Joel Spolsky weighed in two days ago with a vicious attack on Microsoft’s Passport technology, but while I tend to agree with Joel’s writing, this one sparked a flame in me. His fear seems to be of a much broader phenomenon, that of customer data warehousing, and I can’t see how it specifically applies to Microsoft.

Ummmm…. I want this job. WOW, would that satisfy a big life goal of mine.

I guess Napster’s down by now… (Wait, CNN is now breaking in with news that the injunction has been stayed.)

Darryl Strawberry, troubled outfielder for the New York Yankees, is having a very, very bad week.

Excellent quote out of this month’s talk magazine issue, in an article by Christopher Caldwell on the loss of pleasure in America:

Still, our happiness is protected in the Declaration [of Independence]. What is there to protect our pleasures? Nothing — which is as it should be. It’s the essence of pleasure to be un-protected. Happiness is to pleasure as phone sex is to sex, as chat rooms are to chat, as virtual reality is to reality. Happiness is about control; pleasure is about discovery. Happiness is about allocation of resources; pleasure is about forgetting, if only for a moment, that such allocation is necessary. Happiness is long-term; pleasure is now.

From Heather comes a particularly pathetic story of office politics, Aeron chairs, and the unfairness of it all. The sad thing is that it’s trumpeted as specifically a dotcom office politics thing, when anyone who’s worked at any big company can tell you that this crap happens everywhere. Window offices, cubes oriented this way versus that way, guest chairs, distance from the copy machine… people can be superbly petulant when they want to be.

It looks like the West Nile virus is invading Boston now. Today’s Grand Rounds at the hospital was on West Nile, by the city epidemiologist who received the original phone call last year reporting the first suspicious encephalitis case in Queens, the case which first alerted authorities that there was a strange outbreak in New York City. She made it sound like last summer was a pretty wild ride for the city public health groups, the CDC, and even the FBI (who obviously had to look into any possible deliberate release angle).

Wow. A mother has spent the last seven years in jail, accused of sodomizing her seven year-old son. At the time, she claimed that the family pit bull had done it; nobody believed her, even after the dog’s semen was found inside the boy. Now, the boy is offering to testify on his mother’s behalf, saying that her story is true. Weird.

If you plan to see the movie Coyote Ugly (I have no clue why people want to see it), there’s a tribute page to the real Coyote Ugly bar, by a patron who seems to be way too excited about his NY bar experience.