Author: jbenton

Ah, cost cutting: Until a couple of weeks ago, my work laptop was a nice Dell Latitude. (Nice when it worked, that is, which was roughly half the time.) Today, I got my new work laptop: a Toshiba Satellite 115CS. (That link is to an eBay auction; the opening bid is $99. No one’s bid on it yet, and that’s likely because it’s not worth it. My Toshiba has its little eraser-nub mini-joystick ripped off, a b&w screen, no CD-ROM — it’s an ancient piece of crap. Oh, and it won’t boot up.)
Which is why today I bought an iBook. (On sale — only $894! That’s a hell of a deal, people.) Color me happy. (And in debt.)

I have an idea for an experiment, and I’d like your help. A lot of you no doubt know about the Blogdex, an MIT grad student’s excellent attempt to quantify the link relationships among blogs and between blogs and other sites. It’s really a nice service.
One of the most useful functions on the site is its list of the 25 most popular links among all the blogs it tracks. Reading the list is a good way to see what everybody else is talking about. I want to see if a little collective action can shove an uninteresting web page into the top 25.
The plan: a bunch of people add their blogs to the list of sites the Blogdex checks, if they haven’t already. Then, on one day, we all link to one exquisitely boring site, with no indication that it’s anything other than a normal blog link. Then, we watch it climb the list.
At the moment, #25 (a Winona Ryder/shoplifting story) is linked from only 12 blogs. So if we can get 12 people in on the project, we’ll have a good chance of getting on the list. (#15 is linked 23 times; #5 is only 20, which must mean that freshness of the link or some other metric must be taken into account somehow.)
I think it’d be an interesting experiment in watching a meme take hold. Will other people start linking to the site? How much will that site’s stats be affected? Let me know if you’re interested in helping test this out. (And I promise, this power will be used for good, not evil.)
On an unrelated note: I hope all my local readers will be making it out to tonight’s DFWblogs dinner. (I initially typed “making out to tonight’s DFWblogs dinner,” which I suppose is a fine option, too.) Important note: I’ll be bringing the mix CDs for the Mix CD Of The Month project, so if you want to trade, bring yours too.

Last minute Christmas shopping left to do? Well, if your friends and/or family like to look raffishly faux-rough hewn while tooling around town in their SUV, eddiebauer.com has a pretty silly deal going on: $20 off orders of $20 or more. (You just need to enter the coupon code 6033059 upon checkout.)
Well, it’s not quite as perfect as that, since their silly policies throw about $10 onto any cheap item there (at least $4.95 shipping, $3.00 “handling,” and tax, at least in Texas). But it does end up cutting the price of anything about $10. Search for something that costs $21 or so and you’ll come out paying only about $12. And there’s evidently no limit on how many times to use it.
Crabwalk.com: I work for you!

Tom Banse (BAHN-see), one of my fellow fellows in Japan last month, has been putting his stories for Seattle-area public radio stories on the web, in both audio and text. Tom is a much harder worker than I am, which is why he produced six stories from the trip and I but one…

The perfect gift for the Potter-obsessed: the Invisibility Cloak Harry Action Figure. Um, but you can see it.

The wonderfully named (and talented) writer Dahlia Lithwick usually reports on the Supreme Court for Slate, but this week she’s turned to a far more pressing subject: taste-testing fake meat.
“I chose to serve up a whole cornucopia of fake meat products to friends at one sitting. As one would at a wine tasting, we served up three ‘flights’ of food groups

Not long ago, Kelly linked to a great, great story in the Washington Post in which its author searched for the worst place in America. (The official title of Armpit of America was at stake.) He settled on Battle Mountain, Nevada, which sounds downright awful. (The author tries to make it salvage something good about the place at the end of the piece, but it doesn’t convince this reader, at least.)
Anyway, one of the people quoted in the story, the local newspaper editor, has evidently been fired for saying the Armpit of America title “sounds about right” for Battle Mountain. Sheesh.

You know how there are times when you have an enormous amount of work to do, a nearly epic amount, really, enough work to choke a ox, or maybe just a cow, but probably an ox, yeah, an ox, and it’s all piled up and deadlines are climbing up to you like, um, things that climb up to you, I don’t know, maybe ferrets or something, and still you can’t get anything done?
This is one of those times.

(sniff, sniff)

I’m looking for some advice. Thanks to a new corporate policy, I have to get a cell phone of my own (as opposed to the company-owned cell I’ve had for the last year or so). I’m getting the phone in a couple of weeks, but now I’m considering canceling my home phone service altogether. My cell will have free nights and weekends, and that’s the only time I’m home anyway. The only thing I’d need a land line for is Internet access, but I could probably afford to get DSL or a cable modem if I cancelled my regular phone service.
Has anyone gone the cell-phone-only route? Any advice, pitfalls, experiences, etc.?