Links for 12-14-2009

• December 11th - National Backup Awareness Day - "Do as much backing up as possible, while being careful not to destroy your precious data in the process. Have an offsite backup. Print out your blog on paper if it's any good. In fact, print out as much stuff as you can. Your backup strategy should be like a squirrel's: bury stuff in as many places as possible (well, except sensitive information, which is a whole other story in itself)."
• The Unintended Consequences of SPAM - "Finn Brunton, a research fellow at New York University, jumped into spam with two feet and wrote a doctoral dissertation about it entitled Spam in Action: Social Technology and the History of Unintended Consequences. For example, creating new ways of distributing spam, and countering spam can produce unintended innovations. Finn was interviewed about his work a few days ago on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), and the full interview is available for downloading as a podcast. Interesting stuff."
• Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: AWS: the new Chicago Edison - The concept of spot pricing for compute cycles has been floated previously going back to P2P computing days. But much easier to implement within 1 company than as a marketplace.
• Revisiting Old-School Text Adventures as a Jaded Modern Gamer | Cracked.com - As a longtime player of text adventure games, this is pretty funny.
• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T - Ah, this is a good one."That’s how good we are here at Apple — we’re so good that even you and your team of Bell System frigtards can’t stop us. You know what it’s like being your business partner? It’s like trying to swim the English Channel with a boat anchor tied to my legs. And yes, in case you’re not following me, in that analogy, you, my friend, are the fucking boat anchor."