I just logged into Del.icio.us and noticed that all of my bookmarks are gone. I was about to send an email to the team but figured I should do my due diligence before blaming the mass deletion on their end. I sincerely doubted that I had managed to delete all of my bookmarks (300-400), I don’t even think Del.icio.us allows users to delete all of their bookmarks in one fell swoop (outside of deleting one’s whole account).

But I managed to do it.

You see, I recently downloaded Flock and one of its highly touted features is its integration with Del.icio.us. While I understood the idea of sites I favorited in my browser being added to my Del.icio.us account, I didn’t get that if I deleted a site from my favorites folder in Flock, it would be removed from Del.icio.us account. While it makes perfect sense in retrospect (yes, I feel like an idiot), Flock might want to make that “total integration” concept a bit more clear.

If you don’t want to integrate your flock bookmarks and your del.icio.us account go to Tools -> Accounts and Services and uncheck “share favorites.”

I have primarily been using Yahoo’s MyWeb, so I didn’t lose all that much data. However, if I didn’t make the connection between deleting seemingly local data and its effects on my remote data, the more technologically inept users that follow me will certainly have some accidents that they may not so easily shrug off.

I had absolutely no idea that Aaron Spelling produced Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, The Love Boat, Hart to Hart, Dynasty, T.J. Hooker, and Twin Peaks (among other things).  I only knew about Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.

I was thrilled to see that the auctioning off of of Dr. Martin Luther King’s papers to the highest bidder was averted. It looks like the papers are going to Morehouse.

Apparently Frank Bruni, restaurant critic for the New York Times, makes around 325 dinner reservations a year.

This is downright awesome. Quickmuse holds what they refer to as Agons where two poets are given a passage and are given 15 minutes to right a poem. Their keystrokes are captured in real time so you can literally watch them as they write the poem - every thought that hits the page, every edit, every deletion.

Robert Pinsky and Julianna Baggott were asked to write poems in reaction to the following passage:

“He was an intellectual. He used to read novels, poetry, history, stuff like that. And he could hold a conversation with almost anybody on all kinds of things…. He was real sensitive. But he had this destructive streak in him that was something else…. [H]e used to talk a lot about political shit and he loved to put a motherfucker on, play dumb to what was happening and then zap the sucker. He used to especially like to do this to white people.”

–Miles Davis on Charlie Parker

Watch Pinksy craft the poem or see the finished version.

Other Agons include Paul Muldoon vs. Thylias Moss and Jonathan Galassi vs. Marge Piercy. All battles are archived on the site.

I am sure most of you already know, but an agon is the Greek term for “debate” or “contest” and both tragedies and comedies had formal agons in which the central idea of the drama was debated.

Google has posted the collected works of Shakespeare on Google Book Search.

I realize that I am probably the only person on the face of the planet that attempts to use the synonym feature in the right click menu in Word. That said, can someone explain to me why when I attempted to find a synonym for “identifies” the only result was “identify”? I then (unintuitvely) had to select thesaurus from the context menu, confirm that I wanted synonyms for identify, select a suitable word from the results and then manually modify the new verb back to the proper tense.

Give me the damn synonyms in context so that I don’t make careless errors. The squiggly green grammar police program built into Word knows every time I make a grammar error (and even sometimes when I don’t). Why can’t the thesaurus figure the reverse?

We have three very large (and very expensive) flat screen televisions on the first floor of one of the law school buildings. They are always on, always silent, and always tuned to CNN. Every once in awhile, as I enter the lobby, I pause to see if anything new is being reported. Today, as I passed the silent screen, I saw “Late Breaking News” and stopped to tune in. On the screen was a picture of Maryland with a pulsating circle located right above Camp David. “Oh no they didn’t…” I thought to myself, wondering whether Camp David had been attacked. The caption underneath the picture read:

Bush says Zarqawi’s death won’t end the insurgency.

At least CNN got it half right. It ain’t news, but they certainly broke it late.

Quick WordPress tech note for anyone looking to direct 100% of their feed traffic to their FeedBurner feed. Steve Smith has a dead simple plugin that redirects all of your subscribers to a single FeedBurner feed. It took me approximately 5 minutes to set up.

Update: On another note, when did sitemeter start tracking “out clicks”? It’s useful to see what links people actually follow when leaving your site.

Bessemer Venture Partners has a hilarious “anti-portfolio” on their site celebrating the investment opportunities that they turned down that turned out to be huge winners. It’s a great read.

These new ads from Amnesty International are amazingly powerful. I can’t believe any local government would allow them as they look so realistic at first glance.

The tagline translates to “It’s not happening here, but it’s happening now”

Update: The ads were designed by Walker Werbeagentur Zuerich.

Interesting article in today’s NYTimes about Netflix and how they are succeeding despite the fact that the technology exists for digital delivery of movies. Interesting fact from the article: Netflix carries roughly 60,000 movies. How many of them are rented by users everday?

35,000 to 45,000.

Shocking.

Interesting article on MovieBeam, a new service backed by Disney, Intel and Cisco. MovieBeam is a set top box that stores 100 movies at a time for your viewing pleasure. You pay for only what you watch and there are no monthly fees. What fascinates me is how they get the movies onto the box. According to the NewYork Times:

This wireless movie-delivery feature gives MovieBeam its name. The company doesn’t require an Internet connection or even a computer. Nor does the service depend on what cable or satellite setup you have, if any. How, then, can it send enormous, multigigabyte movies to MovieBeam owners nationwide?

Answer: Very cleverly. MovieBeam’s movies are encoded in the broadcast signal of PBS stations across the country. You’re actually receiving MovieBeam’s movies at this very moment — but they’re invisible unless you have the MovieBeam box. (MovieBeam pays PBS for these piggybacking rights.)

I didn’t even know you could do that!

This service doesn’t seem to solve the problems I raised here, but perhaps it is a step in the right direction. (via LJ)

Marginal Revolution has an interesting theory of reciprocity when it comes to relationships:

The symmetry thesis: A given person likes (loves) you as much as you like (love) him or her.

Interesting model. Fun to try and poke holes in, but in general I tend to believe it.