Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. — buddha

Perhaps the most useful life skill is the ability to learn life lessons via proxy. This can be through anecdotal evidence, reading, or whatever. Those who can learn what to do — or more importantly, what not to do — without having to actually have the experience have a massive advantage in life.

Ok, if anyone hears me say I’m going to try a Windows device within the next year or so, you hereby have my permission to launch a full flying krah attack on me.

My 8125 was just flaky — just like they all have been. I have a friend that loves his Windows device, but he’s like controlling satellites with his and stuff, so he needs the actual computer functionality offered. But me — I just want a good phone.

The final straw for me was on Friday when I got all the way to the 9th set of numbers on a manual Office 2003 activation sequence. I was typing it in because the thing couldn’t understand me. Well, at the 9th set my Windows device stopped taking input. The numbers just stopped working. I tried frantically to use voice to enter the last set, but it didn’t work.

The automated system called it a failure and transfered me to someone in India (at which point I had to start the sequence over with him).

Anyway, when the 8800 comes out I’ll enjoy the camera on it, to be sure, but ultimately I’m just too happy with the Blackberry platform to move from it. I just wish work had a damn BES server…

For all you design/HCI geeks out there, this is a must-see. Plus it’s some good Flash.

Link: Don’t Click It

This guy is seriously sick.

VIDEO: Mullen Tearing It Up

This is a pretty cool concept; you make up an address, like $foo@mailinator.com, and you use that address to sign up for temporary accounts or services that require an email (since giving your real one is problematic).

You then go to mailinator.com and get what you needed, and the information gets scrubbed every few hours. Neat.

The Mailinator

This thing rocks; it makes you a color scheme based on colors you give it. Plus it makes decent random ones. Here’s what it came up with for me:

The photo above was taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it sailed away from Earth, more than 4 billion miles in the distance. Having completed it primary mission, Voyager at that time was on its way out of the Solar System, on a trajectory of approximately 32 degrees above the plane of the Solar System. Ground Control issued a command for the distant space craft to turn around and, looking back, take photos of each of the planets it had visited. From Voyager’s vast distance, the Earth was captured as a infinitesimal point of light (between the two white tick marks), actually smaller than a single pixel of the photo.

The Earth From Voyager I

Wow, this will take you back: Video: Get Your Adverbs Here

This makes me think of Thundar, Dungeons and Dragons, and the general feeling of looking forward to Saturday morning cartoons. Oh, and I may be strange, but I think this song is pure genius. Listen to it all the way through a couple of times and try to disagree.

Link: Math Pickup Lines

My love for you is a monotonically increasing unbounded function…