In lieu of original thought, here are a few links.

My Heritage, you can upload a photo of yourself and it will attempt to match you up to the celebrity you resemble. I purportedly resemble Ernest Borgnine & Willie Nelson. Seriously, my self esteem may never recover from this. [Link courtesy of Amy & DailyCandy]

Immigration has been in the news lately. While reading an article about a congressman from my home state in the NY Times, I came across this great quote.

I love that quote. I wish I could naturally talk like this. It reminds me of when Dan Rather saying “He beat him like a rented mule.” on election night a few years ago.

Check out this field of 180,000 clay figurines. This is the kind of art that moves me.

If you like flickr, and I know you do, you might be interested in Preloadr, which has a helpful image processing and uploading toolkit for flickr. It’s not going to replace Gimp anytime soon, but if you’re on the road it might come in handy.

If you want to sample some free music you might want to check out CC Hits, a neat little mash-up app from ning.com. BTW, Tim O’Reilly did a really nice write up about ning.com recently. Mix the idea of ning.com with this nugget from Microsoft, “Being a developer “on someone’s platform” may ultimately mean running your app in their data center, not just using their APIs.” (Operations: The New Secret Sauce) and you may be able to understand the new web.

I have been completely hooked on Craig’s List recently. It’s not the “furniture” or “sublets” section it’s the “Missed Connections” section. These little notices amuse me to no end. They ads are a little stalkerish, more than a little self centered, quite shallow and occasionally very amusing. Most recently I was amused by the post where someone is looking for their lost youth. I find it both creepy and endearing that people think they can find love in the want ads after seeing someone for a few seconds at a stop light or at the deli counter of the local Kowalski’s.

Here are some random bits for your web surfing pleasure. 

Aras wrote up a nice bit on his recent jury experience.

Here are some instructions on "How To Make A Hip End of the Year ‘Best Albums’ List". Whenever I make up a list like that I worry, will my friends think I’m cool after they read this list? Did I have at least on obscure hipster title in the list? Then I remember, they already know the truth — the indie movie or unknown cd in my list can’t possibly begin to fix my image.

This guy, Harry Eng, put a lot of impossibly sized, weird stuff into bottles. 

Microsoft Research has been putting out some interesting software lately. Groupbar is pretty cool. It allows you to create these application groups you can save and then restore later. In the end I don’t need yet another task bar. Snarf worked fine, but didn’t answer all the questions I have about my email corpus. The thread view is pretty cool. I don’t know why Outlook isn’t as slick in that regard. I really want to try the virtual wi-fi software. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Why do we rename really shabby streets after Martin Luther King? Here is a flickr pool of photos of different streets named after Dr. King. Here is a little more info about this project.

Worst analogies ever. 

Every once in a while I cough up a list of links for your browsing pleasure. Enjoy.

I love this amazing paper model of a V-8 engine. I admire the discipline, exactitude and obsessive-compulsiveness that goes into a work of art like this. I’m quite sure there is medicine for this, but I’m glad it wasn’t used.

I’ve seen a few cool t-shirts lately. I especially like this one for bird watchers.

If you were thinking God had it in for New Orleans, you were wrong, it was Japanese Yakuza. 

If you thought you had every known accessory for your iPod, think again. It’s the music that is making me smile, honest.

This smiley jewelery would make a nice Christmas gift for your favorite IM’er. 

I like Cringley’s speculations about Google, seems plausible to me. 

The Religious Policeman takes on racism in the Magic Kingdom. 

Seems like these water toys might be fun in the summer and help me avoid the flu in the winter if I could just wedge it through the hallway at work.

Dave pointed me towards the WikiTravel site for Minneapolis. I think it’s missing a lot of information. Time to create an account and add your favorite Minneapolis haunts.

… and btw Dave thanks for pointing me to the salmon flavored soda. I do appreciate the occasional disgusting link.

C.S. pointed me to an amusing list of unfortunate urls. The worst one I think is http://www.molestationnursery.com/. Don’t worry it’s work safe, it’s not what you think.

So I saw a few clever people were playing with this “yourname needs” meme. Simply plug in “yourname needs” into your search engine of choice and find out what you need.

Here is what google thinks “Tim needs”.

1. theme music
2. your help
3. a shirt
4. to know that his actions are going to land him in the gutter…
5. to succeed
6. an elevated stage with a minimum
   size of 8 feet & a patch into the main or house system …
7. to enable javascript
8. approving by Sheralee
9. to remain as Majority Leader
10. to climb out of
    his VW bus and build a house in Honduras… or Pakistan

I can’t wait to find out what yahoo and msn think I need.

Here is a link to a great little essay on distractions both wide and narrow. I totally agree with the writer, Paul Ford. Sitting with my moleskine, the antithesis of technology, is often much more productive than the fully featured desktop where items are constantly popping out of the corner threatening to distract me. (BTW, I have to say I love the design of his website even if the navigation is a little odd.)

A clever design company, noting that one almost never sits and cooks at the same time built a combination stovetop/chair. Check it out.

I know the breathless 90′s with the hype about the web is over. Something special still happened; buried under the hype a kind of human freedom that is still being explored and discovered was born. Check out Kevin Kelly’s article in a recent edition of Wired for more thoughts on this topic.