...like myself. From a professional truck driver, rules of the road to remember when driving around truckers. Some of them apply to all driving situations, such as "you are not as good a driver as you think you are," "SUVs are not suits of armor," and my favorite, "If you've been cruising blithely along in the left (or center, on a three-lane highway) lane for a half-hour or so, please consider moving the fuck over, you selfish ass-pirate." (I almost spewed soda all over my monitor when I read that one.)

Jill Walker: Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web, a very cool paper presented in June 2002 at the ACM Hypertext conference in Baltimore. The paper argues for a "political economy" of value created by links.

Whereas most valuation models for the web start from the advertising assumptions that impressions (views of the ad) are the basis for value, links to sites have value independent of the impression or even the clickthrough value. This is because of Google and other search engines that value the source and target pages of links through the link itself. Links are currency that may give value to giver and recipient: by linking to this article, I share some of my PageRank with it (and vice versa). This makes the article more visible in search engines and therefore more discoverable. How much is that worth???

There are a lot of people talking about this, including Roland Tanglao, and Jim McGee; thanks to Jim for the pointer.

...Richard Milhouse Nixon resigned as president of the United States when it became clear that he was going to be impeached for the Watergate crimes. Despite continuous attempts to claim executive privilege, in the end it became clear that not even the highest office in the land was above the law that it was chartered to uphold.

Is that still true today?

My mom, who continues to be one of the most amazing women I know along with my wife and my sister, turns ... well, discretion forbids. Anyway, it's her birthday, and if you know her drop her a line and wish her well. One of the things that makes me unhappiest about being on this coast is that I can't drop in on her without a lot of advance planning, but I know she and my dad will be throwing a great party tonight before she takes off for my cousin's wedding in Pennsylvania tomorrow. So happy birthday, Mom!