Once upon a time there lived a comedian named Chris Bliss. Chris liked to tell jokes, and he also liked to juggle. One day he juggled to the tune of a Beatles song, and audiences were thrilled. The act was taped and posted on the web, and soon e-mail started flying through cyberspace. "You gotta see this act, it's amazing!" they exclaimed.

But not all were amused. The juggler enthusiasts were incensed. "Juggling three balls like that is easy!" they cried. "And his movements, they are not graceful!" One of them was particularly sick of the praise that Chris's video got, so he made his own. It was set to the same music, but this time, Jason Garfield used five balls, not three.

True, Jason's act was more skillful technically and it was arguably more graceful. But Chris's "lack of grace" has a point — the juggling was set to rock music, so Chris's juggling mimics the jerky, abrupt movements of a rock musician. It's the whole package that's impressive, not just the juggling.

And so the moral of the story is… uh… just go watch the videos…

By the way, in case anyone is interested, my del.icio.us bookmarks are at del.icio.us/jlin45d. They are even more random than this blog.
 

The management of a technology company realized they didn't and couldn't know all the great ideas within the company. So they set up a marketplace, where ideas become stocks and employees can buy and sell shares in them. The more valuable the idea, the more valuable the stock.

• Here's an Idea: Let Everyone Have Ideas • New York Times • March 26, 2006

Courtesy of San Francisco magazine and Check, Please:

• Old Mandarin Islamic Restaurant in the Sunset district of San Francisco (Muslim Chinese)
• Naomi Sushi in Menlo Park
• Woodward's Garden in San Francisco (Californian/French), named after the amusement park which used to be on the same site
• Los Cubanos in San Jose (Cuban)

Here are the latest in web fun, courtesy of Clemens and Jason:

• The amazing powers of thermite, especially when it meets a car
• Lighting a barbecue grill… with liquid oxygen (a classic)
• What if the Transformers landed on Earth during the Industrial Revolution?
• The real life Simpsons introduction, commissioned by Sky TV in the UK

Another sign of technological change: grainy amateur viral videos posted on the web, and then broadcast on TV for your viewing pleasure.

I consider myself pretty open-minded when it comes to food. But this makes even my stomach turn. The Gateway Grizzlies minor league baseball team have teamed up with Krispy Kreme Doughnuts create “Baseball’s Best Burger“: a bacon cheeseburger with a Krispy Kreme glazed doughnut for the bun. Yeah.

(via Ned Batchelder via Planet Python)

Google and iFilm are hosting a video that answers: “How would Microsoft package the iPod?” It is absolutely hilarious, because it’s true. Who would make such a scathing video? Microsoft.

I just came back from two intriguing talks from this month’s BayCHI meeting. The first talk was about Chandler, the open source PIM that seems to have been under development forever. Mimi Yin talked about Chandler’s design philosophy and how it’s different from typical e-mail/calendar programs (her slides are online). For example:

• There is a universal inbox, called the Dashboard, that can hold anything: e-mail, calendar, documents, etc. These go into one of three categories: Now, Later, and Done. Stuff moved from Now to Later can be “tickled” so that it moves into Now at a specified time. The idea is that things go back and forth between Now and Later, picking up more information about how they get done, until they are actually Done.
• Stuff can go anywhere. An e-mail message can go directly into the calendar or a to-do list, and it also stays in your Dashboard.
• Tags are used for bottom-up organizing (so that you can find it later), while categories are used for top-down organizing (putting stuff in collections). They have somewhat different affordances, but tags can easily become categories and vice-versa.

This all sounds good, but I asked how much of this was driven by user observations. Mimi said the biggest source came from looking at people’s e-mail folders to try to figure out what their organizational schemes were. So I’m still not sure how much of Chandler’s design is driven by what people actually do versus the Chandler team guessing. I hope it’s more the former.

Chandler is particularly interesting to me because it’s trying to address many of the same issues as the IBM research project I’m in, Unified Activity Management.

The second half was an absolutely hilarious talk by Merlin Mann about modern life in general and dealing with the deluge of information. In fact, he manages a whole web site about this problem called 43 Folders. One organizational framework that he discussed in particular is called Getting Things Done (which Mimi also touched on in her talk). Instead of rehashing what Merlin said, take a look at his intro. Suffice to say that geeks seem to have gravitated to it, so I’ll have to take a look.

“For those of you keeping score at home, I just want to make something very clear: Martin Scorsese, zero Oscars; Three 6 Mafia, one.” — Jon Stewart

Three 6 Mafia Steals Oscar Song Award • Washington Post
Still-Stunned Three 6 Mafia Say Jamie Foxx Gave Them ‘Pimp’ Confidence • MTV