How do web pages get amazingly popular? They produce silly pop-psychology survey tests that give an amusing result, and provide HTML code that includes a link to the survey site so you can share your results with everyone who comes to your web site.

Like this:

If I were a work of art, I would be M. C. Escher's Lizards. I am a bizarre juxtaposition of the real and the unreal. Based in the realm of mathematics, my two-dimensional appearance belies a complex and free-willed behaviour which both delights and confuses people. Which work of art would you be? The Art Test

Or that's the theory, anyway. Too bad it doesn't really work.

Interesting article at WashTech about the newest sales strategy of everyone's favorite contrarian computer maker: Apple's Time to Grow:

[Apple] moved ahead with plans to spend $85 million opening its first 25 stores this year after it had become clear the computer sector was beginning to sag...

Interesting postscript to my WOMAD writings. Tony Levin wrote about the show too and took photos from the stage! Unfortunately I was too far over on the edge of the stage to make it into any of them...

Long time no blog. It is, as I've mentioned recently, the end of the semester in about two weeks. Tomorrow I'm doing a presentation on the future of Web Services and how it will affect the Internet and the business of software. The website will be available by the 12th; I'll link it when it comes on line. I don't have anything to do directly with building this website; for once I'm happy just to be a content provider.

I know where I want to spend all my time during IAP. Unfortunately, I don't have any money to spend there. (Although I didn't realize that there was a city called "CambridgeSide" in Massachusetts.)

It's good to know that the war against terrorism is protecting us from protected speech:

"Do you have a warrant?" Brown asked. They did not. "Then you're not coming in my apartment," she said. And indeed, they stayed outside her doorway. But they stayed a while--40 minutes, Brown estimates--and gave her a taste of how dissenters can come under scrutiny in wartime.

And all because of a poster on her wall.

Or as the great Walt Kelly put it, much more eloquently:

It's hard to get into the holiday spirit when it's 55° outside, somehow. What's that? Didn't you grow up in Newport News, Virginia, where it snowed maybe three holidays in the eighteen years you were there? Well, yes, alter ego italics, I did. But this is frickin' Massachusetts. Last year it was already below freezing by Thanksgiving.

It's hard to get into the holiday mood without the proper incentive. So, without further ado:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., and Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley
Swaller dollar cauliflower Alleygaroo!
Don't we know archaic barrel
Lullaby Lilla Boy, Louisville Lou
Trolley Molly don't love Harold,
Boola Boola Pensacoola hullabaloo!

Or something like that.