They have this "Compare People" application on Facebook that I added just for kicks. It's an incredibly spam-laden, devious application, but it turns out there's a lot of people using it. Here's a summary of my attributes, as voted upon by my "friends":

So they think I'm cool, have a "better body" (ahem), am smart, funny and loyal. But they'd rather get handcuffed to someone else, probably someone who is "kinder", but can "drink more" and is more "entertaining".

I guess my takeaway from this is : All my friends are drunken shallow psychopaths. But I still love you all, you crazy people.

I hooked up my Facebook status feed to my Twitter page that should keep most “followers” happy with minimal work on my part. To inaugurate, I posted a twitterpoem of less than 140 characters, which I grandly entitle “Tales of the Database Scientist”:

i flirt with hordes of entities,
runtimes and complexities.
relations are for databases;
i negotiate in times and spaces.

Facebooker Dave Morin recollects a story so so very familiar to me (sorry Mom! :P ), but adds an interesting observation:

My parents would inevitably yell down to my room, “time for dinner!” To which I would respond, “ok, just a minute!” I would then continue doing whatever I was doing on the computer until my parents would inevitably get pretty mad that I hadn’t come to eat dinner yet. I think most of my generation probably knows exactly what I’m talking about

This was, and probably still is, pretty annoying for parents worldwide.

Last night I met up with some new friends in Geneva, and we were having a conversation about life, family, and technology. At one point we started talking about the iPhone and what a great new innovation it is. One of the guys mentioned that the best new thing about the iPhone is how it ha changed his kids behavior around dinnertime.

Now, when he says “time for dinner!”, his kids come running, iPhone in hand, right to the dinner table.

Now, the iPhone is an incredible new platform that we are all excited about for various reasons. But getting more kids to the dinner table again? That sounds like social progress to me.

XML co-inventor Tim Bray talks about over-designing systems:

Programmers experience soaring joy when they can rip through code deleting functions and declarations, screens-full into the bit bucket, with the steady drumbeat of tests-fail-then-pass.

So maybe I didn’t build one to throw away, but I built one that needed major amputations out of the box.

He concludes with a quote from Fred Brook’s The Mythical Man Month, one that I strongly believe in:

“Where a new system concept or new technology is used, one has to build a system to throw away, for even the best planning is not so omniscient as to get it right the first time. Hence plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.”

David O’Reilly recently shot to fame in the tech-geek land thanks to a seemingly authentic preview of his iPhone app, iHologram. A few hours and hundreds of thousands of page impressions later, it turns out the app is only a concept video and that David’s only a filmmaker, not the second coming of Obi-wan. He is, however, a rather talented film maker; lending his animation talents to productions such as Son of Rambow and The HitchHiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. His Selected Clips video is rather surreal, and worth the two minutes and twelve seconds of viewing time:

A good depiction of the change in attitude when you become an nth year PhD student.

Almost flat, this land below
I deliberate, if I should go
spiralling down with insanity
as if to spar with gravity.

The rocks on the cliff I stand upon
crumble, roll and fall
I wonder if this was their fate
or just a symptom of it all:

the mediocrity, a lack of fire,
inexplicable thirst, a flaming desire.
the wanton, sated, ignorance,
a rotting state of impotence.

Get out of my way, crumbled stone!
I have lands left to explore
the more you try to impede
i will wisen even more

the more you try to bring me down
to the levels you lie upon,
the more you try to sabotage,
the more desire I will spawn

To leave you behind, in the dust
I am meant for greater things
Horizon surge, I beckon you
I have dreamed one day I’ll win

This world is mine, from this point on
to as far as can be seen
Now is the time, this is my moment:
My turn to reign supreme.

Rapper AC spins off Yael Naem’s “New Soul” into a nice little rap video peppered with commentary about Apple ads, drugs, iRaq and Obama: