Anyone use google reader regularly? I’m interested in trying out the new feed sharing stuff.

It took me a moment to get this Onion article: New Speaker Of The House Caught Wearing Women’s Clothing

This video shows a guy who flies on a helicopter and fixes high-voltage power lines:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nX3SxRrqWA

The end quote is priceless:
“There’s only three things I’ve ever been afraid of: electricity, heights, and women. And I’m married, too.”

It’s a long read, but lots of gems in this year’s edition of The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. My favorites are the ones from UK tabloids where they retract entire stories. Example:

An article about Lord Lambton (”Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire”, News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton’s villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.

Part two of Joel Spolsky’s talk at Yale was the most interesting, I think. It discussed the differences between in-house programming and software development, and seemed dead-on from what I’ve seen in my limited time in both camps.

This paragraph struck me as particularly interesting, especially in light of a few conversations I’ve had with people recently:

The assumption there was that managers exist to tell people what to do. This is quite upside-down from the way management worked in typical west-coast high tech companies. What I was used to from the west coast was an attitude that management is just an annoying, mundane chore someone has to do so that the smart people can get their work done. Think of an academic department at a university, where being the chairperson of the department is actually something of a burden that nobody really wants to do; they’d much rather be doing research. That’s the Silicon Valley style of management.