The New Scientist reports new research on placebos. The results of the research that they report suggest that the placebo effect is mediated by opiods in the body. The New Scientist seems to be impressed with the wrong part of the research. Here is their opening paragraph.
It seems that placebos have a real physical, not [...]

Windows Backup is very poorly designed and implemented for automated use. I had to jump through hoops backwards to accomplish automated backups. In the interest of preserving your sanity, here is what I did.
My environment:

Windows XP Professional
Multiple Users
Selected Folders
Multiple Disks — C backing up to D, and vice-versa
Running as a regular user, without a password, [...]

I use emacs as my preferred text editor. In general I prefer text files to more complicated or proprietary formats such as Word .doc files. Text is easy to use. Text files are small. Text can be processed with standard tools such as grep, diff, sed and awk.
In that light emacs is a somewhat heavy [...]

Paul Graham says lots of interesting things in What Business Can Learn from Open Source.
I like this quote:
The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a car are to speed.

How many times will I relearn this lesson?
Breathe. A full deep breath cause my abdomen to protrude and puts a spring in my step.

Yesterday I visited San Francisco City Hall. I went to get a business license and to file a fictitious business name statement from my new project, 67 Central Software.
I set out to pursue a simple business errand, but I ended up at the center of dozens of changing lives.
There were two offices involved in my [...]

Once again Lance Armstrong and his team are in trouble.
Ha. How many times are we going to have to read from that script. Every Tour de France Lance’s team, or Lance himself, appear to be in trouble, appear to be struggling around the stage 8 to 12.
Lance struggling to keep up with Ulrich in 2001 [...]

What do you do about commenters on your blog?
I haven’t had that many people comment on any of my entries. Unaccountably, as I posted before, most of the comments are on my post about deciding to stop using Norton Anti-virus software.
Comments on that post still continue to come in. The commenters want me to check [...]

Lance Armstrong put in a stellar performance today. He made up more than a minute on Jan Ulrich within 15 km, and placed second on the stage, 2″ behind David Zabriskie, but more importantly, 51″ ahead of his nearest rival. On OLN, Phil, Paul and Bob were considering the possibility that Lance had pulled up [...]

Lance Armstrong is one of the greatest athletes of all time. He is younger than I am, but I consider him one of my heroes and I strive to emulate him in many aspects of my life.
The thing that I respect most about him is his incredible mental power and focus. Just looking at him, [...]