I must admit that I don't like most graffiti I see on the streets; it mainly ego tagging with no ideas of their own. But I do believe in street art and guerilla art; bring the art and the ideas to the people and make them think. The stuff banksy does is amazing. (I visited his Santas Ghetto in Oxford Street this year. The Tony Blair picture is killing..). But the worse which can happen to banksy and friends is a slap on the wrist..but these guys in Iran probably risk a chop at the wrist or worse to do what they do:

via Wooster Collective

one of my jokes if we come up short in the financial planning of a project is that it is not a problem because we just sell a kidney. It was an idea i picked up from the illegal organ trade and the urban myths surrounding the subject (and we got 2 of them). It turns out to be legal in Iran to sell your kidney and the very serious economist suggests that more governments should allow the sale of kidneys to reduce the waiting list and the deaths of patients waiting for the essential blood scrubber.

it seems to be very successful in Iran although the street value of 2000-4000 USD is a bit disappointing. I always assumed 25K USD as the unit price; at 2K is going to take a lot of kidneys to close the gap on some of the projects and some teams weren't big enough to cover it and using 2 kidneys per team member is not good for the productivity..the cost of an office dialysis machine would have been prohibitive.

Since I am not one of the chromosomally challenged renting out my womb had never occurred to me and it turns out to be 6 times more dangerous than selling a kidney. The stuff you learn from the internet.

update by bert boerland: I closed the comments on this thread. After deleting some 100 comments of people who will sell their kidneys and their right arm, I decided to stop this nonsense!

I went to the LogicaCMG Guru4pro session with Chad Fowler (Ruby & Rails evangalist, author) yesterday. It was a nice talk complete with obligatory Ruby-on-Rails-app-in-10mins demo but I couldn't help but wonder if the Logica suits with redyellow neckties where too happy with the anti-java/anti-enterprise angle of the talk. Guru4pro is a thinly disguised courting session for Java "J2EE" Ontwikkelaars/Architects/Software Engineers.

The subject of the talk was the (non)innovation of the RoR platform and one of the conclusions was be arrogant and lets face it:David Heinemeier Hansson is an arrogant bastard, why else would you build a MVC web platform in an obscure language like Ruby and tell the world how they should use it; how to name your tables, columns, controllers views and how your directory structure should look. And yes the plural of sheep is sheeps... RoR has basically one configurable item: the database access. The rest is default. This fits well of course with Enterprise software development...not.

Enterprise customer want standard services as long it is their standard. but it doesn't fit very well with the community thinking either in which freedom is paramount (often resulting in more options, features and ways of doing the same thing than you can wave an XML file at..)

it was an entertaining evening. And I got a free Rails Recipes book.

update by bert, mike is a guest blogger and friend and went to this event.

It is that kids are so damn cute ...otherwise the pro-life movement had to protect a group that is really alive.

via Picture I like..most of the other pictures are certainly NSFW but some are very funny

Poor Bovine...as usual jwz drags the weird and wonderful from the Internet: and he has well disciplined commenters (get it wrong and you get beat up by jwz personally..)