Project OrielEmbracing Change

* I stopped reading comics the day Calvin and Hobbes stopped. I tried to start again and again, but just couldn’t there was no feature strip that I just had to read. Then Cul de Sac came along. What caught my attention is that it is endorsed by Bill Watterson the creator of Calvin and Hobbes: “I became a big fan of Richard Thompson when I saw his book, Richard’s Poor Almanac. Thompson has a sharp eye, a fun sense of language and a charmingly odd take on the world. Best of all, his drawings are wonderful—something one doesn’t often see in cartoons anymore. I’m delighted to see Cul de Sac, and I have high hopes that Thompson will bring a much-needed jolt of energy to the daily newspaper. We have a real talent here.“

* Etsy has a couple unique options for finding handmade products: Shop by color or by Geolocator.

* A nice tutorial on how to understand and take good pictures with a SLR (Single Lens Reflex) digital camera.

* Did you like Ratatouille, Cars, or The Incredibles? They were all made by Pixar and the new project, Wall-E is looking promising! They are running a promotional site “for Buy n Large, maker of the Wall-E robot. The site is full of ridiculous corporate-speak like “by visiting the Buy n Large web site you instantaneously relinquish all claims against the Buy n Large corporation and any of its vendors or strategic partners.” Check out the Nanc-E under Robotics/Robot Models for a chuckle.” [via Kottke]

* Minnesota History of the Land series. We’ve been enjoying listening to the soundtrack by Peter Ostroushko.

* Multitasking is the devil: See Human Task Switches Considered Harmful where Joel Spolsky makes an excellent point about context switching costs. See also Cogitus Interruptus: The Case for Focus or 43 folders Podcast: The Myth of Multi-tasking

Quote: “Time is that quality of nature that keeps events from happening all at once. Lately it doesn’t seem to be working.” – Anonymous

Quote: “The constant, unproductive preoccupation with all the things we have to do is the single largest consumer of time and energy.” – Kerry Gleeson

“It was more than half a century ago, on Christmas Eve in 1955, that a Sears Roebuck & Co. store in Colorado Springs advertised a special hotline number for kids to call Santa. What the company didn’t know at the time was that they had inadvertently misprinted the telephone number. Instead of Santa’s workshop, the phone number put kids through to the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace defense of the U. S. and Canada.” [via Official Google Blog: Tracking Santa then and now]