Microsoft to Acquire Teleo, an Internet Phone Company. Microsoft is expected to announce on Wednesday that it is acquiring a San Francisco-based Internet phone company, Teleo, to add features to its MSN Internet portal service. By CHRIS OAKES International Herald Tribune. [NYT > Technology]

Master the art of asking If you want to be an effective communicator, you need more than just communication skills: you need to have something meaningful to say. You can start by 1. Collecting good information, and 2. Taking the extra time and energy to make it relevant to others. You can do both at [...]

App-less Web Apps. This is really cool. 37Signals has a couple neat posts which really struck me this morning. The first one I missed a while ago, App-less web apps and this morning’s ponderings about URLs vs. usernames and passwords. The reason is that I’ve been “working” (i.e. thinking a lot about and doing nothing [...]

Blow your own mind. If you want your brain to stay sharp, you have to work it. “I write complex code every day of the week. That's all the brain exercise I need.” you say. But you're wrong…. [Creating Passionate Users]

Don't hire on the cheap. I’ve recently learned my lesson about hiring workers on the cheap. A friend of mine recommended I hire this guy and his crew to handle some painting and wood stripping/refinishing. The quote came in really low and the time frame wasn’t realistic. Against my best judgement, I went for it [...]

Much of Gulf Coast Is Crippled; Toll Rises. Floodwaters were still rising as much as three inches an hour in parts of New Orleans late Tuesday. By JOSEPH B. TREASTER and N. R. KLEINFIELD. [NYT > Home Page]

The Pacific Institute. Going through my many pages of notes, here are some highlights: – Goals cause us to change what we see, who we talk to, and where we go for information. State (or better yet, write) a goal, and then walk into a bookstore, surf the net, or talk to a stranger in [...]

Mass. high court creates archive of oral arguments. I've written here and here about the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's launch last spring of live webcasts of its oral arguments. Today the court announced that, in addition to the live webcasts, it will provide permanent archives, posted to the Web [Robert Ambrogi's LawSites]

The leap seconds are coming, the leap seconds are coming. Oh, great–first the government mucks with DST, and now leap seconds are back for the first time in 7 years. I was starting to think that we were done with them for good. My timezone is going to have an extra second added at 3:59:60 [...]

Useit.Com: Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents. All these guidelines stem from the same underlying phenomenon: the non-Web documents are native PC formats. These formats have their own applications, each of which gives users a set of commands and navigation options that are completely different than the ones for browsing websites. [Tomalak's [...]