After wearing them most of my life but then going a number of years without them after I (oops) lost my only pair, I finally got myself some new glasses last night (from LensCrafters). So far I'm very satisfied with how they perform and how they look (though the frames I chose were unfortunately among their most expensive -- do stores make their cheap frames significantly uglier on purpose to push you to the 'good' ones, or do I just have expensive tastes? Hmph).

So, everything that was far away and less distinct than I would have liked is easier for me to see now. It's rather nice. :)

Plus, I feel more like my old self in some ways. My mental image of myself is used to having glasses on it...

Where did this guy come from, and how does he write so much interesting stuff in such a short period of time? Joel Spolsky is writing a lot of thought-provoking pieces on software development and how to manage projects and people. This is one of the best I've read so far, because it actually gives me some ideas on how to improve my own work habits:

• Where do these people get their (unoriginal) ideas? [Joel on Software]
  We all know that knowledge workers work best by ... being "in the zone", where they are fully concentrated on their work and fully tuned out of their environment. They lose track of time and produce great stuff through absolute concentration. This is when they get all of their productive work done.
  
  With programmers, it's especially hard [to deal with interruptions]. Productivity depends on being able to juggle a lot of little details in short term memory all at once.
  
  If you take a 1 minute interruption by a coworker asking you a question, and this knocks out your concentration enough that it takes you half an hour to get productive again, your overall productivity is in serious trouble.

For me, working at home only rarely seems to lend itself to being highly productive. I should probably set aside a separate room as an office instead of sitting in my living room with a TV nearby... maybe I'll finally clean out that other room...

What does it say about my personality if I dislike taking personality tests? Is there a Myers-Briggs designation for that? (Yes, of course there is.)

• Psychoanalyze Yourself [Sanborn]
  Read the following questions, imagining the scenes in your mind, and write down the FIRST thing that you visualize. Don't think about the questions too much, just go with your gut feeling.

My gut feeling is, I've wasted too much of my life already on pointless exercises like this.

Seen on various folks' sites, including Jeffrey Zeldman's:

• iStockphoto.com - The Source for Free Royalty-Free Stock Photography and Illustration

Looks like it could come in very handy.

That Microsoft bug from last week was declared null and void, then another separate vulnerability was found in the same part of the FrontPage Extensions, so you're still supposed to delete the file that was mentioned in the original bug report. Yadda yadda, etc. etc.

How does a not-quite-confirmed bug get reported in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal?

That's all the time for today. See you next week, with better stuff than this. Really.