Nerd Merit Badges, including a sash for your laptop.

Twitter results in Google seem to be about 5 hours out of date. Not exactly real time, even Twitter’s search does better at this stage. Oddly enough Google picks up my WordPress.com blog posts within about a minute. UPDATE: As Cormac Moylan points out the work is pending, hasn’t been done yet and the blog post, if read more carefully, says “in the coming months.” Apologies for the off-the-cuff blogging.

Our idea team at Ideagen. The young man in the middle was just 13 years old and full of ideas and plans. I’m on the far right.

I think for the most part people realise that the Anglo employee at the end of the phone didn’t cause this mess.” Then who did? Your customers asking for risky loans? The international market for tripping over and landing on you? Bertie? Your CEO? Hang on a second, your CEO is an employee of Anglo. So is his subordinates and their subordinates and so on until it reaches you, the employee of Anglo handling whatever money matters you handle. You made decisions on customers, right? You assessed risk and felt bullish, gave money were maybe you shouldn’t have? When the company I work for does badly I too am responsible. If the top brass doesn’t communicate then I am partly responsible for giving them a kick up the pants. You should talk to your boss who talks to her boss who talks to the CEO. You talk to colleagues and peers who do the same thing. A company is made of people, an organisation made of thousands of decisions taken each and every day. I’m not going to throw rocks at Anglo employees but I would like to know why they think 5 guys at the top are the only ones responsible. This isn’t the military or a dictatorship. You can question things, you can take action. Take responsibility and sort the mess out, or better yet, avoid the mess in the first place by doing a good job.

I’m not into productivity techniques but I do like this list by Pmarca. Active procrastination. I do that too well.

Best use of Google Wave I’ve yet seen.

Crossbow analyzes a human genome using Hadoop on Amazon EC2 for about $100.

Random Hacks of Kindness, a code-jam for disaster relief.

Some updated Nook details. It has an on-screen virtual keyboard. You can read the eBooks on Blackberry and iPhone. It supports PDF and ePub. You can get ePub/PDF books from other sources and read them on the Nook. It has some kind of near-field identifier built-in for use in B&N stores.

Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere is back for 2009.