Huh… I just realized I hadn’t visted a certain set of my favorite web sites in a week or so. Turns out I had accidentally closed one of the folders in my bookmark tree. Out of sight, out of mind, I guess.

This article, Largest Machines On Earth: Particle Colliders, is interesting in its own right, but the thing that struck me as I was reading it was: what kind of amazing chain of PR goes on to get billions of dollars of funding for something so abstracted from the average person’s everyday life? I’m gonna have to ponder that one for a while, because I think there’s something deep in there…

Of course, a lot of males could be swayed by the simple argument: “It’s a HUUUGE freakin’ machine! Like a racecar track, kinda!” 🙂

I’m thankful for… perambulation.

I’m thankful for… the fact that some of the nasties humans create can have some positive effects on other living entities, too: Pollution Can Convert Airborne Iron Into Soluble Form Required For Phytoplankton Growth.

Doncha love free software? Have I asked that before?

I had a 91-page PDF document with the pages in backward order. That’s annoying. I tried to use Acrobat (Standard) to reverse the pages, but I’m too dumb to make that work. My best guess after 20 minutes of searching Adobe’s help and the web was to print to PDF with the ‘reverse pages’ turned on. That did not produce a satisfying result.

Then I popped over to Freshmeat to ask that oasis of software goodness for some help. In less time than it took to try the print experiment (it had cranked for a good 15 minutes…), I found pdftk, installed it, learned how to get it do do what I wanted (pdftk manual.pdf cat 91-1 output manual-rev.pdf), did it, got a satisfying result, and mailed the developers a thank you note.

Woot.

I’m sure this doesn’t need any more linkage, but I’m just a bit amazed sometimes at how well Google’s new features come out. Google movies

I’m thankful for… the fact that I can get directions from someone and end up at the geographical location intended…

Dasher is an interface to allow for text entry via ‘natural continuous pointing gestures’. I’ve played with it a bit and it’s kinda neat, although I don’t yet have a use for it. In any case, it points out some nice techniques for getting information through narrow channels. Grab it and play with it.

Don’t forget to attend the Iowa State HCI Forum on April 15.

Stirring: Theory and Practice is one of those books I’d assign one of my clones to read. I mean, if I had clones, you know.

But I’d settle for a good answer to the following question: does juice mix better if there’s a little air in the bottle, or not? I have a belief that it does, but I haven’t yet come up with a really convincing experiment to try…