Office hours Friday 10/2

On Friday Oct 2, I will not be able to have office hours at the usual time, as I have a meeting.

I will hold alternative office hours on that day from 1:30-2:30pm.

Explaining the mystery of Craigslist

Yes, it's ugly, annoying, and mysterious. Refreshing, disturbing, energizing. So of course, I have to love it. Wired delves in:

"Besides offering nearly all of its features for free, it scorns advertising, refuses investment, ignores design, and does not innovate. Ordinarily, a company that showed such complete disdain for the normal rules of business would be vulnerable to competition, but craigslist has no serious rivals. The glory of the site is its size and its price. But seen from another angle, craigslist is one of the strangest monopolies in history, where customers are locked in by fees set at zero and where the ambiance of neglect is not a way to extract more profit but the expression of a worldview."

data gathering on the self

A few links regarding the collection of personal data on yourself: video, audio, facts

--Exercise Guy, 1 year
--Noah, picture every day for a year
--Same thing, female, 3 years
--Guy who publishes an annual report of himself
--The quantified self (blog)
--Track Your Happiness (service)

Most of the mainstream media have focused on health-related data gathering, i.e. Nike Plus or just running web sites like Map My Run, Daily Burn, etc. Wired July 2009 has a series on this topic. The Cover Story is "Living by Numbers".

language with the happiest users

This does not surprise me in the least! Perl rocks.

The programming language with the happiest users