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About.com's Shakespeare section has a famous last words quiz up. I'm disappointed that I only got 8 out of 10.

Wherefore art thou, Romeo? (Act 2, Scene 2) is the most popular search engine query that will get you to my Shakespeare blog. So I'm wondering, what exactly is it that people are looking for when they search for that? Do they want the context? Do they want an explanation of what it means? Or something else?

Tell me if you were looking for something specific and didn't find it. If I can provide better Shakespeare info than you're getting elsewhere, I will. At the very least I'll try to make it as accessible and entertaining as I can.

(I also notice in my logs that at least one person hit my viewer pages while searching for Timon of Athens quotes! That's not something you see every day....)

I've started podcasts I'm listening to for two reasons. First, I'm trying to get my friends and coworkers into podcasting and having a single page where they can go for a sample of what I'm talking about is good. And second, I have yet to find a good directory for what's out there, so when I find something I like I want to mark it down. I used to really love ipodder's directory and would check the "What's new" button every day. But that stopped when everybody started titling their podcast with something meaningless (then again, what does "Daily Source Code" mean?)

I'm all set on husband and wife teams, and guys who just ramble about their opinion on technology during the morning commute, thanks. Now I'm looking for actual useful content.

Got any suggestions? Once I get my Windows machine back up and running I'll check them out.

Tim Bray's visit with Buddha. I have nothing to add, I just like such moments, especially when shared with fellow geeks.

You've probably already seen the story about the baby that was thrown from a moving car, only wasn't. Turns out the woman who claims to have found the child was actually the real mom.

This morning I'm sitting here watching it rehashed on the news again (isn't this old? Why is the Today show covering it now?) and thinking, "Why do people do this?"

I'm not talking about throwing a newborn from a moving car, or the fact that we all believed it.

I'm not talking about the mom that made up the story.

I'm talking about the "hundreds of calls" that the police department is getting offering to adopt the child just because they saw the story on the news. If you want to adopt a baby, there are plenty of non famous babies who will never be on television just waiting for a good home. Seriously. Go away. Seeing the story on the news and suddenly deciding that you need a child in your life is no qualification for handing it over.

Major credit to the Today Show for actually pointing this out. The woman on the news this morning even said, "We'd like to remind people that there are hundreds of babies in Broward County waiting to be adopted..."

Personally, I'm a Linux geek. But I keep a Windows machine in the office so that Kerry can do her thing, and so we have a backup for those times when only a Windows piece of software exists (like iTunes).

Well this morning, my iPod isn't being recognized, at all. I find that weird. Usually when you pop it in the cradle it immediately goes to "Do not remove" status, and my new drive letter appears. Nothing. I try every variety of unplugging the thing I can think of (changing USB hubs and so on), still nothing. So I power cycle the machine.

Now the piece of crap won't boot at all. Brings me up to the Windows screen, but no progress bar, and it just hangs.

That's the sort of thing that pisses me off at 7:45 when I'm trying to go out the door to work, knowing that I'm gonna leave Kerry without a machine for the day and that I'm still gonna have to fix it when I get home. I'm seriously tempted to just put a fresh drive on the thing and reinstall, for various reasons. But then all my other apps like iTunes are gonna barf and say that this is a new, unauthorized computer.

Man, I hate Windows.

Here's an idea. I have several long running (i.e. 10+ hours) jobs that I need to monitor. Currently I do it by either tailing a logfile, which is fine except that I always have to have shell access to the machine.

I'm wondering, what if I borrowed from the XML listener idea and created some sort of RSS feed for these jobs? I am already running an RSS aggregator on my desktop. If I went this route then my jobs could report back to me with any important events - run rate, error alerts, and so on. Of course I'd have to set up some sort of server that could be pinged, instead of having an actual log file, but that's not so hard.

I'll definitely do it in Java (since that's what the existing application is written in). One question is whether it works as an extension to Log4J, or just an entirely different beast.

Hmmm, something to play with in my copious free time...