So, I bought the new Joe Jackson album. It's good (especially the title track, 'The In Crowd/Down To London' and the 'Fools in Love' bit with Graham Maby sitting on notes so low my Powerbook's speaker won't play them), but it's not as good as I was hoping. 'The Obvious Song' doesn't work that well with such a small ensemble. Still, merely-okay Joe Jackson is better than some artists' greatest hits.

And there's a new studio album coming in the fall...Night and Day II

Hey, results are results:

• Handwriting Is on the Wall for Job Seekers [Yahoo Daily News via Breaching the Web]
  Ikea says its ads on the walls of restaurant restrooms in Malmo`s chic Lilla Torget area cost one tenth the amount charged by newspapers and produce better results.
  
  "After only four days we had received 60 applications. That's four or five times more than what we would get from a normal newspaper ad," Ostholm told Swedish news agency TT.

Subtle nicety in Mac IE 5: Command-N brings up a new window and loads your default home page, but Command-L brings up a window for you to type in a URL without slowing you down by starting to load your home page.

Interesting games to play with identity-tracking technologies: swap cards with friends!

• Identity swapping makes privacy relative by Elizabeth Weise [USA Today via metafilter]
  In a study last year by the Boston Consulting Group, more than 41% of respondents reported that they left sites when asked to provide registration information; an additional 27% said they lied.

Al Franken really doesn't want Rush to be a football announcer:

• Block That Rush! [The Nation via q]
  ...it's not so much Rush's politics. If, say, Steve Largent quit Congress (which wouldn't be such a bad idea), I'd be happy to listen to him call Monday Night Football. Let me explain why: Steve Largent knows a lot about football.

You do have to wonder just where the idea came from.

For fans of Russell Crowe (or any other Gladiator folk):

• Interviews with the director and cast of Gladiator [BBC Online]
  

Including some audio.

Re: today's quote up there, it's not that I don't get a little buzz when somebody links to me, and it's not that I don't like getting more hits rather than fewer (Hits Good!). It's that comparing your own hit stats to anybody else's is a meaningless exercise and has little to do with anything, but it can take over how you think about your site if you let it.

I opted out of the beebo rankings many months ago for that reason. Nobody needs to compare their 'rating' to mine and I don't really care where I fall in the list; it's meaningless. So the bonus part is, those folks who are left get to compare themselves against each other on some arbitrary scale with one less competing site in their way. Ooooooh.

Not everything is a contest.

In fact, very few things in life are contests.

(Except sports, and they're artificial and pointless anyway. But that's a whole 'nother topic...)

It's about having a place to say what you think and having people come by, stop for a few minutes, listen and maybe discuss. Then we all learn from each other. That's what I'm doing this for, anyway...