Last 100 posts, part 2

(This is a biweekly-ish wrap-up thing that I’m trying. Here’s the first installment.)

Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France, but you already know that. Enroute to victory, Armstrong tangled with an off-the-bike rival…or was it just smart game theory? Heather has photos (1, 2) from the final stage in Paris.

Ken Jennings is still alive on Jeopardy as the show goes on summer vacation. Tapings begin again in August. I see no end in sight to his reign. More Jennings links than you would ever want:

- Ken Jennings Wikipedia entry
- The various ways in which Ken has signed his name
- An enormous list of movies Ken likes
- Lots of discussion on the Jeopardy Forums. Jennings himself even participates in some of the discussions; here’s a list of his posts.

hello, typepad ties it all together in a post about Lance, Jennings, me, and (respectively) our continued dominance of the Tour, Jeopardy, and Google.

The discussion of the Fast Company article on Whole Foods is a reminder of why it’s so much fun for me to do this site. The thread contains both pro and con responses, including one from the boyfriend of a satisfied Whole Foods employee. What’s odd is that the article generated zero comments on the actual article page on FC. I wonder why?

Re: the HTML version of the 9/11 Commission Report Executive Summary I posted last week, here’s the whole report (HTML TOC links to PDF (FYI LOL)) with permalinks for each section. Should be a Wired article appearing soon about the guerilla reformatting of the report.

For the announcement of the new iPod, we were promised out-of-the-ordinary publicity. Instead, we got the cover of Newsweek. Boooor-ring. Does anyone have one of these bad boys yet?

I tested the wisdom of a crowd by opening up comments on the Wisdom of Crowds post. How’d the crowd do? Well, it would have been more interesting had any of the commenters actually read the book. I’ve thought of starting a kottke.org book club where I post what book I’m currently reading, invite others to read along with me, and then have a discussion about the book when we’ve finished reading. I’m not completely sold on the idea for a variety of reasons, but would there be any interest in this?

In response to my problems with MTAmazon, Adam Kalsey, the creator of the plugin, writes in with a possible solution (haven’t tried it yet, so I don’t know). He says it’s a problem with Amazon’s ever-changing API, which makes sense because nothing with my MT install changed to make the plugin break. Thanks to Adam taking the time to help and for making MTAmazon freely available. Amazon’s API aside, it’s one of my favorite plugins.

The DNC bloggers are gearing up to do their thing. (What “thing” that is exactly remains to be seen.) I’m a little irritated about not being there; I didn’t find out that they were letting bloggers into the convention until it was too late to sign up. Sounds like an interesting experience.

Other than that, last week was a hard week. I’m setting up a new server and, after 40+ hours of monkeying around with installation of software and configuring everything, the hard drive threw a wobbly. Luckily I got the data back, and I’m only out a few bucks and a few hours for my trouble. I’ve got it back to where it was (more or less) and am currently working on an rsync-based backup solution before I go any further. From what I’ve seen so far, rsync is quite a cool application.