Another thing I wish I knew about long ago: http://printfreegraphpaper.com/. Good source of PDFs for graph paper in a variety of types, measures and pitches. Prints in faint grey. (By way of the Seattle Times technology section.)

Remember the Doodle Writer, the writing-desk toy with the magnetic stylus that lets kids (or you) write without making a mess? Well, Pilot has the same thing in whiteboard size. It’s called the CleanWriter Chalkless Board, and it’s mainly being marketed as a whiteboard replacement for clean rooms. A coworker of mine just picked one up for the new playroom he’s setting up for his two-year-old — I’ll post an update when I find out how she likes it. (I know I’d think it was way cool at age two — or even age 35.)

Nice piece of glue by Paul Rademacher, combining Google Maps with Craigslist to produce a great integrated service. This is exactly what I wish I’d had when I was looking for a house all last year. (Thanks to Adam for the link!)

EFF has posted a short paper on how to blog without getting fired, breaking it down roughly into (1) blog pseudonymously, (2) limit your audience and (3) know your (lack of) legal rights.

It’s unfortunate that (4) come to a reasonable agreement with management about what’s acceptable wasn’t even in the running. That’s a tricky negotiation though, both because once you broach the subject it’s much harder to go back to being anonymous and because your management might feel OK about looking the other way but when pressed might feel the need to say no rather than yes. And when it comes to protecting themselves from upper management or angry stockholders should your blog embarrass the company, they’re probably right.

I’m of two minds when it comes to pseudonymous writing. On the one hand, I still want more choice of soft walls when it comes to managing what I write. Mailing lists and things like LiveJournal‘s friends lists are good starts, but what I really want is a publish-this-to-everyone-except-those-who-would-get-me-in-trouble-for-what-I-wrote button. But on the other hand, I can’t help but see such a button as a kind of cowardly way out. Maybe it just stirs some deep emotion implanted during half-listened to high-school discussions of Thoreau, but isn’t the measure of a writer, at least in some small way, just how much trouble his writing gets him into?

Comments are working after being down for a day, now that I’ve finished installing MT-Keystrokes, the latest weapon in the anti-comment-spam arms race. It’s a plug-in that uses Javascript to detect whether a person has typed something on the form prior to submission — it’ll be pretty simple for spammers to code around, but it may give me a month respite in the mean time. (Note that this also means you’ll need Javascript enabled to post comments… shouldn’t be a problem for the one or two of you who comment every month, and hopefully it’ll be slightly more of a problem for the hundred or so spambots that try to post and clog my filter box.)

Movable Type has so much effort going into trying to block spam — I wish they’d put even half that effort into making a half-decent interface for just deleting comments in bulk…

It’s interesting how the Google satellite pictures differ ever so slightly from the Google map.

In particular, notice how the NW-to-SE roads are skewed about 5 degrees clockwise from true while the NE-to-SW roads are skewed about 5 degrees counterclockwise from true. (Click on the image for higher-resolution.)

On second thought, it could be that the map is correct and the satellite images are skewed to locally fit the Google perspective. Maybe the map is the territory after all!

Google just upped the ante again with Google Satellite. Satellite images curtsey of Digital Globe and EarthSat.

As a side-note, the Google Maps URL includes GPS coordinates, so given a street address you can get both GPS coords and satellite map quickly and easily. You can also just erase the part from q=Blah+blah& part of the URL to get a nice clean satelite image, or just add &t=k to an existing Google Maps URL to turn it into a satellite image. (I really hope that doesn’t become an issue for some well-meaning panic-stricken patriot who thinks terrorists couldn’t get that info quickly and easily in dozens of other ways — I always missed that GPS feature when it was taken out of earlier mapping software.)

Update 7:40pm: Note that you need to click on “Link to this page” in the upper right-hand corner to get the full URL to show up in the address bar.