Here's Oliver Willis with 20 Ways To Bring “The Wire” To Your Office. My favorites are:

2. Whistle “the farmer in the dell” as you walk between cubicles.
3. Show pride in your job via bad grammar
eg. “I’se real web developer.”
3a. Lament the lameness of your office in comparison to everyone else.
eg. “I wish I worked for a real accounts payable department”
20. When in doubt, just kill someone. That always seems to work.

Plus here are 3 links about actor Michael Kenneth Williams who played Omar Little. He's in 'The Road' which appears to be apocalyptically awesome. A profile, A Q&A, and a handy post summarizing both of them.

Thanks Karmie and Kerry.

I'll never get over how much Omar Epps looks like Mike Tomlinson. And yet, they only made #2 on this list. Strange

Ken Auletta from the New Yorker wrote a book about Google, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It” and before he published it, he cut the last chapter of 25 media maxims. Click the link above to read the chapter, or see below to see them in cribbed form. You might recognize the first maxim from Steve Jobs' Stanford graduation address (video below via AllThingsD)

1. “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
2. Passion Wins
3. Focus is Required
4. Vision is Required
5. A Team Culture is Vital
6. Treat Engineers as Kings
7. Treat Customers Like a King
8. Brand Often Means Trust
9. Every Company is a Frenemy
10. The Speed Of Change Accelerates
11. Adapt or Die
12. “Life is long but time is short.”
13. A “Free” Web Is Not Always Free
14. Digital is Different
15. Don’t Think of The Web as Another Distribution Platform
16. Technology Provides Potent New Targeting Tools
17. The Web Forges Communities, and Threatens Privacy
18. Beware The Government Bear
19. Paradox:The Web Forges Both Niche and Large Communities
20. More Media Concentration, Yet More Choice
21. Luck Matters
22. No More Old Media Magic
23. No More New Media Magic, Either
24. Don’t Ignore the Human Factor
25. There are no Certitudes

Mashable put together their list of the top 9 internet memes of 2009. I can't tell if they were presented in order or not, but this isn't the order I would have presented them in if so. There was so much noise in their post that I simplified the list to just a link each. Anything missing?

As far as excitement on the internet, I'm not sure #3, #4, or #5 belong with the others on this list. #6 doesn't either, but it was a truly awesome internet moment.

#1 David After Dentist
#2 Susan Boyle
#3 United Breaks Guitars
#4 Three Wolf Moon T Shirt
#5 Baby Dancing to Beyonce
#6 JK Wedding Entrance Dance
#7 Christian Bale's Meltdown
#8Balloon Boy
#9Kanye West at the VMAs

Rotten Tomatoes does the work of naming the 100 worst movies of the last decade. I thought I watched a lot of crappy movies (I watch them so you don't have to), but I've seen surprisingly few of these. And even better, I don't think I liked any of the ones I had seen. It's redemptive.

Thanks to the Telegraph UK for this list of 50 things that are being killed by the internet. Thanks also to them for posting this list on one page instead of as a slide show. I hate when people do that.

My favorites below, and also, #1 is a doozy.

9) The myth of cat intelligence
The proudest household pets are now the illiterate butts of caption-based jokes. Icanhasreputashunback?
42) The nervous thrill of the reunion
You've spent the past five years tracking their weight-gain on Facebook, so meeting up with your first love doesn't pack the emotional punch it once did.

Via Fimoculous.

Well, hell, we all make mistakes. And we all love a good list. My favorite is #7.

1. Failure to recognize or take seriously the scarcity of resources.
2. Mistaking strategic goals for strategy.
3. Failure to recognize or state the strategic problem.
4. Choosing poor or unattainable strategic goals.
5. Not defining the strategic challenge competitively.
6. Making false presumptions about one's own competence or the likely causal linkages between one's strategy and one's goals.
7. Insufficient focus on strategy due to such things as trying to satisfy too many different stakeholders or bureaucratic processes.
8. Inaccurately determining one's areas of comparative advantage relative to the opposition.
9. Failure to realize that few individuals possess the cognitive skills and mindset to be competent strategists.
10. Failure to understand the adversary.

Thanks, Dave!

Updated to add:
While I noted it to Dave, I should have mentioned it here, as well. This list should have 11 points, the last being Vizzini's rule of never starting a land war in Asia. That one's so obvious.

...And Some I'm Glad I Didn't.

Last night, Facebook allowed users to grab user names, vanity URLs for the masses! Here's a list of names grabbed last night that would have been fun to have, and some that wouldn't be. All mixed together. There's the dorky, the profane, the regrettable. And yet, it's surprising the number of awesome vanity URLs leftover. Makes me think there just aren't THAT many people that care THAT much about the internet. If you haven't grabbed a name for yourself yet, go get one.

Props to this thread on Reddit for some of these. If you've got anymore, send them in or post in comments, and I'll add them.

default.aspx
twitterisbetter
georgebush
shitbag
cockface
leroyjenkins
myspaceisbetter
irony
cokehead
terabyte
myspaceyom
settings.aspx
twilightfan
cockgoblin
openbsd
prick
dirtbag
stoner
911wasaninsidejob
defaultuser
kernel
megabyte
dirtyslut
dudebro
minix
404error
twitterrocks
freebsd
uglyduckling
hippy
hipster
druggie
Subscribe to RSS Follow us on Twitter

Notes:
-iusetwitter, irony, and goddamn go to the Facebook Homepage. Maybe they're taken, and the profiles marked private.
-Nice of Facebook to reserve most, if not all, of the common first name only user names. A perk for employees?
-Here are some more winners: Mashable's list of 15 Vanity URLs.
-And here's a list that trumps mine. I should have searched for lists harder before I started exploring Facebook!

Waxy pointed to a question on Metafilter asking What books do people proselytize about and said, "Someone needs to compile this into a list, ordered by mentions." How could I not?

I took every book and author mentioned and compiled a list for both. If a book was listed with an author, this was counted as an entry for the book only. The Metafilter question asked for fiction books only, but this rule wasn't really followed so I counted everything. I did this fast and any errors can be blamed on speed, Drew's Cancer, or both. Finally, it becomes obvious quite quickly, that this list is more about books people don't like, as opposed to books with fanatical fans. This is summed up best by commenter OhHenryPacey, "If this list proves anything it's that assholes are assholes and will be assholes about just about anything or book you'd care to mention." You can't argue with logic like that.

Interesting findings:
-Ayn Rand blew away the competition in the author Category with 11 mentions, while The Celestine Prophecy edged out Harry Potter 8-6 in the Books category.
-There are 124 titles on the Books list and 56 Authors.
-People mentioned Jonathan Livingston Seagull 3 times, spelling the name 3 different ways.
-Twilight had 4 mentions, though I expect this to grow over time.
-Kottke will be happy to note that while Infinite Jest is on the Books list 4 times, David Foster Wallace is not mentioned on the Authors list.
-Looking quickly, Ayn Rand inspires the most assholish proselytizing with a combined score of 16. But what do you expect with a name like Ayn.
-Seriously? The Wizard of Oz? You must not like anything.

Full list below: Read the rest of this entry »

On it's 20th anniversary, Portfolio offers 6 reasons the Game Boy made it, including #1 Tetris and #4 Price.