I'm actually making progress on my todo list!  Yay.  And had a few productive conversations, and made two count 'em two useful decisions.  And I took the world's slowest and coldest ride today; it was 40^o; I'm still frozen, three hours later.  I think I'll take the rest of the day off.  But first, this:

Of all the things which are crappy in Windows Explorer - and there are many - the crappiest is the way it manages image thumbnails.  The whole feature is tectonically slow, buggy, and hard to use.  The filmstrip is a joke; it could be useful, but it is just way too slow and buggy.  Really I cannot see how they whole thing ever shipped.  Whenever I try to use thumbnails in Explorer I toy with the idea of writing an app from scratch to replace it.  So far I haven't done so, but I got awfully close last night...

TheScientist features Darwin vs. his Dad, c 1931.  In this letter Darwin summarizes his father's objections to a voyage around the world as a naturalist:

1. disreputable to my character as a clergyman hereafter
2. a wild scheme
3. that they must have offered to many others the place of naturalist
4. and from it not being accepted there must be some serious objection to the vessel or expedition
5. that I should never settle down to a steady life hereafter
6. that my accommodations would be most uncomfortable
7. that you should consider it as again changing my profession
8. that it would be a useless undertaking

How classic.  The letter changed his father's mind, Darwin's life, and perhaps the course of the world.

The Onion: Sony releases new stupid piece of shit that doesn't fucking work.  Hilarious :)

This looks pretty cool: LovelyCharts.  Perhaps a great new way to make network diagrams.  I use Visio now, and it isn't easy enough.  I notice you can save them off as a PNG, too.  Very cool.

Spam of the day: Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall - Confucius.