The Ole filter makes a pass, Cinco de Mayo edition.  I must warn you I am really tired; had a long day of strategy meetings which somehow take more out of me than tactical ones (!), and then a long ride and a long dinner and a long drive home...  please forgive me if I nod off while posting...

I've been ruminating on the value of unique names in business.  It is increasingly important/useful to be able to "find stuff" by name, and if you are looking for a unique name, it is that much easier.  For example a company name of Aperio is pretty good, because while it isn't completely unique (it is a Latin word) it still isolates search results pretty well.  If we named our company Digital Pathology Inc. that wouldn't be nearly as good, at least for searching.  And in a not-so-subtle way it wouldn't nearly as good for branding either.  Something to keep in mind for Project Q...  

Oh to be a fly on the wall: Jason Kottke blogs about the New Yorker Financial Summit, with Malcolm Gladwell, Nassim Taleb, and Robert Shiller speaking...  "Experts talking about how experts are wrong! My brain is seizing up..." 

Joel Spolsky hits a familiar nail on the head: why Circuit City failed while B&H thrives.  Basically, you have to deliver value to your customers to have a business.  That's what it's all about. 

Horizontal scrolling and the evolution of medical content on the web.  "I have the impression that a major technical shift is underway regarding how web pages are organized and formatted."  Huh, interesting.  I don't have that impression at all, but I guess we'll start monitoring for horizontal scrolling sites...  Note this is different from something like Kindle which doesn't scroll at all. 

Alternative reality: Steve Gillmor says Rest in peace, RSS.  "It's time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn't cut it anymore."  I suspect this is just link bait, nobody can really argue Twitter in any way replaces RSS, right?  The signal to noise ratios are way different. 

Huh, looks like the Tour of California is moving to May.  That means it would take place head-to-head with the Giro d'Italia, the Tour of Italy.  "We will be head-to-head with the Giro but frankly I don't think that will really affect us.. The Giro is a great race, but very few cyclists who are serious about the Tour de France will also race the Giro."  Interesting and aggressive move. 

If you're a regular reader you know I occasionally post about desk checking, the lost art of carefully verifying computer software in your head before doing so live on a computer.  I get quite a lot of email about this, mostly in the "yes!" category, and it tends to have a "kids these days" flavor (correspondents often tell an "I used to walk to school in the snow barefoot" type of story by way of introducing their interest :)  So today I was looking for a trivial formatting bug and I was trying to use Visual Studio to step through the code but there were too many branch paths, so I forced myself to resort to a little desk checking.  Not only did I find the trivial bug, I actually found an unrelated nontrivial bug in the process.  I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be good to take away interactive debuggers altogether.  Ah, kids these days, why I remember walking to school in the snow, barefoot... 

And now, ZZZzzz...