I don't think I'd ever have the chutzpah[1. Perhaps not the right word choice for a story about the Hezbollah...] to do this. A great piece by Mitchell Prothero.

We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.

The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.

As my eyesight returns and readjusts to the dim arena light, I poke out from my position behind a low cinder-block wall. Two large men in green jumpsuits are bearing down on me. I have them right in my sights, but they seem unfazed—even as I open fire from close range, peppering each with several clear, obvious hits. I expect them to freeze, maybe even acknowledge that this softie American journalist handily overcame their flash-bang trickery and knocked them out of the game. Perhaps they’ll even smile and pat me on the back as they walk off the playing field in a display of good sportsmanship (after cheating, of course).

Instead, they shoot me three times, point-blank, right in the groin.

An American man, with no legs, has reached the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro by walking to the top on his hands.

Inspirational.

MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after "MP3" entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one's music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience.

Enter Winamp, the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that "really whips the llama's ass." In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million—and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge.

Winamp's 15-year anniversary is now upon us, with little fanfare. It’s almost as if the Internet has forgotten about the upstart with the odd slogan that looked at one time like it would be the company to revolutionize digital music. It certainly had the opportunity.

Who among us didn't use WinAMP before we all had iPods? I remember carefully editing my ID3 tags, crafting playlists for my Cybiko and, of course, building my own skins.¹ This is a must-read article by Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica for three reasons. First, it's a happy tale of an entrepreneur building something for themselves, really sweating the details to make it perfect and becoming a huge success for it. Second, it's a sad tale of how Nullsoft's decline correlated with that of AOL.² Third, and most importantly, the story ends with a reminder of just how powerful the international markets can be. Any developer building something that's intended for the mass market needs to be building support for other languages and cultures into their apps.

I'm currently on a lifetime abstention from McDonalds, but even I must admit my stomach growled a little bit after watching them craft that burger. My favorite part is ever-so-slight injection of ketchup and mustard into the front of the burger.

I like to keep a copy of every photo I've taken with an iPhone synced to my phone, mostly because there have been multiple times when I want to show somebody something I've taken with my camera phone and I've been bit in the butt because it's not on there. I do this by making smart folders that correspond to each phone, so I have folder for iPhone 2G Photos, one for iPhone 3GS photos and one for iPhone 4S photos. After a recent trip to Europe, I glanced at the photo count in each of those folders, and, well, look for yourself:

• iPhone 2G Pictures: 893
• iPhone 3GS Pictures: 955
• iPhone 4GS Pictures: 1,173
  

For a little fun, why don't we break it down by average photos per day:

• iPhone 2G: 893 photos / 801 days = 1.11 photos per day
• iPhone 3GS: 955 photos / 778 days = 1.23 photos per day
• iPhone 4GS: 1162 photos / 194 days = 5.99 photos per day
  

To be fair, I've used my camera a lot more in the last few months due to multiple factors that may not have existed while owning my other phones (trips to Jamaica/Europe, social media requirements for my job, etc.) But I consider myself to be a camera nerd and I would not be using this camera for those purposes if I didn't think they took adequate-looking photos (which, let's face it, the definition of adequate is a lot different for me than it is for your average iPhone user).

"We are not saying we want to be given anything," says resident Kathy Goss. "We found our own potential solutions and we are willing to pay what it takes to get the hardware installed."

If the target audience for your app/video/network/website is "everybody", then you have to keep people like this in mind. Just because they live in the middle on nowhere doesn't mean they are A) stupid or B) poor. They, very simply, might just lack the resources to have a high-speed internet connection.

It wasn't too long ago that we all were trapped by 56k connections. Hell, it was only 2006 that I had to leave my computer on overnight to download a CD, and that was a paltry 50 megabyte download. Today, you have websites serving up 150 megabyte video downloads or serving all their graphics as 3 megabyte JPEGs.

I try to remember those days as best I can while designing websites today. Get your users to the content as fast as humanly possible. Then go ahead and add all your HTML5 gobbledy-goo.

Here’s something no one has stopped to consider: Maybe making movies is too damn expensive. Or rather, far more expensive than it needs to be.

After SOPA and PIPA, Hollywood now looks like a dinosaur, and as out of touch as someone trying to kill the radio or home video cassettes. Venture capital firms are actually now actively looking to fund companies with the aim of dismantling the industry, as the current model of movie making seems outdated. The internet is producing a talented crop of filmmakers working on shoestring budgets, hungry to get themselves noticed.

Perhaps A-list actors do not need multi-multi-million dollar salaries when there are thousands of hardworking amateurs trying to get noticed. Perhaps not every graphic novel and board game needs $100M or $200M thrown at it in order to become a feature film when there are hundreds of creative, original screenplays that get tossed in the trash. Perhaps you don’t need to spend an additional $100M marketing a movie when everyone is fast-forwarding through commercials and has AdBlock on their browsers.

The most baffling thing about the entertainment industry today is that by being so scared of totally collapsing, they are just standing still while the ground under their feet collapses.

It's almost election season, and I'm hoping that the ads this year will be up to the ... caliber ... of the following spots:

I think both of them needed more gunfire.

I love this. Rich Eisen, NFL Network anchor, runs the 40 yard dash every year at the Combine.

I won't give away the result, but be sure to watch both videos, especially the second one, which un-ironically analyses his performance against other Combine participants.

A lot of the articles and videos I've come across lately are about being productive at work and how to really get work done.

I read an article by Michael "Rands" Lopp about setting aside one hour a day to just sit in silence and create something.

It meshed up very well with this video by Jason Fried, who hypothesizes that work operates in cycles, much like sleep.

In order to achieve "a good night's sleep," you have to go through several stages of sleep. If you're interrupted, you have to start back at the beginning.

So it is with work.

God knows I'm guilty of spending 12 minutes on a project, only to hop over to Facebook and see that, once again, nothing has changed.

I'm going to issue myself a personal challenge. I want to see if, for the next week, I can spend 30 minutes a day with my cell phone turned off, my email client closed, and my social media sites logged out.

For 30 minutes, I will do nothing but edit or program. I will ignore all others (sorry Shannon) and fully immerse myself in a given task.

I'm sure there's no such thing as a "paleo diet" for working, but I bet this is a good first step in that direction.