Seen on /. and definitely in the realm of "more than I need to know", but real cool nonetheless. Check out Google Zeitgeist - a page full of stats and charts about what people are searching for on google.

My current subway reading is the current installment of Warren Buffett's annual chairman's letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders (no, I'm not a shareholder). On top of a little bit of discussion of how Berkshire's businesses did he adds a lot of general investment and management philosophy. Here's a nice quote from this year's report:

The line separating investment and speculation, which is never bright and clear, becomes blurred still further when most market participants have recently enjoyed triumphs. Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. They know that overstaying the festivities - that is, continuing to speculate in companies that have gigantic valuations relative to the cash they are likely to generate in the future - will eventually bring on pumpkins and mice. But they nevertheless hate to miss a single minute of what is one helluva party. Therefore, the giddy participants all plan to leave just seconds before midnight. There’s a problem, though: They are dancing in a room in which the clocks have no hands.

Away.com sends out nice travel-related photos on a daily basis (well, almost daily, even though they call it "Your Daily Escape"). Today's image is quite nice. But since Marney was born, I've stopped using photos of anything or anyone else for my desktop background.

Slashdot posted a story about a coffee pot with "optical feedback" ... "that results in a highly reproducible means to brew coffee at the same strength time and again." But slashdot's readers provide more interesting reading. I never appreciated how much coffee means to them until reading the comments on this article. My favorite comment comes from a person who insists that to get a cup of proper espresso, you should roast your own beans and then spend $200+ for your grinder and $250+ for your espresso machine.

I did a couple hours of coding yesterday while thousands of Washingtonians waded through Fourth of July festivities. As I was finishing up and preparing to send email to coworkers, our power went off. I eventually sent the message but it would've made an interesting picture -- me sitting at a battery operated laptop, plugged into an ordinary phone line (instead of using my wireless network), and, next to the computer, two glass oil lamps illuminating my notes.

Too many volume controls... The speakers have a physical dial, the OS has a master "Volume Control" panel, and most of the audio apps (RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, etc.) have a volume control. I set the volume to a nice level while listening to streaming radio, but then I visit a site with a flash movie w/o a volume control, so I need to hit either the OS master switch or the physical dial on the speakers to turn it down... then the volume level I liked for the radio is lost. Too many controls... how do you handle this?

Sunday's Washington Post travel section had an article comparing results from different map sites. Among the findings:

It was time for an easier test. Could the Big Five get us from Reagan National Airport to the White House? Surely, we thought, the Internet's biggest and best could locate the nation's most famous address. We started with MapQuest, entering "Reagan National Airport" and "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue." Up popped the response: "Unable to find 1600 Pennsylvania Ave."

Mapquest.com has since fixed this bug.

Tip for shopping for a web hosting company -- be sure that "domain.com" and "www.domain.com" return the same page. For example, I wanted to see what sort of new parent classes were offered by Sibley Hospital (where we first met Marney). Somehow, I don't think that Sibley designed sibley.org.

Dueling 404 pages... Bork posted a cool one at borklog. I also like sgi's 404 page. Be sure to hit reload a bunch of times.

Yahoo!'s "Most Emailed Content" page is a good once-a-day place to visit, if only to get a sense of the demographics of the net. The popular photos are a mix of cute animals, sports stars, real news photos, bizarreness, and, from the younger males, cleavage. The popular stories usually have something fun like this one.

Bandwidth speed tests are fun, but http://tech.msn.com/internet/speedtest.asp and http://bandwidthspeedtest.com/speedtest/ give very different results -- at my desk, I got ~900 kbps and ~1,900 kbps, respectively. Mr. Shlabotnik of NYC got ~500 kbps and ~1250 kbps, respectively, on his cable modem. Bork reports 40.2 kbps from the second site on his ISDN line in rural Pennsylvania. MSN flaked out on him when he tried the first one.

Customer: "Can you copy the Internet for me on this diskette?"
-- posted to Computer Stupidities