Nothing brings in the new year better than getting up early and heading up to Columbus Circle to ride on a 1940's subway train...

...with a bunch of other train geeks...

...and a marching band...

...out to Coney Island...

...with some dancers...

...and a few grown men in diapers...

...to see the crazy Polar Bears...

...who swim in the cold ocean...

...on New Year's Day...

ZeFrank's New Years Message.

POTD

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Jonathan Deacour, switcher. Cool.

This is my favorite anecdote:

[...]I also wonder if I don’t expect too much. When I bought a Dell desktop machine in 1998, I explained what I wanted to do with Windows to the consultant who was installing a DAT drive:

• Use all the Microsoft Office applications.
• Scan photographs and edit them in Photoshop.
• Run Personal Web Server to do some dynamic web development.
• Do my accounting with QuickBooks Pro.
• Run Microsoft’s Japanese IME so I could read and write Japanese.
• Burn CDs.
• Install a Firewire card and capture footage from my Sony digital handycam.

“You’d probably be better off splitting those tasks between two separate Windows machines,” he told me.

Funny -- I've been thinking lately about how much I'm liking the last few versions of MacOS X. Reasonably fast, consistent, and no crashes. My laptop is routinely running for weeks at a time without reboots. All the while I'm switching between three different WiFi networks, attaching and removing digital cameras, connecting to phones and PalmPilots via Bluetooth, posting to 'blogs, etc...

A detailed (long) report by the Irish Commission on Electronic Voting on the electronic voting system purchased by the Irish government.

Particularly interesting: part 4, Testing of the System; and part 5, Accuracy and Secrecy of the System

The WordPress project has released bbPress, a simple, web-based discussion forum application. They are using the WordPress support site as a bbPress showcase. Pretty cool. I'm tempted to intstall WordPress and bbPress for a test drive.

Gartner to acquire META for $162 million. Now you have one fewer company from which to purchase wild-assed guesses.

RIP: Jerry Orbach

POTD

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PalmOne: How to HotSync over Bluetooth.

RIP: Susan Sontag

Can this be for real? An unfortunate name, indeed.

POTD

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Speeding up Firefox.

This actually seems to have an effect.