Making The Rounds

Being bored at work, I spent more time than usual making the rounds of the Blogosphere. Thank God for my RSS aggregator! Fortunately, there was a lot of interesting stuff to read.

For example, over at A Small Victory, Michele weighs in on the holiday season and those who'd like us all to be miserable. Kudos to Michele. She makes the case better than I ever could.

Ernie the Attorney gives us the lowdown on Endless Loops & Non-artificial intelligence. One thing that he focused on was a common problem with emails:

I see a lot of loops in emails. People who will respond (and cc everyone who received the original E-mail even if it was a trivial question) to every E-mail they get. If we were farther along with Artificial Intelligence we could build programs that would recognize these "looping emails," analyze them for the meaningful thread of information, and keep only that thread. I'm not waiting for AI to solve this problem. I use non-artificial intelligence, and when I see a bunch of emails that all have "RE:" followed by the same subject line I just delete them all. I believe that looping has to be dealt with ruthlessly.

Definitely no argument here.

A number of people had some strong words for Iraqi Blogger Salam Pax. As most of you already know, Salam Pax has taken some heat, and justifiably so, for this snide little piece of commentary about our war effort:

To tell you the truth, I am glad that someone is doing the cleaning up, and thank you for getting rid of that scary guy with the hideous moustache that we had for president. But I have to say that the advertisements you were dropping from your B52s before the bombs fell promised a much more efficient and speedy service. We are a bit disappointed. So would you please, pretty please, with sugar on top, get your act together and stop telling people you have Iraq all figured out when you are giving us the trial-and-error approach?

James Lileks' The Bleat takes him to task very severely:

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

On the other hand, over at Unbillible Hours  TPB, Esq. offers an entertaining look at how he might handle it a la Gene Hackman's "Little Bill" character from Unforgiven. Just one note to TPB: "It's not fair, I was gonna build a house." Evening things out Daniel Drezner offers an opposing viewpoint.

PromoGuy chips in with his Hit 'N' Run links for the day. Frank J. offers his Top 10 Reasons he didn't have a funny post today. Geoffrey comments on Kicking The Liberal Habit. Chuck bought a suit and Lauren's been too busy to blog.

And last, but not least, Gnome-Girl gives new meaning to the phrase "turning the other cheek." NSFW.

Have a great weekend. I plan to get outdoors and commune with Mother Nature.

File under Around The Blogosphere (formerly Blog Talk).

8:18:35 PM    Go ahead, make my day  []  trackback []