Patrick Logan linked to an interesting article that's ostensibly on XML-RPC, but contains the following quote: "Python is one of the more popular languages for XML-RPC apps, because it has a very flexible way of creating remote procedure calls that look much like local ones."  To me, this is interesting in that it highlights how people like to write code. First of all, there's the question of whether I even want to write RPCs. Then, there's the issue of programming language design. I feel like XML-RPC and SOAP were designed with curly-brace programmers in mind, where there's all this effort to
generate proxies that look like LPCs, but totally ignore support for message style communications.

I've been really interested in how Lisps handle this.  I wish I had more time to explore the implications of this, but it just seems so tantalizing. For example, I look at the way Allegro's pxml library parses XML into Lisp expressions, (if you aren't familiar <foo>bar<baz/></foo> becomes (|foo| "bar" (|baz)) ) and it seems like I could just decide what actions I wanted to take on each symbol, assign a symbol-function, and process XML in a way that's really native to the language.

There's 2 kinds of easy: easy in that I don't have to learn anything new, and easy as in really easy.  I'd like to get to the place where the 2 kinds of easy intersect.

I haven't ever heard of anything like this:  an escalator at Coors Field suddenly accelerated while carrying people out of the park after last night's game, throwing people down the escalator.  We have friends who were about to get on that escalator when this happened.  If you haven't been to Coors Field, these escalators are really tall - it'd have to be terrifying to be on one when this happened.  Apparently something like 30 people were injured. 

I saw this post on individuality and community a while ago, and it really resonated with me.  My favorite quote is at the end:

"If you teach a person to fish s/he will keep catching fish, but when you give the same person fish, s/he will come for more fish." - Kenyan proverb

I like this Kenyan proverb, because we begin to think about whether or not we want the man to return. Having the man return builds community, don’t ya know.

That's an interesting thought.

Today I read Clay Shirky's A Group: Its Own Worst Enemy (link from Joel).  Nothing really to add except that it struck me how Clay drew on W.R. Bion's discovery that his patients in group therapy "were, as a group, conspiring to defeat therapy. "  I read another article not too long ago describing how therapists were becoming concerned about the Web because communities of people with various disorders were springing up, offering sort of "negative support" groups for people with the same disorder.  The article cited examples of sites for bulimics that offered tips on how to hide the disorder better and resist treatment.  That's got nothing to do with Clay's thesis, but I hadn't heard of Bion before and the connection was interesting.