Link Banana

Some people of some repute — Chris Bowers, David Cay Johnston, Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur — think that there’s really no need for Hank Paulson’s $700 billion dollar proposal (or anything like it). I don’t know nearly enough to have anything intelligent to say, but i thought I’d note it.

(via @gruber)

UPDATE (20 minutes later): Also:

• An open letter from economists doubtful of Paulson’s plan.
• Felix Salmon and Ryan Avent answer David Cay Johnston (linked above). (via Yglesias)
• A chart to put the massive size of the proposal in historical context. (via Kevin Drum)

I noticed two interesting things on Google today, so I thought I’d share.

• Google has a new favicon. They’ve switched from the big G to the little one. I like it. (via DF)
• Maps on searches for country names and cities. Now when I want to know where Zambia is, I no longer have click through to Wikipedia to know.

It’s phishing, but only for big fish only.

Thousands of high-ranking executives across the country have been receiving e-mail messages this week that appear to be official subpoenas from the United States District Court in San Diego. Each message includes the executive’s name, company and phone number, and commands the recipient to appear before a grand jury in a civil case.

A link embedded in the message purports to offer a copy of the entire subpoena. But a recipient who tries to view the document unwittingly downloads and installs software that secretly records keystrokes and sends the data to a remote computer over the Internet. This lets the criminals capture passwords and other personal or corporate information.

(via Daring Fireball)

They just passed Wal-Mart.

(via Daring Fireball)

Andy Baio has some good words on the topic of the FAIL meme (typified by The FAIL Blog).

A few years ago, I wrote an entry about knee-jerk contrarians on the Internet: those delightful people who find fault in anything and everything, dismissing months or years of work with a few words.

This is nothing new. It’s as old as communication itself. I’m sure that the moment man discovered fire, there was some guy nearby saying, “Too smoky. Can burn you. Lame.”

(via Daring Fireball)

I know there’ve been a lot of times when I thought this would be useful, and now it exists. A site to tell you if the problem with a certain website is on your end or their’s.

(via Daring Fireball)

Props to John Gruber for finding this. I’ll leave the explanation to him:

Quite a web site for one of the most successful companies in the world. View source to fully enjoy the Adobe PageMill HTML 2.0 love. It’s funny, but I’m not holding it up to mockery. Given Warren Buffet’s homespun keep-it-simple philosophy, somehow this site, ridiculous as it is, seems appropriate.

Portfolio has a pretty neat showcase of the five dollar bill through history, including the newest iteration. They also have some of those compulsary notes about its security features.

(via Daring Fireball)

A perfectly good question. And the answer is: I don’t know.

But I do know that Link Banana is my just-born link blog. I also know that the name was chosen because I have a penchant for odd and off-the-wall names for otherwise serious thing. Probably the clearest — though certainly not only — example of this is that my longer-form blog which is called “Frozen Toothpaste.”

And as that name came like a random shot of lightning at sometime in the past (I don’t remember the moment or day), this one did too. Though I would say that this time I was holding the longest metal rod I could get my hands on. If I had to guess I would say the name came while I made banana bread on this first day of 2008. And it’s coming saved my from naming this “Worth a Link” — an accurate but boring title for this link blog.

I should probably explain what I mean by “link blog,” as the term has little pedigree or precedent. To me, a link blog is not unlike a “tumblelog,” but it is less varied in look and content. The chief content of a “link blog” is, well, the links. Hence, they’re in the title of each “entry.” Probably the purest example of what aesthetic and content you’ll see here is a look at Daring Fireball’s Linked List, though the content will be rather different than that. After all, we’ll be playing with my preferences and sensitivities, not John Gruber’s.

In any case, because Link Banana is a nascent and untraditional blog, some things don’t work quite right yet. This site’s RSS feed is still formatted like the WordPress default, which mean you’ll have to click through to follow any link I proffer. So too is the archive and commenting system not quite as I’d like. And the look will probably be see revision sometime soon.

But if you can accept all those flaws (and I hope you will) please enjoy the content that will soon be on offer from Link Banana. And I wish you a beautiful 2008.