For almost a year, I had sore fingers from using the mouse.  After a day of clicking and wheeling, tips of my index finger (used to press left mouse button) and middle finger (used to press right mouse button and roll mouse wheel) got swollen and I felt pain when I used them.  I usually had to rest my fingers on a cold pack to get the swelling down.

The solution I came up with last night was to put one of those rubbery band-aids over the mouse buttons.  Wow, what a difference they made.  It was like discovering Nike Air after running barefeet my whole life.  Next week, I am going to try one of those shock-absorbing pads for foot.  I wish I can put them on the keyboard too, but labels cause problems.

Gee, I think there might be a market for these sort of things.  Maybe security industry's terror marketing tactic can be used.  If a doctor announced that minute shocks to finger tips through prolonged use of mouse and keyboard can damage fingers irreversibly, millions will rush out to get these finger shock-absorbers.  Woohoo!

Why can't I fast forward most movies?  How about slow-motion then?  Why can't I play a movie with scenes in different order?  Why can't I bookmark movie frames?  Why can't I dub or caption movies with my own dialogue or in some other language and share with others or publish it?  Why can't I write an XML file that creates a new movie out of one or more movies (regardless of location) at playtime?  Why can't I do the same with music like playing Madonna's Beautiful Stranger in some funky way using a file created by my favorite DJ?  What if I want Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct to have different hair color so I can see more clearly when she cross her legs?  Why oh why?

If directors can have their own cuts, why can't I have My Cuts or My Buddies' Cut?  DVD and choices it offers is cool, but its not enough.  If I paid $14.99 for Harry Potter movie, I should be able to see it in other ways than studios intended.  Decentralization is nice, but lets pull the plug on monopoly of presentation too.  Let me dice and chop the bits anyway I want.

I just finished Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance and am now reading Hard-Boiled Wonderland.  His books are void of meaning, but he has an enjoyable way of describing things or feelings.  Here is how he describes plunging into darkness:

"I was a leftover wrapped in black plastic and shoved into the cooler.  For an instant, my body went limp." – Hard Boiled Wonderland

His novels typically feature a thirty-something man having a mid-life crisis in midst of a surreal adventure.  In many of his books, women leave the guy without a word.  Usually its the wife.  Also thirteen year old Japanese girl often appears and tags along for a while with only a teasing trace of lolita.  Similarity of cast gets tiring after a while, but his power of description is unique enough to keep reading.

Someone named Remaale spammed me and my readers via Radio comment facility.  If this sort of thing happens more often, we'll be seeing spam filtering added to blog comment services soon.

Nikolai Filatov, head of Moscow's epidemiological services, told reporters he thought SARS was man-made because "there is no vaccine for the virus, its makeup is unclear, it has not been very widespread, and the population is not immune to it." – SFGate.com

Either Russian interpreters need better training or this is the dummest exhibition of logic I have encountered.

Marc Canter is probably like the guy who saw the Bering land bridge form and yelled "Hey, guys!  Lets go across!"  He joined LinkedIn and invited 50 people.  I am too lazy to do that.  Its too much work to think about who I know, whether I should invite them, and to find and type in information.  LinkedIn should make it easier to invite.

One way to make it really easy to invite people is to leverage the informal network already formed in Blogland: blogrolls, links, trackbacks, and comments.  Given my blog's URL, a list of candidates for invitation should come up.  Even if some of them already joined, I want to know about it.  Best way to form new network is to add them in natural groups so they can support each other.  Come on Reid, this is no brainer.  Just swallow the whole Blogland a juicy cluster at a time!

A tip on subscription-based revenue model: make it free for and offer extra goodies to Connectors (as in Tipping Point).  This is how hunters catch whole herds.

I just joined LinkedIn, a Ryze-like serviced founded by Reid Hoffman, former COO of Paypal.  What I can't figure out is the revenue model for companies like Ryze and LinkedIn.  I had a similar social network-based business idea for a while, but it was limited to specific industries and groups of people and had a per-project profit sharing.  LinkedIn and Ryze are more general so I don't know how peer-pressure for profit sharing can be applied here.

UPDATE: According to Joi Ito, Reid was not the COO of Paypal, but an EVP which I assume stands for Executive VP of something.  *shrug*  I still don't think there is any money to be made there.  In fact, I don't think there is anything of substance in so called social software.  Hype and rush will leave the market severely fragmented and no critical mass for anyone.  I maybe proven otherwise, but that is my view at this time.

Based on Washington Post articles (1, 2, 3, 4), The Nature Conservancy (TNC) smells like something that started with good intentions and then got swamped by carpet baggers.  Apparently, they interpreted the word "conserve" literally: to keep up and reserve for personal or special use.  Buying land using people's donation and then drilling for oil is ridiculous.  I'll bet Bush would be their dream CEO.

Their network of websites gives an entirely different picture, although I can't help notice that they look very well and expensively done.  I hope every one who took part in those "not illegal" deals get nailed to the wall.  I am going to tell everyone I know to avoid TNC like the plague.

People are looking at Wiki again, probably due to popularity of blogging.  My take on Wiki is that there are some good ideas in Wiki, but there are severe inherent weaknesses that usually leads to an ever growing pile of mess.

Peter Morville wrote about Trust by Design, a key component of Wiki, but fails to mention the downsides:

• Difficulty of evolving Wiki content due to social and structural constraints
• Inconsistent quality, style, and direction

If Blog is an one-mensional animal with a single continuous stream of consciousness, Wiki is a N-dimensional animals with many segmented strands of consciousness.  While the two are related on the surface, they are two very different beasts.

UI-wise, Wiki is like a fun house for cheery gully dwarves, endless interconnected rooms with five-feet high ceiling and no housemaids.  Think neck pains and perma-mess.

I use Radio and like it for the most part.  What I don't like is its tendency to depend too much on UserLand servers.  I don't mind generated pages with static resources from busy servers (i.e. W3C, UserLand), because I can replace them with my own copies.  What I am concerned about are dynamic contents pulled from UserLand servers, particularly the comments.

UserLand servers are usually dependable and speedy, but occasionally they are not available (like now).  When Radio comment service is down readers can't access the comments.  Once posted, comments are static content which can be stored locally as XML and HTML files as well as being embedded in RSS files.  Only the comment posting service need to be handled by UserLand servers since many Radio sites don't have CGI capabilities.