It has come to my attention that when googling Mike Champion the first hit will be this other Mike Champion who works at Microsoft aboard the WS-Deathstar. Blog posts with titles like “Mike Champion Defends WS-*” send shivers down my spine, so I thought I’d clarify that I’m in the RESTful camp.

Seeing DHH give his keynote at last year’s RailsConf on ActiveResource was eye-opening to a simple path to web services. I still have scars from trying to get a very early version of Apache Axis to generate WSDL that MS tools would consume. And the recent book “RESTful Web Services” by Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby is chock full of pragmatic REST goodness. Just wanted to set the record straight.

On a recent repeat of a 30 Rock episode was this fantastic exchange:

Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan): “I’m gonna make you a mix tape. You like Phil Collins?”

Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin): “I have two ears and a heart, don’t I?”

There is a Phil Collins resurgence afoot. Bands like the Postal Service have covered “Against All Odds” for years, and Stereogum declared that it is okay to like Phil Collins. This week’s This American Life on Breakups had a great piece by Starlee Kine, featuring her obsession with Collins and an interview with the man himself. Phil comes off well, even when quoting his own song. She describes her interest in Collins’ music becoming “less and less ironic until one day we were actual fans”.

It is time he gets his due. And not in a nostalgic I-love-the-80s way, or a Chuck-Klosterman-liking-Billy-Joel anti-hip judo move. But for songs like “In the Air Tonight”, “Sussidio”, or “Don’t Lose My Number”. And that isn’t counting the hits he had with Genesis. Peter Gabriel is thought to be the real talent from that group, and yet, can he sing and play drums at the same time?

Redheads may go extinct by 2060 according to an article citing National Geographic. As a member of this endangered minority, this would be alarming if I believed it. I hope to be alive in 2060, or at least my soul in a vast computer network. And just looking at the comments on the Reddit thread show that at least nerdy guys like redheaded women. The best quote from the article is,

“National Geographic says the gene at first had the beneficial effect of increasing the body’s ability to make vitamin D from sunlight. However, today’s carriers are more prone to skin cancer and have a higher sensitivity to heat and cold-related pain.”

Less rickets, more cancer & pain. Great trade-off, thanks Nature. Realizing that I’m a mutant of the Mc1r gene led me to some reading up on our condition, culture and challenges. Wikipedia is fantastic for including Conan along with Shakespeare, Churchill and Jefferson as famous redheads and detailing all the comic book and sci-fi redheads.

I’d never heard the term “ginger” before the classic South Park episode “Ginger Kids” where Cartman first argues that they should all be destroyed, and then after being tricked into thinking he is a “ginger”, he argues that they are the chosen people. (Tough to disagree with Cartman that Carrot Top should be killed.) Apparently there is more anti-“ginger” sentiment in the U.K. than the States. That kind of treatment makes my fiery temper boil! If you thought that crude stereotype was funny, then you sir, are a bigot.

Appropriate for the day that the much hyped game BioShock hits the shelves is a Hiawatha Bray piece on Boston’s video game companies. Bioshock (I gots me one!), made by Quincy-based 2K Boston (formerly Irrational Games) and Cambridge’s Harmonix with forthcoming Rock Band are in the spotlight. Still, the Bay State only has 4.4% of the game design workforce, according to a cited survey.

Amazon Web Services is running a series of half-day events called “The Start-Up Project” that is part sessions on AWS and part mixer aimed at startup founders and VCs. They are coming to the Hotel@MIT in Cambridge on Thursday, Sept. 27th from 2-8pm (registration). AWS held a similar event in Seattle a few months ago that had some positive blog coverage.