Greg and I are doing part two of our honeymoon this weekend with a visit to Pawleys Island. I’m not sure about the whole “arrogantly shabby” thing, but we’ve never been to a North/South Carolina beach, so it’ll be an adventure. I hope it’s not too cold for swimming.

…I might swim regardless.

• Hill Gardens of Maine – What’s Wrong With My Seedlings? – Awesome article on light and temperature treatment of indoor plants and why seedlings end up spindly and weak (like mine are!).
• Twitter / @Adwoa D. : Political Correctness – Weird to link to something on Twitter here, but I love this statement.
• WikiLeaks: grand jury hearing opens in US – Telegraph – I had no idea that journalists couldn't attend grand jury hearings–that's shitty.
• Who is Osama bin Laden? – Boing Boing – I tend to resist the urge to blame the educational system for things, so some of the comments on this post annoyed me. That said, I hadn't thought about the fact that my own little sister was 2 (count 'em!) when 9/11 occurred. How crazy is that?
• How do you convince the average web user to switch to a non-IE browser? – Nothing incredibly new here, but it does include the following exchange:

  “Why do you use Internet Explorer? Do you know that there are other options for browsers?”, I asked.
  “No, not really. As far as I’m concerned, when I access the internet, I just need to click on the big blue ‘e’ and do a search. I don’t know why I would use anything else.”
  “What does the ‘e’ stand for, Alex?”
  “The ‘e’ stands for ‘internet’”, he replied.

• Lego Apartment – Look at this awesomeness. Everything folds away; it's pretty slick.

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This week’s internet cruising:

• 1995 – I loved me some JNCOs.
• Playing the ‘playing the racism card’ card – "Most of us don't have to bend over backwards not to be seen as racist because we don't go around saying racist things."
• Pigeonnier – Bee-yoo-tiful.
• Jim & Sid’s Tiny Houses – Some of these are so cute!
• Google: Bing Is Cheating, Copying Our Search Results – "Google has run a sting operation that it says proves Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google’s results, then uses that information to improve Bing’s own search listings. Bing doesn’t deny this."
• Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List
• R is for Reliability – "How to handle each type of potential failure is a choice; a choice you may not realize you are making, but a choice nonetheless, and we’ve all made them on all of the projects we’ve worked on, though we’ve probably not thought about it for most of them."

Speaking of 1995, I’ve added an opt-out option for analytics on my about page. No special browser plugin required!

This week’s internet cruising:

• Coding Horror: Trouble In the House of Google – Jeff isn't the first to point out the problems with Google's search results lately (the content mills are clearly winning, and I swim through a lot of mess to get good results anymore), but he's done a lot of due diligence to try to improve Stack Exchange's rankings over the content scrapers, with mixed results. Excellent post.
• Sphinx – A better way to write your docs – This looks like an awesome doc writing/management system–I struggle with how much documentation to produce for the internals of a system (i.e. not a publicly exposed API), but I'd definitely play around with a system like Sphinx.
• Buttersafe – Flowers – Bees’ knees!
• Baptist Press – N.C. court voids same-sex adoption – What? What?! (Warning: Christian news source)

  "'Many homosexuals and their sex partners may sincerely believe they can be good parents. But children are not guinea pigs for grand social experiments in redefining marriage, and should not be placed in settings that are unsuitable for raising children,' Dailey noted in the article. He cited a study in the Netherlands that found the average duration of a homosexual relationship to be 18 months and that 'committed' homosexual couples have an average of eight other sexual partners each year."

• Gay former service members praise Senate vote on ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ – latimes.com – "Carpenter, who comes from a family with a tradition of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, thought that he would make a career in the Marine Corps. But when he fell in love with another Marine pilot, he decided he "couldn't continue living a lie" and left the military as a captain."
• Hawaii-bound, Obama signals his opposition to gay marriage ‘evolving’ – Key quotes:

  "I still believe that it doesn’t make sense for us to provide tax cuts to people like myself who don’t need them when our deficit and debts are growing."

  "With respect to the issue of whether gays and lesbians should be able to get married, [...] my feelings about this are constantly evolving. [...] At this point, what I’ve said is, is that my baseline is a strong civil union that provides them the protections and the legal rights that married couples have. And I think — and I think that’s the right thing to do."

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This week’s internet cruising:

• Lymejello – Wow. Speaking of telling difficult stories. Lyme disease is apparently no joke. I remember seeing the photos in middle school health class–a ringed rash, warnings that it could kill untreated, but not that it was so damned debilitating.
• My Hopebuilders 5k page – Yeah, I'm a punk. Go donate and push me to run. If I meet my fund-raising goal, I'll run it hard.
• Tim Gunn Is A National Treasure – "[W]hen I visit department stores and I go to the shop that’s called “woman,” I am horrified! Horrified by the awful, degrading, disrespectful choices that women have."
• 10 Usability Tips Based on Research Studies – A very nice set of usability tips, including some debunking of common UX myths.
• YouTube vs. Fair Use – Apparently, YouTube is getting amazing at detecting copyrighted content. For better or worse.
• With New Rules In Place, Old Overdraft Gimmicks Under Fire – Ah, the old "reordering debits to maximize overdrafts" game. It's good to see it challenged.
• Ask BFD: How Do I Deal With Compliments On Weight Loss? – Because thinner does not equate to prettier.
• DarkPatterns.org – From Elf, this is a nice little collection of web… scams. Or UI trickery. Or something in between.

This week’s internet cruising:

• A Beginner’s Guide to Website Feedback – If I can wrap up and launch this damn character sheet app, stuff in this post will be handy for when it betas, especially the surveying. I suspect the LARPing audience will be sufficiently… opinionated to speak on it.
• Six Useful CSS3 Tools – Some of these are pretty slick, if you're moving into CSS3 development.
• Sharpening the blade, part MCMXVII: Nine Amazing Hours. – This is incredibly cool, and I plan to use it for a bit and see if it helps me focus.
• Amazing Examples of Paper Art – I almost hate to link to this, in case Greg gets ideas for elaborate projects.
• Python Business Rules Engine – Lott raises a good point about handling complex business rules, in that it's (often) cleaner and simpler to go ahead and incorporate complex business rules into the app itself rather than writing a parser to allow external entry. In my case, I have such a small user base on the side that would have been entering these rules that it's just as fine for me to do a small code release for any games added with these validation rules in them.
• YouTube – Turkish male belly dancer "diva" – Major glitter warning, here. Major. This may be the first male bellydancer I've ever seen who wasn't mocking dancing, and he's very good. I don't like the music or the dissolve and swirling transitions, though. Or the glitter. That's a lot of glitter.
• Amazon S3 and CloudFront with WordPress and DreamHost | .larre – This is quite a cool plugin. Not the quickest to set up with CloudFront, minifying, and combining, but worth the effort, even just for the hell of it.
• Girl quits her job on dry erase board, emails entire office – This is apparently fake, but a cute read anyway. I’d advise against airing dirty laundry like that, though.