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I love pencil sketches, draft scripts, internal memos, and test-market product
experiments. JBX is one such test, a slicked-up version of Jack in the Box,
currently instantiated only twice in Jack’s hometown of San Diego. The idea:
better cuisine + shiny décor = yuppie-magnetic fast-food. (Or,
you know, whatever we call Young Urban Professionals now.)

Further reading: JBX
project background, anecdote and photos
(source of above shots), menu scans.

See, this is
why I still like Colin Powell. (Videos here.)

Yahoo! explains its DomainKeys anti-spam
proposal in detail, using pretty pictures. (Basic idea: All
messages will now be PKI-signed by the source MTA; public keys will be
stored in DNS, of all places.)

An interesting side-effect of the protocol as described in the DomainKeys
RFC is that message header order now becomes significant.
Because the headers are signed along with the rest of the message (a crucial
detail, since you want to sign the “From:” header most of all), the spec
explains that any headers that occur before DomainKeys-Signature:
are not included in the signature. (To verify a message, find the
last occurrence of this magic signature header, and then verify the signature
embedded in that header against the computed signature of all
subsequent headers plus the message body.) I don’t know of any other
usage of RFC822/2822 email that places this sort of restriction on header
ordering, and I know for a fact that there are MTAs out there
that aren’t always careful about keeping headers in sequence. (Fortunately
these all seem to be end-user mail apps, but you never know.)

Stream-of-consciousness though they may frequently be,
I have never read a book or an essay by Kurt Vonnegut
that didn’t connect with me in some way. His essay, “Cold
Turkey”, published last week, is no exception.

The best part, the thesis, is quoted below. Unfortunately
it’s also the punchline of sorts, so if you don’t like reading mystery
novels back-to-front you ought probably to just go read the
essay from the beginning.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t like TV news, is it?

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in
a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now
committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re
hooked on.

This came up again at work.

to lie (to tell untruths)

present tense: I lie, I am lying
past tense: I lied, I was lying

to lie (to recline) — intransitive
verb

present tense: I lie down, I am lying
down
past tense: I lay down, I was lying down

perfect past: I have lain on my bed

to lay (to spread something out) —
transitive verb

present tense: I lay the table, I am
laying the table

past tense: I laid the table, I was laying the table
perfect past: I have laid the table

(I feel honorbound to reference my source for this handy table, though it’s not exactly worksafe
reading.)

Seattle’s new public library, designed by Rem Koolhaas. [photo
gallery]

“A gas station in Menlo Park, California, displays a sign that says it
all.” —CNN story