And be a hot woman. My August issue of Wired arrived yesterday. Influenced by the advice of Copyblogger's "How to be Interesting" post I perused the cover story on Julia Allison.  Copyblogger's tip #8 on being interesting was "Show a (half) naked woman."  Other good tips in the post, but the half-naked Julia Allison on the Wired magazine cover seemed to support Copyblogger's thesis.  The Wired story was all about how to successfully promote yourself on the Internet like Julia Allison did.  While I have never heard of Julia Allison, she was half-naked on the cover, so I had to at least read the article's "5 Ways to Be Like Julia" sidebar.  The first was "It's not who you know, it's who you're next to," which advised posting pics with well-known people like Allison did to make yourself look like an established personality, whether the celebrities you pose with know who you are or not.  The best tip was the last, "Be a hot woman with an exhibitionist streak."  I'm really, really close on that one.

Web Designer Wannabe Playground. Here's a site that Web Designer Wannabe's and hacks (like me) might enjoy.  htmlPlayground, where you can select an XHTML tag, then manipulate attributes to view their display affect.  Cool client-side javascript, regardless of your Web Designer Wannabe proclivities.

Dan says we should OpenID-the-heck-up. I've liked Telligenti Dan Hounshell for a long time, but even if that weren't the case, his "Adding OpenID to your website in conjunction with ASP.NET Membership" post got me more interested in OpenID than anything I read to date.  OpenID is one of those things that you see in the confines of your geek subscription space and sense it's a good idea, but see little confirmation that it's worth the investment beyond that geeky boundary line. We'll see what Dan has to say about it in the future.

Exploratory on San Francisco's rogue network admin. This is a really fascinating, in-depth article from InfoWorld with a behind-the-scenes look at the Terry Childs issue, the San Fran Network Admin with a 125K annual salary who was recently arrested on four counts of computer tampering and is currently in jail on a $5 million dollar bail.  Apparently someone in San Fran's IT infrastructure shared everything he/she knew with the InfoWorld reporter on the basis of anonymity.  Bottom line, the guy was a brilliant network administrator who single-handedly built the city's FiberWAN network.  He had Cisco's highest level of certification and his network was rock solid.  But he didn't play well with others and was very anal about the ownership of the network. Check this out,  "Later in the e-mail, my source offered some insight into what may be at the core of the issue: Childs was so paranoid about the security of the network that he even refused to write router and switch configs to flash, which would mean that if the device was powered off, all configurations would be lost."  That's pretty extreme, but most of you reading this, like me, can identify with the motives of Childs in protecting his baby.  My immediate impression was that his IT managers definitely let things get out of hand and should be fired immediately.  Childs doesn't generate a lot of sympathy in the post comments which are worth a read (Dear Reader, beware of InfoWorld popups on the previous link--InfoWorld needs to get a clue...) and while I mostly agree with the comment that started with, "Put the asshole away..." I can see Childs's side of it, too.

And the best movie of the year is... "All Quiet on the Western Front" released in 1930.  I know Heath Ledger's performance in Dark Knight is getting rave reviews, but I personally don't give a shit about some performance by some actor who killed himself.  Calloused and unpopular, I know.  Too bad.  Which reminds me of a line from "My Favorite Year" with Peter O'Toole where he's drunk and dangling by a rope beneath a balcony where a party of intellectuals is going on.  One guy standing on the balcony says to the other "Alan Swann is below us!"  The other guys says, "Of COURSE Alan Swann is below us.  He's an actor!"  Back to "All Quiet on the Western Front," this movie is gripping and soul-wrenching, even though it was created in 1930, almost 80 years ago.  The delusions of war's romance replaced by so much dirt and so much death.