do i talk in my sleep?

if i did it wouldn't be as nearly as amusing as this

new google patent;

oh brother. google's new patent: a search box and two buttons on a web page.

apparently it took 5 years of legal haggling. assholism has no expiration date.

how do you spend your day?

New York Times has a nice stacked visualization of how different groups of people spend their day. Of course, the unemployed are the outliers.

Twttr launch announcement (yes; artist currently known is Twitter)

Tech Crunch was less than enthused about "Twttr" launch back in July of 2006:

If this was a new startup, a one or two person shop, I’d give it a thumbs up for innovation and good execution on a simple but viral idea.

But the fact that this is coming from Odeo makes me wonder - what is this company doing to make their core offering compelling? How do their shareholders feel about side projects like Twttr when their primary product line is, besides the excellent design, a total snoozer?

waaahhhh

Here come sour grapes from Darren Bent as he is slamming the door behind himself:

"It was the worst two years of my career," Bent said. "Even last year, when I was the club's top scorer, I never actually felt wanted. I didn't feel Redknapp wanted me there. [...]

"My career stood still at Tottenham.

Mirror mirror on the wall

Nathan shows you the trends in the data you provide about your own behavioral / living patterns. I plan on trying it. I think.

the guardian writers are on crack

The Guardian is running a series of blog entries as a preview to the upcoming EPL season. The lack of clarity and insight is staggering. here are a couple of examples:

• Profiling Arsenal, Chelsea, and Liverpool within the first week of the transfer window. Start profiling with teams that are coming up from Championship, and then move up the ladder. Leave the "Top 4" for the end!
  
• Suggesting that Liverpool will take 1st. Are you on crack!? They will take 1st with the loss of Alonso, a shorter than required bench, and with a fairly young defense!? If a couple of leaders get sidelined, they might not even make the Champion's League next year.
• Zhirkov is a marquee signing for Chelsea they say. Hell yes, but the man will run out of gas by Christmas. He came from Russia where they play Spring-Fall, so he is in the middle of his season -- of course he has impressed everyone during EPL pre-season.

Dumb & Aggravating. Please Guardian if you can't be insightful about soccer stick to the Rules of Peeing the Shower content.

how do you say a&%hole in bosnian, swedish, or croatian?

Is Zlatan Ibrahimovic rapidly becoming the biggest a&%hole in contemporary soccer or has this been going on for a while, and I was just too busy with other things?

In English:

“I am north, south, east and west. I am Zlatan Ibrahimovic,” reads a passage.
“I am north because I was born in Malmo and I am and want to be considered Swedish. I am very attached to my hometown and my country and my real friends are still there.
“I am south because I have a ‘hot’ character, I’m not a passive man. I like feeling strong emotions and playing in stadiums where all the fans are against you. I have no fear. I like creativity, and not just in football, but in life too.
“I am west because I love the United States, where I often spend holidays with my family. I love the weather and I like English as a tool to communicate with the world.
“I am east because I find my family’s origins there, Bosnian father and Croat mother. I still like talking my father and mother’s language. I still feel strong ties, the passion of travelling crowds, always in search of something. With courage, never hiding their heads in the sand…”

Original in Italian.

Generating empty buzz

By way of Mr Wind comes a link. Mr Wind & I work together. The link that Mr Wind sent me contains an article that mentions my current employer and, more importantly, is authored by a consulting company both Mr Wind & I had the pleasure of working with in the past. Pleasure, of course, is a relative term. Like everything else in life it depends on its environs. I shouldn't digress.

To me the article (which is a part of a blog) appears to have been a random translation of a random white paper from English into some intermediate language and then back into English. Mr Wind has a far more interesting theory that the blog entry was generated by stringing together sentences using a fancy algorithm (whose name escapes me) that chains expression instances based on its perception of how they relate to each other. Mr Wind is wicked smart. No joke. It is true.

In either case, the blog seems to exist for one reason. It links to and therefore promotes other most definitely auto-generated blogs which in turn point back at it. It is a network of auto-generated blogs full of buzzwords and advertisements. The fact that they are connected makes their Google ranks go up. So when you search Google about the aforementioned consulting company or anything else that appears on the pages the blog in question come up higher in the ranks. It is mo' better hits... Bill Hicks was right: