Who says games aren’t good for you? A new study suggests that playing casual games including puzzle games can help you maintain a healthy mind. The research is being published by PopCap Games and The Games for Health Project. The findings are being presented as part of the Serious Games Summit happening this week at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose, Calif.

Study: Casual games can help your mental health - Yahoo! News

The Torn-Up Credit Card Application

You should probably buy a shredder today.

The Torn-Up Credit Card Application

It certainly sounded like Microsoft leadership committed to us, our customers, our partners, and our shareholders that Vista would be out in 2006.

Slip!

We should have asked for more details around the "or else" part of that commitment.

Fascinating glimpse into the inner Microsoft world. Read for the comments to see the mess within.

Mini-Microsoft: Vista 2007. Fire the leadership now!

The other major news networks have stuff too, but that's the gist. This happened three hours ago, dammit.

Downtown is completely locked, they aren't allowing any traffic in or out. Also, there's a rumor that the parkway is also closed off, too. Lovely.

ETA -- Some jag-off was shooting pigeons with a pellet gun. We'll so make national news for this.

pittsburgh: Pittsburgh people:Witnesses: Gun-Wieldin

It’s the triple “A” business model: AJAX, Adsense and Arrogance.

The “Triple A” Business Model | Ajaxian

Budget constraints are forcing some FBI agents to operate without e-mail accounts, according to the agency’s top official in New York.

“As ridiculous as this might sound, we have real money issues right now, and the government is reluctant to give all agents and analysts dot-gov accounts,” Mark Mershon said when asked about the gap at a New York Daily News editorial board meeting.

No Money for Email at the FBI | Gadgetopia

The founder of an enterprise IM startup recounted this anecdote: "While deploying our IM software at a hedge fund, I noticed the admins using AIM, and suggested to an admin that the new intra-office IM system for the traders would be helpful to the admins as well." Her response: "Will my boss be able to see what I've written?"

The answer was yes, of course. One of the reasons the firm bought the app was to improve knowledge retention. The lesson here is that employees are averse to the vision of a manager peering over their shoulder when they're alone at the keyboard. If they know that it's merely possible, they will curtail their efforts, per the philosophy The Less Said the Better.

The PC, for all its deserved reputation as unmanageable, is a personal sandbox in which an employee doesn't feel constrained and watched. She is free to play with ideas and drafts, and chooses what to circulate to colleagues. That freedom is a boon to productivity.

Web 2.5 : The Always-On-You Web: Web 2.5: Privacy Promotes Productivity

You may have missed this over the weekend: The Saturday WSJ reports that "More than $2 trillion of U.S. mortgage debt, or about a quarter of all mortgage loans outstanding, comes up for interest-rate resets in 2006 and 2007, estimates Moody's Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa."

Let's repeat that number: Over the next 20 months, more than two trillion dollars worth of adjustable rate mortgages will reset at higher interest rates.

The Big Picture: Coming Soon: Mortgage Payment Resets

Welcome to killer sudoku online. Your online source of killer sudokus.

There are three puzzles on this page: two killer sudoku puzzles and one “greater than” sudoku puzzle. You can play any of them online or print them out to play offline. Older puzzles are in the archives. Generally, the weekly puzzles are harder than the daily puzzle. Have Fun!

Apparently my CMU CS professor boss is was enough of a Killer Sudoku user that he made his own online site. I never suspected he knew javascript... but it is a pretty nice site.

Welcome to Killer Sudoku Online

Lee Gomes, a WSJ reporter recently undertook a moonlighting writing gig for peanuts, just to see how the process worked.

Topics ranged from positive comments on colloidal silver to how bird flu mutates so that it can be passed from human to human.

After turning down the first article Lee wrote the second and then was asked to write more on the same topic, but given other full articles from other sites, and asked to slightly modify and plagiarize them.

We Right Contents for Cheap | Threadwatch.org