Well, that's never happened before: in the time between loading this week's links up to check them, and then loading them up again via "Preview Post" for a final check, one of them has gone 404. It was heavily critical of the United States Department of Homeland Security. I'm sure that's just coincidence, though 
Substitute link sent on:
Happy invoicing!
Substitute link sent on:- 10 Things You Should and Should Not Do at a Funeral - Funeral director Caleb Wilde offers some advice which one would have thought unnecessary, but which turns out not to be: for example, "One. Silence your phone. Seriously that means you."
- All the American Flags On the Moon Are Now White - "NASA has finally answered a long-standing question: all but one of the six American flags on the Moon are still standing up. Everyone is now proudly talking about it. The only problem is that they aren't American flags anymore. They are all white." So they buy cheap flags, and we all end up surrendering to the aliens
- Mr. Monk Ruins My Night - ""Mr. Monk Goes to the Bank" is one of the most painful hours I have ever spent with my television. There are a handful of scenes in film and TV that make me wince, but rarely do I sit through an entire episode that hinges on mishandling the opening of a lock." Schuyler Towne, lockpicker, bemoans the stupidity of this particular story, and of lock-related plots in popular media generally.
- Why Microsoft Word must Die - "One faction wanted to take the classic embedded-codes model, and update it to a graphical bitmapped display: you would select a section of text and mark it as "italic" or "bold" and the word processor would embed the control codes in the file and, when the time came to print the file, it would change the font glyphs being sent to the printer at that point in the sequence. But another group wanted to use a far more powerful model: hierarchical style sheets... In the end, the decree went out: Word should implement both formatting paradigms. Even though they're fundamentally incompatible and you can get into a horrible mess by applying simple character formatting to a style-driven document, or vice versa. Word was in fact broken by design, from the outset -- and it only got worse from there." Charlie Stross explains why he doesn't like Word.
- Dacre Classics - Great works of literature, as told by the Daily Mail. For example, Of Mice and Men: "Two workers, George and Lennie, have done the right thing and got on their metaphorical bikes to California so that they don’t have to sign on, like asylum seekers in your town... The two stop in a clearing that has not been destroyed yet by high-speed rail and decide to camp for the night."
- A Normal Life, An Extraordinary Death and the Video Game That Wasn't Meant to Be - "In late 2003, a friendly, attractive and perfectly normal 38-year-old woman named Joyce Vincent died in her London flat. She was in the midst of wrapping Christmas presents... Joyce's remains were eventually discovered when building officials entered her apartment to repossess it. They found her skeleton where she'd last sat, television still playing in front of her, presents still nearby, though quite a bit more dusty. That discovery happened—someone finally found out that Joyce had passed away from apparently natural causes—in January of 2006." When Carol Morley made a film about Joyce Vincent's death, an attempt was also made to make an associated game. Turns out it's hard to make a game about people dying alone.
- The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store - Extract from Brad Stone's new book about Amazon, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, including examples of Bezos's blunt management style: [After reading a start-of-meeting memo] “This document was clearly written by the B team. Can someone get me the A team document? I don’t want to waste my time with the B team document.” [After an engineer’s presentation] “Why are you wasting my life?”
- The rise and fall of Silk Road's heroin kingpin - "Nod’s black-tar heroin had a certain sweetness to it. Many customers fell in love at first taste... Last week, as part of a larger movement against Silk Road's most prominent users, Steve Lloyd Sadler, a 40-year-old man from Bellevue, Wash., was arrested by the Department of Homeland Security. The DHS accuses Sadler of being Nod and say he built a digital empire in the Pacific Northwest that ranked him among the top one percent of all vendors." Detailed examination of the ways of a 21st century smack dealer.
- IKEA or Death - "IKEA is that friendly shop where you get cheap furniture from the inside of a giant, unending warehouse. Black metal is the kind of music that sounds like someone screaming while trapped inside a burning church. They each possess a fervent fan base. And to tell you the truth, the names of the furniture in IKEA sound a lot like the names of black metal bands. Consider this quiz an educational way to learn the difference between the two."
- Cider: Always drink responsibly. Unless you're from the 1970s. - Pete Brown examines some classic Bulmer's ads from the days before the Code of Practice said that alcohol advertising "...must neither link alcohol with seduction, sexual activity or sexual success nor imply that alcohol can enhance attractiveness… [and] must not imply that drinking alcohol is a key component of the success of a personal relationship or social event."
Happy invoicing!
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