Talk about Txting
The census numbers are in. The results are staggering and disturbing. People are... sending text messages.
It is always entertaining to watch a behavior such as text messaging develop over years, firmly embed itself in culture then all the sudden bust into the media. Recently, we've had a one-two punch of no-texting-while-driving legislation and census figures. Pundits have gone mad with opinion and analysis.
As with most new trends, the general feel that's being cultivated around the media's latest insight into humanity is one of apprehension and fear. I understand where this protectionist mindset comes from, because I feel it to. But I think it's rather dumb because it doesn't comprehend that this is a new form of communication that is evolving as people use it. It hasn't played itself out yet.
I, for one, am more excited to see a decade down the road what we're going to be doing with texting and other new forms of communication than I am afraid of what it is doing to us.
BostonPHP Podcast discusses JQuery, barackobama.com, High Traffic of Facebook, et al
BostonPHP has some great podcasts in their archives. Among the notable are two covering JQuery, a conversation with one of the folks behind barackobama.com and a talk by a guy from Facebook covering strategies for 'high traffic' php sites (including how they deliver billions of images per day, obscene stuff.) Listening to people talk through code doesn't exactly lead you to mastery, but it does lay some broad conceptual strokes and ranks among the highest forms of nerdy enjoyment.