"I don't understand how you can find so much to read. I mean, sometimes I'm bored or I have a few minutes, I want to find something to read, and I wonder 'What would Kitt read?' but I can never find the interesting things you would read. How do you do it?"

Or something like that. Kris' sentiment. Oddly enough, Heather asked me the same question recently. I don't have a link blog, nor do I have a well-used del.icio.us account, but, part of Project Decloak™ will probably change that at least a little bit.

Until then, help for Kris: where do I go to get the interesting posts/pages?

Slashdot

Not so much for the discussions, but more for the interesting links.

Kottke.org

Jason Kottke's website, mostly a linkblog with commentary. I don't recall how I found his website, maybe through dooce.

New Scientist

Mostly because I'm a science junky, I'll read the science headlines from New Scientist, sometimes also reading notes from Nature News or sometimes the Science Blog, the former more than the latter. The problem with these sites is that it's a slippery slope into more and more information: some of the articles are behind their subscription firewall, requiring payment to read, which leads to a subscription, which leads to either a stack of unread science magazines or a waste of money. I've been through both cycles.

I visit these websites because they're entertaining, reading more or less on a daily basis.

Dooce, iWalt, Megan's blog and the Town of Or

Heather Armstrong's website, found via Walk Dickinson, whose site was shown to me by Megan. Maybe I can convince Megan to name her blog. My current favorite picture of Mirabelle. I'll also read Town of Or to keep up to date on Jake's activities.

Foxtrot

Been reading for years, there are still some gems in there on occasion.

Photomatt

Matt Mullenweg's summary blogish sort of site. Found his site via Jonas Luster's site, which I found via his Drupal flickr module.

APoD

Or rather, the Astronomy Pictures of the Day, sometimes beautiful, always interesting images about space and related topics.

FactoryJoe

Chris Messina's personal blog. He slants toward social justice with an intensity I'm not able to conceive, much less muster - which is why I'm very happy he's around. The world needs more Chris Messinas.

Jeremy Zawodny

Not sure why I read his blog, in as much I'm not particularly interested in aviation. Must be the Yahoo! and MySQL and tech related postings.

A Thousand Kids

Kathryn Yu's link + photo blog, which I found via Cal's Flickr friend's list when I was looking for my name. Kathryn spells her name correctly, and it was on the same page as my name, so I followed her profile to her website. She reviews music for NPR and has other interesting links. It's where I found the El Boton button sets, which didn't help that hobby at all.

Every once in a while, when nothing from the above sites particularly inspires me, I'll also wander over to these sites:

Digg

But only because everybody's doing it. I don't particularly believe in the wisdom in crowds because the wisdom part requires independence not found in the incredibly connected web (and so such social sites become the madness of the mob mentality), but there are good links in there that are somewhat interesting.

Reddit

Same thinking as digg, with the same caveats.

waxy.org

How can you not love Andy's Linkblog? Apparently his the source for many other sites' "breaking news".

Techdirt

Commentary on important events in technology, more from a what-a-moron standpoint, but the topics are a cross between technology and interesting.

And then there are my bookmarks, which I should merge and export sometime soon, so that I don't lose any of them. There are another three or four dozen websites I'll read in a week. Since it's taken me an hour to write all of these sites, we'll just start here.

So, there you go, a good first pass of What Would Kitt Read. Have at it, Kris.

Better than thousands, I expect.

So far, all of the various conferences I've gone to, with the exception of one, have been technology related. From SiGGraph to the Future of Web Apps, it's been tech, tech, tech and, just for fun, science. Okay, one was ultimate related, a UPA league organizers conference. It was small, and not one I had to spend hundreds of dollars to attend.

The next one I attend will be another ultimate related one, but it won't be to just sit in the audience and listen to other people lecturing. Instead, I'll be speaking!

As part of Project Decloak, I'll be standing in front of hundreds of people, imagining each and every one of the completely naked, talking about ultimate.

My talk is titled "Ultimate for the non-gifted athlete." It's basically a list of all the tips, tricks, and training Kris has taught me or I have learned in the last eight years. Well, most of them. The talk is geared toward the beginner and intermediate athlete who isn't on an athletic scholarship, but wants to play ultimate better.

I'm surprisingly not nervous about the talk, and have it outlined and ready to go, including notes about what studies to look up and what video clips to find. Poor Kris is going to have the talk memorized by the time the presentation rolls around.

My plans are to have the presentation available on an ultimate website. I haven't decided which domain to use for it, though: talkdisc.com or recsportdisc.com. I own both domains. I wanted talkdisc.com to be a combination of the rec.sport.disc newsgroup plus articles and snippets, but ultimatetalk.com was launched between my thinking of the idea and now, and I don't want to have a copy-cat domain name, even if I did think of the name waaaaaaay before ultimatetalk launched.

We'll see. I'll put it up on one of the sites.

I'm convinced of it.

But they're also pretty wonderful, too.

This weekend, I came home from Crate and Barrel with my new "dresser" (think, embracing my inability to use drawers), and found this on my doorstep:

Now, if I can just get the perpetrator to confess, I'll reward her/him with a trip for this:

Just once, I'd like to have a project that's not full of a billion problems. A project that starts and ends on time. A project where the client and the developer are happy. Where I don't have to wrestle with arcane IE CSS rendering bugs. Where I don't have to beat down MySQL databases or Apache aliases or PHP casting bugs. Where I don't spend more of my time fixing problems, but rather I spend it creating things.

A project where I'm not up until 2:00 am two nights in a row because I'm trying to solve the problem before everyone gets into the office in the morning.

Just once. Is that really too much to ask for?

Might be.

It might be the world's most boring project.

When I was working at Pacific Title, back in my former life in Los Angeles, I worked with a man who confused the hell out of me. He wasn't that much older than I was, maybe six or seven years older, but he had, what I thought at the time, some very strange ideas about software and drivers and such.

It was my first introduction to open source software, and I thought this guy was a jerk. I wanted some system brought up and it needed some new graphic drivers installed on it. He had installed some proprietary drivers on the system and they failed and he couldn't fix the problem. After fighting with it for a day or two he downloaded some open source drivers, ones with fewer features but missing the bug of the proprietary driver. In a fit of exasperation during the work, he declared (very loudly) he was never installing another driver he didn't have the source code to, this was it, he was done.

I thought him looney.

In those six or seven years since, I've come around to his way of thinking. I understand why he feels the way he does. Not being able to fix a bug that you can see RIGHT THERE is unexplicably infuriating. Just give me the darn code, I'll have it fixed in 10 minutes.

I'm also leery of installing software on my systems now. Having to close all of my programs while the HP All-in-One installer does some voodoo to my system, only to watch the whole system freeze up, is not my idea of a good time.