When you can't decide on one cliched business photo for your site, just add all five. And to anyone else who missed the memo, cute character illustrations are totally the new lightbulbs, ethnically-diverse hands shaking, holding plants, or holding globes, or hot customer support girls wearing headsets. Get with the program.

This is an awesome blog/resource on film title sequences. Definitely bookmark it socially for future reference. Via kottke.

Yes, this is real. Finally, FINALLY, someone has decided to address one of the biggest issues of our time: Diner Etiquette (and as a bonus, the great Orange Juice vs. Coffee debate.) Idiots.

Dealing with health insurance is possibly the biggest pain in the ass involved with running a business. It is a total scam. Premiums are insane, and coverage is spotty at best. Not to mention the bureaucratic nightmare of the application process. This article provides some resources (and moral support) for small business owners dealing with health insurance issues. I can personally vouch for ehealthinsurance.com. I used them to research plans and get quotes, and they were great. They act as a broker throughout the entire application process and assign an account executive to your case. The customer service was surprisingly good. We didn't actually end up purchasing the plan we applied for through them (through no fault of theirs) since we got denied coverage by GHI at the last minute because they didn't like that, as a partnership, we paid each other with profit draws, not official NYS-45/W-4 wages. Ugh, I won't go into details. Also, you politicians who always talk about tax breaks for businesses, how about health insurance subsidies? Health insurance costs are one of the biggest hurdles when trying to grow from a start-up, to a small business and beyond. We can't hire people, and spur the economy, if we cant afford their benefits!

You may have seen reports of these "snapshot" polls (Gallup, Rasmussen, etc.) circulating the media: Clinton leading Obama, now Obama leading Clinton, but McCain leading Clinton and Obama... on so on. I never really got why these matter, mostly because I tend to look at another national poll, called THE PRIMARIES! You know that one where the entire country gets to vote or caucus, where there is a "sample" size of millions of actual votes. These snapshot polls have a sample size of about 1,000 people, and with the right question, and the right sample, you could get 1,000 people to say that Ron Paul will be the next President (oh wait, that's digg). These polls are just another way for the media to turn this into a horse race. They are the OTB of the political discussion.

I know I kiss some serious NY Times ass on this blog, but honestly, not too many people do information graphics better than they do. Check out this time line of the 6 or so years of events surrounding the Iraq War. Extremely well-designed, easy to navigate and understand, and very informative. They consistently get this stuff right, and it is far from easy. (Hey info-graphic designers at the NYT, start your own blog where you talk about your design process. Everyone will love it and you'll be internet celebrities and get into SXSW and everything, and you'll have a ton of Twitter followers, etc., and you'll get tons of chicks. You're welcome.)

I am generally pretty jaded, and it takes a lot to impress my cynical sensibilities, but the technology and concept behind the BookLamp project is pretty awesome. Watch the demo video and it will click (especially after the Jurassic Park example). There is a ton of promise for something like this. In it's current state, it is very limited since the book database is basically filled with a bunch of scf-fi novels (the type with CG women in g-strings on the cover), but if Amazon or Google got a hold of this, it could be huge. I just hope they license or open source it to the larger community first.

This is funny, and so true. And the reason I find it "funny" and "so true" is the exact same reason that I find the original blog funny, and so true. Man, I feel like I just had a meta mind-trick played on me, and I kind of like it, probably because I'm white.