• Macworld: Feature: I will be smarter about how I handle e-mail - Tips on more secure email, handily graded by "Security" and "Hassle."
• Coding Horror: A Visual Explanation of SQL Joins - This makes so much more sense to me when explained with Venn diagrams. I want Venn diagrams for everything.
• TTB #25 - 09/16/07 at The Teen Tech Buzz - In which I am interviewed by my teen pals, Aaron and Austen (each of whom are younger than several coffee mugs that I regularly use)
• Macworld: Mac OS X Hints: Hand-code Smart Folders - "So this hint is intended to share some info about how to modify the 'code' in the saved search to get what you want." I wish I could hand-code something to make Spotlight's UI work better for me. (Did I say that out loud?)
• The Office Collar: Mind Your Own Business - Geekologie - Maybe I spend too much time in the internet's less savory neighborhoods, but this really has the feel of "pony play" [PNSFW] to me. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Offices can get pretty boring. Here, have a carrot, Ol' Paint.
• 41 Reasons Why Your Blog Probably Sucks - I'd make #42 "'Writing' naught but Digg-y list posts whose headline starts with a numeral and is followed by a plural noun." Heck, I'd probably go ahead and just add that one reason eight more times -- I mean, you know: so you can make it a nice, round, super-useful "50." Yes, that might help countless blogs not to "probably suck."

Enter the Octagon

Here’s an experimental new feature: The Throwdown. Take a problem that lots of people face and tell us your personal favorite way to deal with it — in as much detail and with as much persuasion as you can muster.

Today, a lot of us are living on two or more Macs -- which is great, except for the challenge of keeping the contents and settings of multiple machines effortlessly in sync.

Now before you pop in, holler "dot mac," and jump back on your Segway®, consider that many folks (including your author) are looking for a lot more than simple document syncing and perfunctory preference sharing. How about if your needs are more nuanced:

The fate of human memory

Clive Thompson writes on a phenomenon I think about constantly: if you really do start entrusting all your ephemeral memory work to external systems, might your wetware start to atrophy?

Apparently, yes:

You've probably heard the advice to photocopy your wallet's contents; in the event that you lose your wallet, this makes it easy to know what you need to cancel and replace. Smart.

I recently received a new credit card and had forgotten what a hassle it is to change the info across all my various online accounts. Here's a few suggestions based on things I did this time around that should make it easier (or at least more interesting) the next time this happens.

I sometimes think that one factor in success as a business or as a human being has a lot to do with what kind of problems you're comfortable solving -- and how you get better at addressing the stuff that falls outside that comfort zone.

History is littered with revolutionaries who couldn't run the country they'd overthrown, Generals who've insisted on re-fighting the last war, talented programmers who were promoted to becoming ineffective (and very unhappy) managers, and, of course, there's the countless companies that just couldn't make the leap when technology or cultural change rendered their comfy old business model moot.

Seems like there's a thread here that's worth thinking about.

How do you get better at knowing when you’re trying to solve the wrong problem?