“I wish you would / Come pick me up / Take me out / Fuck me up / Steal my records / Screw all my friends / Theyre all full of shit / With a smile on your face / And then do it again.”

Ryan Adams, “Come Pick Me Up”.

“I wish that I believed in fate / I wish I didn’t sleep so late / I used to be carried in the arms of cheerleaders.”

The National, “Mr November”.

“If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.”

George Bernard Shaw. More.

“…So all of these in house programs look like a dog’s breakfast: because it’s just not worth a penny to make them look nice. Forget any pride in workmanship or craftsmanship you learned in CS323. You’re going to churn out embarrassing junk, and then, you’re going to rush off to patch up last year’s embarrassing junk which is starting to break down because it wasn’t done right in the first place, twenty-seven years of that and you get a gold watch. Oh, and they don’t give gold watches any more. 27 years and you get carpal tunnel syndrome. Now, at a product company, for example, if you’re a software developer working on a software product or even an online product like Google or Facebook, the better you make the product, the better it sells.”

Joel Spolsky, on Why It Sucks To Be an In-House Programmer.

“It is omelettes and eggs. No eggs – no omelettes! It depends on the quality of the eggs. In the supermarket you have class one, two or class three eggs and some are more expensive than others and some give you better omelettes. So when the class one eggs are in Waitrose and you cannot go there, you have a problem.”

Quite. One of many great quotes from the now ex-Chelsea manager, Jose Mourinho.

Jose Mourinho

“…kottke.org isn’t a place for the exclusively new and fresh. There are several other sites out there for that; they function excellently but I’m going to have to go ahead and disagree with much of the blogosphere that whatever is newest is interesting to the detriment of everything else. Bollocks to the new.”

Jason Kottke, Back in the saddle.

“Many people agree that revision 5.1a, specifically, was the best version of Word that Microsoft has ever shipped, combining utility and minimalist elegance with reliability. Sadly for me, although it wasn’t strictly necessary, after a few years and a colour Performa I “upgraded” to Word 98, and somehow the magic was gone. Yes, I turned off all the crappy lurid toolbars and tried to make the compositional space as simple as possible, but by this time Word was stuffed with all kinds of “features” that let you print a pie-chart on the back of a million envelopes or publish your cookery graphs to your “world wide web home-page”, and it already felt to me that Word was only grudgingly letting me write nothing but, you know, words.”

Steven Poole, Goodbye, cruel Word.

“Buddy List Zero (also Twittering) is cute but so far sort of lame. Implying that an empty buddy list means less IMs is just stupid. What’s next, Address Book Zero?”

Joshua Kaufman, Unraveled.

“Digg sends lots of traffic but IMO it’s mostly useless. They usually read only one page, send stupid emails, and never visit again.”

Jason Kottke, on Twitter

“You’re presently reading about what may be the best album of 2007, hands down, by the most under-accorded American musical genius. Real murmurs, believable ones, came with Josh Ritter’s 2006 album, The Animal Years, suggesting that the Idahoan is today’s Bruce Springsteen, today’s Bob Dylan. He’s never sounded more the part than on Historical Conquests, the follow-up to Animal.”

Too right, although The Animal Years still pips it if you ask me.

Amazon.com, on The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter

“I decided that after finishing all 9 previous tours I wasn’t going to get off in this one and pushed on to the finish in Tignes. I asked myself 1,000 times “why am I doing this?”. I’ve seen too many guys getting their race number peeled off and getting in the car looking devo’d and I had the Flemish and French tv following me all day waiting to get ‘that’ shot. I didn’t want to go out like that. Good on Napolitano and Herve too for finishing when they were in the same hopeless situation. I have to thank all the spectators who stayed by the roadside 1 hour after the first rider had finished and clapped cheered and even pushed me towards the finish. I would rather finish outside the time limit than abandon — and that’s how my 2007 Tour ended.”

Robbie McEwen, Post Tour

“Traffic sings the songs / Inviting me in to dodge the bullets from an empty gun / If I had a car I’d drive straight into the window of a bank I owed money to.”

Ryan Adams, Burning Photographs, from Rock ‘N’ Roll.