• Goodbye Microsoft, Hello Facebook – an employee’s farewell letter and advice for Microsoft employees. Almost all of it is applicable to non-MS staff.
• I like Tumblr’s interface, but I dislike that there is no comment system. I’m still contemplating switching back to my WordPress install now that I have writing inertia.
• I’ve been toying around with doing a series of blog posts on links I see between some Buddhist philosophy and Agile / Lean approaches to software. I don’t really want to publish them without making sure the ideas are well fleshed out, but I’m working on it.
• Almost 20 years on, I still love games from the SNES era. I’m currently working my way through a few Japanese RPGs that have relatively recently been fan translated.

I hope all of my Vancouver readers are enjoying the snow!

• Ze Frank’s Guide to Quantitative Easing

I’m an armchair economist at times, and I love a good Jon Stewart-style political mocking. In this video (a take-off of the iPhone 4 v. Evo 4g video that was popular a while back), we are introduced to the concepts behind quantitative easing. It’s pretty funny and worth a watch if you know anything about the banking system.

• Breaking The Web’s Cooking Jar (Coding Horror)

Jeff Atwood is a bright guy, and I love a programmer who knows how to convey technical topics (both simple and complex) to non-technical users. In this post, he discusses Firesheep, a Firefox plugin that has trivialized session stealing. He describes what’s going on, why it’s not a lot different than what’s been possible for 15 years, and what you can do about it.

• Deadly Terrorism Happened Before 9/11 (Salon)

This Salon article does a good job comparing the terrorism events of the past (and the reaction to them) to the knee-jerk, over-reactions of today. An interesting read if you’re the type that grumbles about not being able to bring a 200mL bottle onto a plane (while being allowed to bring ten 100mL bottles), or if you think that security should have less of a theatrical component.

It’d be interesting to see if they tried this out in a few stores and found substantially improved results. Hopefully they didn’t miss the “Check” and “Act” sections of PDCA.