just ask Scott Hoch.

I’m constantly reminded that programming is a lot like that. Many times the work done early in a project is a lot like hitting the ball down the fairway with a driver. You get that satisfying feeling of making progress in huge chunks, and everything feels grand. But no matter how easy it is to get close to the hole, you have to make those seemingly easy putts in order to finish, and the small bits at the end can wind up costing you just as much as the big chunks of progress did early in the project.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve spent hours working on something that turned out to be a one character fix. The difference between “and” and “or” can mean thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Sometimes I find myself filled with a lot of sympathy for golfers who are ridiculed for missing seemingly easy putts.

• Will the popularity of this lead to another one of these?
• Ed Felten, who studied the TSA No Fly List mechanism, also believes that professor Walter Murphy was not added to the list for political speech.

• Draft of a Blogger’s Code of Conduct from Tim O’Reilly.
• Negative feedback on the code of conduct from Roller creator Dave Johnson.
• Negative feedback on the code of conduct from Jason Kottke.
• Don Imus is a bigot.
• Foreign Policy lists big predictions that didn’t pan out.
• Francis Fukuyama says it was hardline elements in Iran who lost out when the Iranian government freed the captured British sailors. It’s hard for me to see the timely release of the sailors with no lives lost on either side as a bad outcome.
• The Taliban kidnaps an Italian journalist and his Afghan translator. The Italian and Afghan governments worked out a prisoner exchange with the Taliban. The Italian is freed, the Afghan is not. The Afghan government refuses to make another deal, and the translator is beheaded. Both sides blame each other.
• How does your name wind up on the Terrorist Watch List? Retired Marine colonel and Constitutional scholar Walter Murphy suspects that he’s on it due to a speech critical of the President that he gave. Wired News security correspondent Ryan Singel says no way.

Anil Dash weighs in on the debate over civility and death threats online. (Yes, bloggers are the main story here but this phenomenon cuts across online communities of all kinds.)

Tim Watkins demolishes “The Secret,” the latest pop psychology guide to life that’s going around. It’s worth knowing about, just so you can smack it around if someone brings it up at a party.

Dave Winer on Microsoft:

I would say MS jumped the shark right around the time of “write once run anywhere.”

A judge has ruled that a DVR offered by CableVision that runs on a centralized server infringes copyright whereas a set-top DVR does not. The reasoning for the decision is interesting, although, I think, incorrect.

Tony Sachs and Sal Nunziato had a good op-ed in the New York Times yesterday about how the record companies made decisions that sowed the seeds of destruction for their industry over the past ten years or so. What they leave out, though, is a look at the bigger picture. Plenty of good music is being performed, recorded, and distributed these days. It’s easier for me to find music that I might like than it has ever been. The means available to access and expand my music collection are only expanding. The music industry may be in trouble, but music itself seems to be just fine.

I’ve been somewhat interested in the pushback against critics of subprime loans. The argument is that subprime loans have made cheap debt available to a much wider swathe of society that traditional mortgage lending left out. Cheap debt was a privilege previously available to corporations and the relatively well off, and extending that privilege to a greater portion of society is a good thing. I find the argument somewhat persuasive. Put me in the category of people who argue that making mortgages available to more people is a good thing, but who also recognize that there was a lot of fraud, deception, and exploitation being perpetrated by the mortgage industry. Selling home loans to people that were certain to leave them in default as soon as runaway appreciation ended was evil. Anyway, Andrew Leonard has a blog post on this topic that’s worth a read.