The initial list of speakers is up for Chris Sells' Web Services DevCon East.  Lots of others have said it, but I will too: if you're interested in Web Services, go.  I see that Peter Drayton, Steve Loughran, Craig Andera, Eugene Kuznetzov, Keith Ballinger, Andy Gray, and Tim Ewald are all back.  I'm interested to hear what Stuart Celarier has to say as well.  Lots of these talks look like reprises of what went on in Portland last March, all of them worth repeating. 

Buy.com is broadening its war with Amazon.com, promising to sell its books at 10 percent below Amazon's prices. [[Justin Rudd]

Seems like a loser's battle to me. Take a look at Best Book Buys. The competition among online book sellers is just brutal, and I didn't think that retail books were a great business to begin with. In any case, beating Amazon isn't the trick, they only discount big selling books these days. Spot checking a few things on my wish list, I see that Amazon is discounting tech books either 30% or 0%. Bookpool is discounting the same books 12% - 39%, and always a better price than Amazon. They seem to have the big sellers at 39% off retail right now. If Buy.com gives you 10% below Amazon, they're still above Bookpool. Maybe you could save on shipping, but if they want to be the low price leader, they're aiming at the wrong leader.

Found an entry in Mike James' weblog with a pointer to doing a 3 column layout in CSS. I tried to do this on my own over the weekend as I started revamping our family site, it's surprisingly hard. These pointers look like they'll be very helpful in this effort. I'd also like to implement Mark Pilgrim's suggestions one day across both this site and the family site.

What these people do is rocket science, beyone the comprehension of people who don't have deep and specialized training, and talent and perseverence. [Scripting News (via System.Error.Emit]

I tend to make fun of the medical profession, because doctors seem to guess at diagnoses more than actually know anything. It seems like every time I go to the doctor, they sort of say "well it might be X, so let's try Y. Call back in 2 days if that doesn't fix it". June 16, the same weekend Dave was in the hospital, I had my respect for these people renewed. Basically, the last 20 minutes of Karyn's delivery were difficult and the baby was in distress. At the end, there were probably 20 people in the room, and Elaina wasn't breathing when she was born. It struct me later that 100 years ago, she probably wouldn't have survived the birth, if she had survived the pregnancy (terbutaline sulfate allowed that). I started thinking about how I make my living; as a former colleague once put it: putting butts in airplane seats. However well I think I do my job, that's pretty humbling.

I remember reading one time that commercial airline pilots aren't paid handsomely for flying a plane that basically can fly itself. They get paid for flying a plane that's about to crash. The same goes for doctors.