rw:
Make a little birdhouse in your soul (flickr-random) [blog]
Dozens of new Unstoppable FilingTechniques (mnftiu-confusing)
Upbeatish PostSecret (1pg w/pix) [upbeatish]-I love that, seeing the reflective tht mvmt
Lap desk $9 shipped (DN-Brylane)
Crescent shape Board sits securely on the arms of a chair, with two elasticized bands to hold papers in place

Scary stats on comment-spam (Wkbnch-vshort)
To give you an idea of how bad the problem is becoming on weblogs, this site has received 13,445 comments in the last 21 days, and 13,188 of them were comment spam, even though I have manually blocked 4,737 IP addresses because they were used for spam.

London department store plans private shoplifter-jail (AP via Ali)
Metropolitan Police said they were in early negotiations for the construction of jail cells at the Selfridges store’s flagship Oxford Street location in London. Under the plan, 10 cells would be constructed by converting old employee offices into detainment centres.

Google spots 15yo's blog, hires him as telecommuter (Inews via Unoff)
Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw's in Google's beta e-mail service, "Gmail". Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student's blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta's expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.

Examples where more choices caused frustration (Cnet-short)
Those who live in North America and Western Europe have more options in terms of food, careers, consumer items and everything else, said Barry Schwartz, Swarthmore professor and author of "Why Less is More."
A tour of his own grocery store underscored the mind-numbing degree of choice today, he said. There, he found 175 salad dressings, not including oils and vinegars, and 285 types of cookies.
Studies back this up. In a grocery store experiment, a table loaded with 24 types of jams got many visitors, but sales were ten times higher when only six jams were offered. In a study of the 401K plans at 1,500 companies, participation in retirement plans dropped 2 percent every time ten more investment choices were added to the mix. In speed dating, participants had a greater chance of hooking up if they met six, rather than twelve, people in a session.
The solution, he said, could be intelligent filters and better-engineered defaults. With retirement plans, that means that people would be automatically signed up for a program. Today, at most companies, people have to actively choose to participate. Reducing choice for consumers could be thought of as "Libertarian Paternalism," a somewhat ominous-sounding concept coined by another academic. Interestingly, the speech was pitched at a room full of execs and venture capitalists that spend their time concocting the next big thing.

Julia Stiles Slams Hollywood 'Airhead' Lolita Culture(Fem1st-short)
She explains, "I grew up with Madonna and other female icons who were sexual, but they owned it, they were in control and they had the brains to back it up. ... It's not even so much a feminist issue for me; It's more of an artistic issue - it's an empty product."

ChgoTrib counter-stalks the CIA (E&P) [orig] [crit] [fdl] ny lkd @.