Here's a few links you may find interesting:

• Facebook | Engineering @ Facebook's Notes - how they implemented Facebook chat - lots of cool technical stuff on scaling and technologies used.
  
• “The Connection Has Been Reset” - great article on how the chinese internet firewall actually works 
• A reminder of the scale of the US economy: (permalink)
   
• Another perspective, from a states => country perspective: (source)
   
• Gandhi’s Top 10 Fundamentals for Changing the World
• Skills for Men - Things Men Should Be Able to Do - Esquire 
• mezzoblue § Image Replacement + Google - google says image replacement via CSS is OK! phew... 
• A fascinating backstory written by the artist who made this t-shirt:
  
  
  In 1976, Cosmonaut Nikolai Peckmann was sent alone to an orbiting space station for what would be called Mission Six- to study the radiation levels and strange circumstances that killed all four crewmen of the last research mission.
  
  By the third day, Peckmann's broken transmissions were coming back to ground control filled with increasing paranoia and delusion. He claimed that the spirits of the dead cosmonauts were coming to claim him, and that he had to keep moving to evade them. He shouted that if he could capture consume these spirits himself while he still had strength, he could move to the next level of consciousness...Truly the rantings of an insane man.
  Indeed, video recovered later would show Peckmann running around the confined but maze-like station, downing emergency sedatives like a madman....pausing in a corner momentarily, only to throw back vitamin pills and give chase to his invisible demons.
  
  He had exhausted the entire cargo of vitamins, pills, and fresh fruit well ahead of schedule. There was no way another crew could be assembled to rescue him before he starved. After one rather violently garbled transmission, the static cleared and the last live image on record is that of Peckmann's empty, wilted spacesuit on the cabin floor.
  
  It was determined that another mission to recover any remains or gather any more research would be a waste of the people's money, and the station was allowed to drift out of orbit and into space- a failure never to be mentioned again. It was ordered and assumed that all video and paper evidence had been destroyed. 
• The next bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash by Eric Janszen (Harper's Magazine) - "The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle." sounds like chicken little 
• Ten Thousand Cents - really cool art project done via amazon's mechanical turk - the US $100 was split into 10,000 components, and people were paid $0.01 to redraw their component by hand ... final result looks good!

. . .

Oh Netflix... how you failed me. Being addicted to West Wing, I added the whole series to my Netflix queue AND SPENT CLOSE TO 15 MINUTES moving all the other movies underneath all seven seasons (I had added them out of order, so I had to reorder them a bit). 

And guess what Netflix decided to send me last week? Yep, no West Wing. The movies from the bottom of my queue. Nice. 

Because I'm an impatient bastard, I ended up just buying the whole series on Amazon instead ... but to offset the $200 cost, I'm canceling my Netflix subscription until at least 2009. 

Oh Netflix, if only you had sent me the correct DVDs...