There's a job on my job board that some of my readers may find interesting. I won't quote the whole listing here, but Architect/System Architect at Time Bridge could be a fun role for someone who wants to get into the world of Web 2.0 business applications.

I'm not about to call this a trend yet, but I've seen a few meetings at work in recent months that advertised and enforced a "no laptop" rule.

It's hard to believe that this video has been on YouTube since 2006 and I hadn't seen it until yesterday, but the Internet has a lot of tubes. It's hard to watch 'em all. Anyway, I suspect that most readers are familiar with expressions built around the phrase herding cats :

If you have a slow cooker (or "crock pot") and enjoy tortilla soup, here's a good recipe to try out.

As part of my Linux backup scheme (which I need to write up someday) I've recently been swapping and upgrading/replacing some USB hard disks at home. There's a Linux box at home (a Thinkpad T43p running Ubuntu if you must know) that has a 320GB disk attached and mounted as /mnt/backup and was running fairly low on space.

When I thought about writing this last night, I didn't realize that FriendFeed was launching . Good timing. My intent was to point out two things, really. First off, usage of FriendFeed seemed to be really picking up steam in the last few weeks. In retrospect, that's probably because they were letting more and more folks into the private beta as they got closer to launching.

Occasionally the Zen Habits blog publishes something I find particularly interesting--usually because the author has figured out way to explain something that's more simple and more clear than I do. And I'm a big fan of simplicity and clarity.

It was only about 7 months ago that I wrote Google Docs vs. the Hassle of Microsoft Office and Friends in which I said: Last week I lost a ton of productivity because the hard disk on my laptop failed. There's a long story behind this. The short version is that I knew it was failing for a few weeks and, yes, I had backups. The IT folks got me a new notebook (an HP nc6400 which isn't bad, really) and I've spent quite a bit of time getting my stuff running again. Would you believe that I'm on the verge of repeating this already?

I made an off-hand remark to a friend of mine the other day about the future of my personal web hosting. Partly inspired by Sun's recent acquisition of Innotek (makers of VirtualBox ) and partly by thinking I've been doing on and off since Xen and Amazon's EC2 took off.

Last weekend we ventured into Yosemite National Park to hike the Mirror Lake Loop Trail (see hikes ). We weren't looking for anything terribly difficult, but walking through all that snow (without snow shoes) definitely made it more challenging than last time .