{tech}.Ben Buckman.net

Dave Winer's post How I develop formats and protocols is a good read, particularly his thoughts on committee deliberations vs individual artistic creation.

What I loved most about the post, though, wasn't the post itself but the way it gave me hours of great reading early this morning: he mentions the FriendFeed Realtime API, which led me to Facebook's Tornado framework, which several steps later, led inexorably to the resolutions: Learn Python. Learn Tornado. Get familiar with websockets and other real-time protocols. (I have a long-term project vision involving an Arduino, a webcam, and a Python or Ruby webapp, so it fits right in.)

This is why I don't use Google Reader anymore: one tweet can lead to a morning's reading and a month's learning. If I took every interesting tidbit in my endless RSS feeds to that extent... I'd need a thousand lifetimes to catch up with a single day.

All this reading this morning was on my Droid in bed, incidentally.