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japanese tv takes a look at some adorably sleepy kangaroos.

runtime: 2 min 7 sec

• it?s time for generation x to grow up by jeremy @ generation x finance.
• pondering financial risks in our retiret by super saver @ my wealth builder.
• how to make ends meet when you can?t find a good job. by david @ my two dollars.
• short term disality insurance is for old married people by ben @ money smart life.
• the abcde?s of planning for debt reduction by ncn @ no credit needed.
• beware the siren song of t cards by nickel @ five cent nickel.
• force yourself to save! 15 painless ways to pay yourself first by svb @ the digerati life.
• year-end checklists for flexible spending accounts by mbh @ mighty bargain hunter.
• first heating ll of the season by sun @ the sun’s financial diary.
• 12 signs of a fraudulent mystery shopping company by jim @ blueprint for financial prosperity.
• how to have a successful budget meeting with your spouse @ lazy man and money.
• fund your hsa to cover retiret healthcare costs @ free money finance.
• i just saved a bunch of money on my insurance by pinyo @ moolanomy.

what better way to kick off a long weekend than with a nice long video about microsoft's entrepreneurial spirit? have a great holiday weekend and we'll see you on tuesday!

video: entrepreneurial spirit at microsoft

about one week ago i wrote a post with a similar le on my italian blog. it was to announce the “beta” of filo, a small service (well, more like a weekend project) that i developed a while ago, and that turned out to be a good testbed for experiting a t with design ideas and developt practices.

what i’m giving you here is an introduction to the project and an overview of its features, i’ll update my dev blog with more in-depth articles about the techie stuff.

what is filo?

filo is a website that allows you to keep track of what you want to read (and don’t have the time to do it right now). it was heavily inspired by instapaper, a web service by marco art (one of tumblr’s developer) and basically started as an exercise to bend instapaper’s behaviour to my needs.

wasn’t del.icio.us / ma.gnolia / $othersocialbookmarkingsite enough?

yes and no. other existing services are mainly aimed at people to share their bookmarks with somebody else or to tag / archive with their own tags.
this is awesome, but requires that you actually know where to put that doent!
filo instead provides you a simple, strictly first-in-last-out list of items you want to remember.

how does it work?

items to read in filo are called knots (that’s a little linguistic joke, as filo means line in italian). you can create knots either manually (using a form accessible from everywhere on the site) or using a bookmarklet that you can drag in your browser’s bookmark bar.

using the bookmarklet is very easy: you just browse to a page you want to “remember” and click the bookmarklet. it will contact filo in the background and create the new knot automatically.

once a knot is created it will be available from the website and in your personalized rss feed.

once a knot is accessed (either clicking on it on the website or clicking it’s le on the feed), it will be marked as read and archived. it is possible to mark archived knots as “to be read again”, as it is possible to trash knots entirely. at the mot, there is no way of bringing items back from the trash (but it will be possible in the future).

how to access the service

the procedure to sign up and sign in have been reduced to a bare minimum: when accessing the site, you’ll be prompted for an email, just type in yours; if it’s recognized as an existing user’s, you’ll be asked for your pword, otherwise a new user will be instantly created so you’ll be able to start generating knots!
you’ll also receive an email to confirm your address. you’ll need to click on the link provided in it to fully activate the account (and be able to log in again in the future).

note, the über-simplified registration process was first presented as an idea by davide casali at the recent experiencecamp.

localization

as of today, filo supports english and italian.

mole version

filo is already designed to be used from mole devices (well, actually the css still needs a t of love). moreover, there’s an iphone/ipodtouch version available at http://filo.m.bzaar.net/ (well, you can go there with any browser, but with the iphone is cooler ;) ).

reading from a feedreader

filo creates a personal rss feed for each user. this feed may be imported in any feedreader. every time you access a knot form your feed reader, it gets automatically archived in filo (and will disappear from the unread feed at the next refresh).

boring technical details

filo is written in ruby, builds on the ruby on rails framework, and stores its data in a couple of mysql tables.
front end logic is powered by jquery and the whole thing should degrade gracefully. the iphone version uses the iui library.

potential troubles

. filo is hosted on dreamhost. now, don’t get me wrong, dh is great and considered what i pay for the hosting, the service i get is just awesome. but it’s not really inteneded for hosting rails applications: we’re running on apache + fastcgi and, well, the whole thing tends to “feel” quite slow.
the good site of it is that i put some decent effort in optimizing the code, so when eventually filo will move to a more rails friendly service it will possibly scream (well, maybe just whistle :) ).
. the whole thing (and especially the integrated login + registration) is not thoroughly tested on a number of different environts (e.g. ie and javascript-less)
. css needs some love, and the same is true for the user settings page.

where next?

some ideas for the future:
. openid support
. “social” stuff, as being able to read and comt your friends knots.
. suggested reads
. offline storage of long articles

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di sini aku ingin gajak kawan-kawan semua onton filem pendek ini yang mana ia boleh dimuat turun atau ditonton terus dari pelbagai laman web yang telah disenaraikan oleh fahmi reza di blognya. namun jika kawan-kawan semua ada lehan masa terluang, silalah pergi dan tonton sendiri filem pendek ini semasa fahmi reza membuat jelajah filemnya yang mana ia leh memberangsangkan kerana sesudah tontonan filem tersebut, akan ada diskusi oleh fahmi reza sendiri dengan para hadirin.

kalian tidak perlu jadi pro atau anti kerajaan untuk onton karya fahmi reza ini dan juga kalian tidak perlu berada dalam golongan atasan mahupun bawahan serta kalian tidak perlu termasuk dalam kategori peminat filem bebas atau genre filem tertentu sahaja untuk membolehkan kalian onton filem pendek ini. lapangkan minda. anggaplah ia sebagai saluran maklumat baru untuk diri kita.

sedikit pesanan dari aku:

fahmi reza ada yatakan nanti akan ada karya filem terbarunya selepas ini. aku berharap dia akan berjaya dalam segala usahanya..

thanks to this video, karaoke is now illegal in 38 states.

runtime: 00 hrs 04 min 11 sec

jeannine aversa / ociated press:
ggest jobless jump since '86 _ wall street sinks  —  washington — pink slips piled up and jobs disappeared into thin air in may as the nation's unemployt rate zoomed to 5.5 percent in the ggest one-month jump in decades.  wall street swooned, and the white house said president bush &ip;