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This list has some great suggestions. Personally, I suggest games. I’ve spent many an hour staring at the trading screen in Madden 2004 or optimizing my cities in Civ III without once having to look at the Internet. Books are also a good choice, but I usually find I’m not in print-reading mode if I’m noticing the Internet is down. TV, not so good. Using the TV as a substitute for more interactive activities you’d rather be doing tends to lead to lots of fiddling around with the DVR, which can be irritating to those attempting to watch with you. ...

Since I use them as my primary browser and email programs, I should point out that Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7 are now available for download from the Mozilla site. I have noticed a couple of problems with the update feature — which has caused some folks to not be able to use the browser — but I suspect that may be due to site traffic as “us geeks” flood the servers. Seems to be calming down now, though. ...

Watching a display of good fundamentals and team play like the Pistons’ dismantling of the Lakers just makes me want college basketball season to get here more quickly. It was basketball played the Carolina Way. Go Heels!

In Philip Greenspun’s Weblog, he notes he just ran into a family of circus performers where the children were far more well-behaved and polite than others he has met. Since the children were “home-schooled,” Greenspun hypothesizes that spending time with a high percentage of adults might be good for manners. Well, aside from the obvious “It depends on the adults,” I think it would be far more likely in this case that two other factors come into play: social space and professionalism. ...

As you may have noticed if you’ve been alive and in the US the past week, our 40th President passed away recently. I think there was some sort of requirement that if you blogged, you talked about/beatified/criticized/cussed about Reagan at least once this week, which is probably as good an indicator as any what a personal impact his Presidency had on us.

Probably an apt description of blogging. :) BTW, User Friendly is an excellent Web comic.

I’ve never quite understood a particular behavior when I’m working with outside vendors: Silence. Particularly when a project is nearing deadline. I want to hear the good news, the bad news, and the no news. I want to hear solid facts, informed commentary, wild guesses, and off-the-wall opinions (although it helps if those are labeled as such). I want to hear everything, even at the risk of being flooded by information, because I can’t walk over and stand in the vendor’s cube to find out what’s going on like I can with people in my building. ...

While I heard the arguments that the Iraq war caused Libya’s leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to renounce terrorism, I’m really hoping not that many people bought it. Do old dictators reform that easily? Has assassination fallen by the wayside as a means of continuing policy (or just grudges)? Sounds like it’s alive and well… ( NY Times link, registration required) Anyway, I seem to remember not too long ago we were once again debating the efficacy of assassination as a tool of our own foreign policy. ...

I know, it’s really soon after his death, but the Bush/Zombie Reagan ticket is hard to pass up. Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

One brief moment of paralysis, right after you open a blog, seems to be “What’s important enough to be the first post? What momentous thing is going on in the world?” Well, there are a lot of momentous things happening, but I have to say the one article I’ve read lately that absolutely fascinated me is this one, about Josef Stalin’s movie habits. Any article that mentions Stalin, Scorsese, and Eszterhas in the same sentence has to be worth reading. That, and Khrushchev talking to John Wayne about an assassination attempt. ...