My laptop hard drive is dying.

This may be a world first: My laptop hard drive is dying almost immediately after a full backup.

Most hard drives die immediately before their first full backup.

I've noticed that the quality of hard drives as measured by how long they last has been steadily going down. Having a hard drive last two years is almost a notable event now. But I think they've been getting better about somewhat gracefully failing; while I almost never see a drive last more than a year and a half, it's also been a long time since I heard anybody say their hard drive just died with no warning at all. (I'm sure it happens but it seems to happen less often.)

Google is quickly coming to realize that they're not in the services business at all. All of their various services -- news, maps, mail etc -- are just thinly veiled attempts to collect, store and control data. Of course, even search itself falls under this paradigm. Search is, after all, the final form of managing data. And now, with Google Base, Google has has made it very clear that they don't intend to be the world's search engine, they intend to be world's database. In this endeavor Google is unique only in their ambition. Every other "web 2.0" company operates on this same innate desire to control user's data. This is my primary concern about the entire Web 2.0 phenomenom: all of these companies intend to build walled gardens around various important sets of data and then expose tiny bits of the data through strictly controlled, proprietary APIs. - Google and the Tyranny of Data

The talk has been in the air about a return to the Thin Client model, although with changing technology the "thin" has changed. A "Thin Client" used to be merely a graphical terminal that ran everything on remote server; a high-class 486, decent graphics card, and a bit of custom hardware could have managed this. A more modern conception of a thin client is something running a web browser; call it a 1GHz machine with at least 512MB of RAM, probably backing to a flash storage device with no hard drive.

It has been theorized that digital TV and downloadable video will rapidly destroy the DVD market, to the extent everyone has broadband. I don't think this is going to happen as rapidly as people thing, because even ignoring some of the other economic advantages of physical media (like the sense of ownership), the economics of the bits that make up the video are different for discs and broadcasting/downloading in some important ways, resulting in a quality advantage for the discs.

Wired reviews MP3 tag editors for Windows, Linux, and the Mac.

The best MP3 tag editor I've found is amarok, which is in most ways the best MP3 player I've found. It's the only editor I've used on Linux where you can do something like take an entire album by "-gershwin-" and change it to "Gershwin", so it fits in with your other Gershwin album correctly.

The only use case not covered is to take a bunch of MP3s and guess the tag attributes from the filenames. You can do it one at a time, but there's no "perform on all selected MP3" option for that functionality.

There's a story, almost certainly apocryphal, of some famous writer having a dream where he wrote a poem, and everyone lauded it for its subtle insight and wisdom. He woke from the dream, and quickly, before the dream faded, grabbed pencil and paper and wrote it down. Then, satisfied that he'd preserved that gem, he went back to sleep.

Next morning he looked at it, and found this:

Hogamus, Higamus,
Men are polygamous.
Higamus, Hogamus,
Women monogamous.

CNN's got a video about people's confusion with Obama vs. Osama, but it doesn't seem possible to link to it. This will at least take you to a page with the "Obama, not Osama" video link for a bit. (Oddly, searching for "Obama, not Osama" does not return that video as one of the results.)

Being named "Barack Hussein Obama" is at least a bit of a problem, and the instinctive politician reaction is to try to shy away from it, but I'd suggest the best thing to do is the exact opposite. Make sure every time from now on that Barack Obama is mentioned that Hussein is front and center. By the time the nominations and the election roll around, that'll just be his name; all the jokes, stories, and problems will be a thing of the past. If he shys away from it, the issue will always be something that can be slyly brought up. If there's any time to do that, it's now, when it basically can't hurt him to speak of; what are they going to do, organize a recall election based on the premise that the voters were unaware of their chosen candidate's name?

Our household has taken on a new resident: A genius cricket.

While crickets are very good at naturally taking up positions that are hard for humans to reach, this cricket has located quite possibly the best possible position in the entire household: Deep inside our furnace, as near as I can tell. I haven't made visual contact yet so I'm not sure, but he's definitely in the furnace room.

Crickets are known for their chirp (which only male crickets can do; male wings have ridges or "teeth" that act like a "comb and file" instrument).... Crickets chirp at different rates depending both on their species and the temperature of their environment. Most species chirp at higher rates the higher the temperature is (approx. 60 chirps a minute at 13ºC in one common species; each species has its own rate). - Crickets

Honey, this one's for you:

Not a morning person? Take solace — new research suggests that "night owls" are more likely to be creative thinkers.

Scientists can't yet fully explain why evening types appear to be more creative, but they suggest it could be an adaptation to living outside of the norm....

Scientists scored each [group of Morning, Intermediate, and Evening people as they] completed activit[ies based] on originality, elaboration, fluidity and flexibility factors. Evening types aced each test based on these criteria, while morning and intermediate type people struggled to get scores over 50. - Night Owls Are More Creative, Says Study

I've been watching my weblogs (by which I mean the actual web server logs) scroll by to make sure everything's kosher and fixing up little things here and there.

It's an interesting view of your website; I'm not sure I've ever really watched a weblog for hours at a time before. One interesting point: While I'm sure my experience isn't necessarily representative, the online feed readers have really taken off. I suppose if even I've converted to Google's reader, and I tend to prefer local clients to web clients, that means something. (The only aggregator that I've been happy with on Linux is also a complete, absolute dog. 20 feeds shouldn't result in multi-second bouts of 100% CPU usage several times an hour; it was noticably degrading general performance. Parsing RSS isn't that hard.) I'd estimate two thirds of my subscribers are on online clients, and that's just the ones that I can tell; some online readers like the Earthlink's don't give reader statistics in the User-Agent.

An "unbeatable" Clinton-Obama ticket?

You know, just on general principles I don't really want our President sequence to go "Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton".

And even more strongly on the same principles, I don't want to see "Bush, (Clinton,) Bush, Bush", so Jeb, unless you are a political genious please don't run.

300 million people in this country and only one family and one marriage is Presidential material?

If we're really lucky, 2008 will be Clinton vs. Bush. Won't that be fun.