• Senior City-zens: The World’s 10 Oldest Still-Inhabited Cities – “I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.” Maybe Eddie Izzard should have gone with “I was born in the middle east, where the really old history comes from.”
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – If you can’t actually avoid meetings, then at least try to schedule them so you can maximise your productivity. Rings true…
• There’s a pretty significant problem in the new… – I’m starting to expect Graham Chapman to burst in at any second and announce that this is getting far too silly. Apparently any iPhone app that allows “unfiltered internet access,” everything from web browsers to Twitter clients to, presumably, delicious.com clients, now requires a 17+ rating.

For this weeks PhotoFriday, “My Favourite Spot,” you could interpret my picture in one of two ways. Firstly as “with friends and family.” The second would be “with a glass of beer in my hand.” I picked this one just to be contrary, as most of the other entries appear to be sunsets!

I’m running a bit late this week, but if there’s still time then please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Eyes.” I’m entry number 66.

• The giant Apollo 11 post – The best of the web on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.
• Year two – Nice analysis of where the App Store need to change in order to keep both customers and developers happy.
• Let’s all take a deep breath and get some perspective – “[Google are] starting to look like the new Scott McNealy. Remember him? Ran a company called Sun, which had a great little business going until McNealy became obsessed with Gates and started doing things like paying millions of dollars to buy StarOffice so he could get into that booming free software business.”

For this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Eyes,” I was very tempted to use the image I took for the “Extreme Closeup” challenge but then realised that it was only a couple of months ago, a bit too soon to use it again.

Instead I picked the above picture of Lena, which was taken in my first time working in a studio. It’s actually a crop of a picture I normally use in black and white.

• Evolution Test – I just don’t get it. Is evolution really that hard? How can you misunderstand it so badly that you can come up with this list of questions and think it proves… well, anything? (Part of me hates to single out this site as there are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar ones.)
• Crash Could Free Up Wall Street’s Grip on Bright Young Minds – “But the big paychecks came with what economists call opportunity costs. Instead of spending their days searching for exotic trades, some of these Wall Street wizards could’ve been creating drugs, imagining software, or solving energy problems.”
• The Norway Lesson: The Benefits of Good Financial Behavior – “Norway made it a point to budget, to save, and to protect against unnecessary risk. Then, it went on to buy when everyone else was selling.” Any other country would have spent all earnings from oil on tax cuts (that’s what happened with North Sea Gas in the UK), but Norway did the smart thing.

Despite Californian voters failing to reject Prop 8, the graffiti in Los Angeles shows that not everyone agrees: Post No Bills Prop.

In stark contrast to pretty much everything else, Time Lords in the US are clearly smaller than their British equivalent.

• Battle between ZX Spectrum and BBC Micro to be BBC4 comedy drama – This looks like it could be fun. I especially like some of the comments after the article. The Spectrum vs. Commode 64 [sic] debate still rages to this day…
• Materials: The HTC Hero’s Teflon Coating Makes the iPhone Feel Like Junk – iPhone 3G – One thing that’s holding me back from getting a 3GS is the plastic back. I much prefer the aluminium from the first gen model.
• The blue and the green – “Your eyes are not cameras faithfully taking pictures of absolute truth of all that surrounds you. They have filters, and your brain has to interpret the jangled mess it gets fed.” A very neat optical illusion.

This weeks challenge, Debris, was quite a hard one and I’m not entirely happy with my entry. It’s debris produced by some household refurbishment, taken on my iPhone and tweaked in PhotoShop.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Noisy.” I’m entry number 142.

One thing that I wasn’t really expecting to see in Southern California were a series of wind farms. With their quiet grace and purpose against the desert backdrop they are oddly beautiful.