It's on my long weekend reading list: the latest essay posted on Paul Graham's site -- A Student's Guide to Startups, which at first glance looks it an examination of the considerations of whether you should start or join a startup right after graduating, or after having been "seasoned".

Graham's an engaging writer and speaker. If you've got the time, go take a look at another essay of his, The Power of the Marginal, which is derived from his talk at RailsConf 2006 in Chicago, which took place in June. Better yet, if you want to catch his presentation mojo in action, check out the video of his keynote, which was shot by the nice folks at ScribeStudio.

At Cameron Moll's site, Authentic Boredom, he's posted all sorts of media from his presentation, Essential Web Skills, which he made at the Webmaster Jam Session in Dallas, Texas. Among his slides is this gem, which explains 9 skills that separate the good designers from the great ones:

Over at Ayman Hourieh's Blog, there's an article titled Checklist for Securing PHP Configuration, which lists several good changes to make to the php.config file of a production machine.

Tucows' head office is located in Toronto, Canada, and this weekend is the Canadian Thanksgiving Long Weekend.

Like many businesses in Canada, Tucows' head office will be closed. Some departments will be operating on holiday hours. Straight from the desk of Hutch M., our Director of Technical Support, here's what's happening on Monday, October 9th:

• The Operations department will still monitor our systems 24 hours a day. (We should send them some turkey.)
• Customer support, Sales and Payments will be open from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Eastern (6:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. Pacific / 1300 hours to 2100 hours UTC). Customer support will be available via pager for system-wide emergencies.
• The Compliance department will be closed.

All departments of the company will be back to their usual schedule on Tuesday, October 10th.

To all of you -- readers, partners, end-users of our services -- have a safe and happy Canadian Thanksgiving weekend!

We'll have some tech news a little later today, but in the meantime, we'll point you over to another blog of ours, Catmas.com. Since 2003, Ross Rader and Joey deVilla have declared the first Friday of every October as "Post a Picture of a Cat to Your Blog Day", the day in which we partake in that most stereoptypically bloggy of blog activities. This year, we've given it the pithy name "Catmas", and we've finally given it a blog. Go ahead and give it a look!