So, I was sitting in my new living room waiting for Cox. Cox was late. And I kept thinking how much I needed Cox, how much I wanted Cox. But I had no Cox. I was very sad. And then a nice man arrived to bring me Cox and I was very happy. But then there were problems and it turns out that Cox was not up. Cox was down. There would be no Cox for me today.

I'm done with ER. The show has devolved into mindless clichés and repetetive story-lines. And now the are going to kill off Greene with a recurrence of the tumor he got last season. This is a character that has lost his wife, his parents, gotten beaten up, had bad relationships, his daughter almost over-dosed on X, and more and now they will kill him off. For people who have been watching the show for years, this is just wrong. He should be written off with a Doug/Carol ending, not this. I'm done. It used to be a good show. Andrew's right. It's horseshit now. Friends, on the other hand, is just wonderful this season. Tonight's episode was well written and well acted. And, for once, they wrote Ross as a real person, not a cariacture.

Plodding with dinosaurs: "A new computer model suggests the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex could not have raced after its prey."

Debate Is Fueled on When Humans Became Human: "Scientists generally agree on the basics of human ancestry. But agreement breaks down completely on the question of when human behavior began."

Tonight's West Wing was exceptional. Gods I love that show. I so wish I could play chess really well. I've always wanted to know but never have had the time to learn. Ah well... in my next life...

"It is snowing here in Boston.  People are freaking out." [Sam Ruby's Radio Weblog] Looks like we moved to DC just in time. Of course it was frickin' COLD outside tonight.

We did it! This afternoon we closed on a townhouse. We have a home and we are all back together again. It's been a long, awful year, but now it's all coming together. We're home for the first time in months. It's out near Reston Virginia and it's a 3 level place with a garage, a deck out back, a fireplace, and ceiling fans. We drove out there tonight to drop off some things. Putting the key in the lock for the first time was such a thrill. We just stood in the living room and looked at each other and said "We own this." What a day!

Today is the day Well, today is the day. I've not actually said here what's happening today yet mainly because I'm being superstitious and trying not to jinx myself. Of course, it's not hard to guess... More later.

Mac OS X Hints - Securing Webmin using OpenSSL

O'Reilly Network: Learning the Mac OS X Terminal, Part 3 [Feb. 26, 2002]

Search for books and compare prices at isbn.nu -- What a neat idea! I still prefer to go to my local bookstore, but hey...

AFA Issues: Culture - Commentary by Matt Friedeman. This is an interesting article. Not so much for its conclusion which I find a bit tenuous, but rather for the reference it makes at the start. There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education some years back (here is a link if you happen to have one of their overly-expensive subscriptions) about how students in college studying Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery" had moved from sharp criticisms of the fictious culture that held a lottery to choose someone to stone to death eacy year to proclaiming that we have no right to judge other cultures. If this is what that culture does, who are we to say it is wrong. That article struck me as central to some of the major problems in the world today. That people can read Jackson's wonderful and disturbing story and not feel that a society which kills members annually in a completely arbitrary fashion is in some way inherently wrong is incredible to me. Anyway, it's on my mind this morning for no particular reason except that I stumbled upon it accidentally.

Ftrain: Robot Exclusion Protocol

Please to ignore. This is being a test.

And now I've stopped messing around with my old blog. I'm fine with the setup I have now.

I'm messing around with my old blog, blackcat.editthispage.com because it is after 4AM and I have nothing better to do. Well, I do have better things to do but at 4AM I can't really do them. My brain won't let me. So, I've got this editthispage.com blog. I've got this radio blog. And I've got this blogger blog. And I want them all. Two are mirrored (radio and blogger) -- if I can pull in the manila one as well... well, that would be truly weird. See? 4AM. Not much you can do with that time.

This posting, item, whatever you call it (what is an individual unit of a weblog? a bloglet?) serves no purpose except to force an update of my site on the radio server so I can test something out.

One of these days I need to make my own design for this site. Themes are nice and all, but it means your blog looks like everyone else's. If you are reading this on raggedcastle.com you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Go check out the other version of this same blog here.

World Wide Words Nothing like a sleepless night for finding some fun links...

My friend Chris Kagy is in Nigeria on business the next few weeks. I can't imagine having to go to a place going through so much trouble right now. As you can read in his weblog, he's pretty much staying in the hotel and going to work. Nigeria is not a place to go sightseeing... Needless to say, we'll all be a lot happier when he comes back home safely.

Fish Fossils Shed Light on Origin of El Niño [Scientific American]

We made it! We made it to Virginia with two cars, one toddler, and a ton of stuff. We almost put it off a day as Ann has a lousy cold but I had to be at work today (which reminds me, I need to get moving) and so we pushed through and did the drive anyway. Now we're here and sit tight until Wednesday. Then we do the next phase...

Moving Begins I'll be off the air until Sunday night or Monday sometime as we head to Virginia. Enjoy the weekend!

kuro5hin.org reports on an ad the Libertarian Party is sponsoring about the war on drugs and how it itself is the true problem.

Went to dinner with Rox, James, and Sumi tonight at a local place in Cranston, RI: A Cullinary Affair. Fantastic little place if you hit these parts. Then had dessert at Gregg's. A nice little send-off...

The movers are here and we are finished packing. Once they are done and all of this stuff is gone, what's left we have to pack up (mostly done already) and put into our two cars. Tomorrow we plop Jack in and head south. We stop at my sister's in New York where my Mother will be joining us for a small birthday gathering for me and then on Sunday we continue on from there to Virginia. We'll stay with the same friends we've been staying with for four months now for just three more nights. Then we begin the end of our move and this four month process we've been in.

We've been packing most of the day. Most of our stuff has been in storage since late October and yet we seem to have a ton of stuff here in Rhode Island. Tomorrow morning, the nice Irish men from Gentle Giant movers will arrive to take this stuff away to join the stuff in storage. I'm exhausted from all the schlepping of boxes and such. I'm so glad that the moving in part of this (still 10 days out) will involve no box schlepping on my part. Well, assuming that all boxes end up in the right rooms. Which is unlikely since most of them are not well labelled. OK, fine. You happy? I have more to schlep. Ugh.

I Am A: Neutral Good Elf Bard Ranger

Alignment:
Neutral Good characters believe in the power of good above all else. They will work to make the world a better place, and will do whatever is necessary to bring that about, whether it goes for or against whatever is considered 'normal'.

Race:
Elves are the eldest of all races, although they are generally a bit smaller than humans. They are generally well-cultured, artistic, easy-going, and because of their long lives, unconcerned with day-to-day activities that other races frequently conccern themselves with. Elves are, effectively, immortal, although they can be killed. After a thousand years or so, they simply pass on to the next plane of existance.

Primary Class:
Bards are the entertainers. They sing, dance, and play instruments to make other people happy, and, frequently, make money. They also tend to dabble in magic a bit.

Secondary Class:
Rangers are the defenders of nature and the elements. They are in tune with the Earth, and work to keep it safe and healthy.

Find out What D&D Character Are You?, courtesy ofNeppyMan (e-mail)

Anti-Matter captured

photograph album: the fountains of rome. Why? Because we want to go back and can't...

SatireWire | FBI to Issue 5-Day Terror Forecasts

BBC News | EDUCATION | School airbrushes pupil's pink hair: "Ashley's stepfather Chris Andrews said: "We are fully behind Ashley's decision to have that colour of hair, we do not feel it's going to be detrimental to her education and her future plans to be a website designer."" Hmmm... maybe if I dyed my hair pink, I'd get even more business in web design...

All My FAQs Wiki: CSS FAQsA Wiki about CSS.

Working with CSS - Introduction to CSS Layout from Apple's website.

article archives :: Blast Sites with User CSS Sheets Some great techniques to test your site for alt tags, balance tags, and to ferret out any remaining FONT tags.

The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, February 18, 2002: "If it's a fact that most blogs suck, it is neither a useful nor an interesting one. Unless, of course, you're writing a story about why blogs suck." Doc, once again, nails it.

Yahoo! News - Pope Has Performed 3 Exorcisms, One Last September. Good to see he's keeping busy...

Ok, it's all fixed now. For now. Here's what I learned in the last 24 hours:

1. Moving Radio from one machine to another is a miserable task. You have to update all references to the path to your data in the myriad of places it exists. The included script to fix this (which I found out about belatedly) does not work properly with Radio and I did find someone who had updated it for Radio but it still did not solve the problems. In the end, Radio worked by nothing I could do would make the Manila/Blogger bridge tool work so I couldn't update my blogger blog at the same time any longer.
2. If you give up on this kind of venture and revert back to your older copy, any blog entries you make with the other copy are blown away entirely as the older copy simply sends up what it knows about. This is not entirely unexpected but it would be nice if the software noticed that there was stuff on the server it didn't know about and offered to transfer it down to your local database or at least warn you that it's going to blow it all away.
3. Sometimes upstreaming doesn't work and you have to kick it hard. As far as I can tell, I was having DNS issues getting to plant.blogger.com which was mucking up the entire upstreaming process. When I replaced that with an IP address (a temporarly solution) it worked again and my blogger site was being updated while the radio one wasn't. Quitting and restarting Radio and forcing an update by editing some entries finally got it working again.
4. Radio's purpose to make blogging easier for the masses has a long way to go. Once something goes wrong, you have to be a technical type to solve it. If I hadn't been a Frontier developer in days of yore and an all-around geek, I doubt I would have been able to fix the problems I had and would have had to reinstall from scratch. Not user friendly by a long shot.

Hey, don't get me wrong, I still like radio and am glad I paid for it. Doesn't mean I can't be critical...

Ok, it's all fixed now. For now. Here's what I learned in the last 24 hours:

1. Moving Radio from one machine to another is a miserable task. You have to update all references to the path to your data in the myriad of places it exists. The included script to fix this (which I found out about belatedly) does not work properly with Radio and I did find someone who had updated it for Radio but it still did not solve the problems. In the end, Radio worked by nothing I could do would make the Manila/Blogger bridge tool work so I couldn't update my blogger blog at the same time any longer.
2. If you give up on this kind of venture and revert back to your older copy, any blog entries you make with the other copy are blown away entirely as the older copy simply sends up what it knows about. This is not entirely unexpected but it would be nice if the software noticed that there was stuff on the server it didn't know about and offered to transfer it down to your local database or at least warn you that it's going to blow it all away.
3. Sometimes upstreaming doesn't work and you have to kick it hard. As far as I can tell, I was having DNS issues getting to plant.blogger.com which was mucking up the entire upstreaming process. When I replaced that with an IP address (a temporarly solution) it worked again and my blogger site was being updated while the radio one wasn't. Quitting and restarting Radio and forcing an update by editing some entries finally got it working again.
4. Radio's purpose to make blogging easier for the masses has a long way to go. Once something goes wrong, you have to be a technical type to solve it. If I hadn't been a Frontier developer in days of yore and an all-around geek, I doubt I would have been able to fix the problems I had and would have had to reinstall from scratch. Not user friendly by a long shot.

Hey, don't get me wrong, I still like radio and am glad I paid for it. Doesn't mean I can't be critical...

I rolled back to the Radio on my laptop and gave up on moving it over to my desktop system for now. Now I wonder how Radio will react if and when it notices that updates happened to the Radio site that it did not make... If you are reading this on raggedcastle.com, then we're back and updating on that site as well. There are entries on the Radio side that are not on the raggedcastle side but until further notice, both sites will be updated at the same time from here on out.

Now all of my TCP streams are being closed unexpectedly. No clue what that means or what to do about it. I don't have time now to go search through the discussions and other tech support files at the Radio site. So, this has to sit until later. (I tried one more thing and it seems to have worked, a bit)

This weekends Missing Blog Entries.

Wow... Radio blew away all entries I made yesterday and this morning when I reverted to the laptop again. Not entirely unexpected which is why I copied the stuff I'd written that I wanted to keep. I'll get it back up here shortly.

So, among the entries that got toasted are a number of rants on my part about radio being a bitch to move around. I moved it to my desktop and everything died. I updated all the path names and yet things still behaved very badly. I realized that Radio is not written to be a *good* OS X application. Being a UNIX system, the radio files should *not* be stored in /Applications/Radio Userland/ but rather in my home directory. This way, they can be referenced as ~/radio/whatever/ and if I move things to a new system, that will still work if I keep the relative path the same. And this is how UNIX systems do things. UNIX programs never store their configuration data in /usr/bin/ and so forth.

Due to technical difficulties which are not worth going into, Webcrumbs will only be updated on the Radio site, not this site. So, follow that link for any weblog links for this week. Really! I'm still updating, just not here.

Standing out in the crowd. Archaeologists explain why they think our ancestors started decorating themselves with jewellery about 40,000 years ago. [BBC News: sci/tech] Now we have weblogs ;)

The Doc Searls Weblog : Thursday, February 14, 2002: "It's mostly about sources. We're all sources for each other here, and don't have the pressures of space, deadlines, commercial agendas or formats to restrict who we source or the stories they tell us. Here we not only link endlessly to countless other sources (which far outnumber those in the average BigPub piece), but we can vet ideas about what might be true, in faith that others who know more will correct us, or pick up the story and carry it forward." Doc's weblog is always good reading but today it is especially good. Follow the link above and enjoy. What's interesting to me is that there are likely plenty of bloggers out there who are deeply interesting but I have no way of knowing about them because they haven't moved on to my radar or anyone else's. I have something like 3 or 4 regular readers. My wife, my friends Chris and Andrew and... well, I sometimes get email from people who have read something here and liked it and I've once or twice found myself linked elsewhere. But, for the most part, I'm writing for myself here. I'm happy a few people come by and see what I'm thinking (or at least what I'm reading as I don't take as much time as I'd like to write these little bits from my own brain) but I have no illusions over who my actual audience is. Now, given that, how many other webloggers are out there who are also writing in the void? There may be some fantastic writers out there who are just not being found by the "mainstream" bloggers. How do we find them? How did you find me? If I say something deeply pithy, how do I get it out into the mainstream? What happens to a blogger when they suddenly have an audience? Do they change what they write or how they write?

Radio as a Python IDE

I am just loving the Olympics this time around. I never thought I'd get into snowboarding but the half-pipe was a lot of fun to watch. And NBC is keeping Bob Costas only to interview guy and framing-the-sections guy and he is just fine in those contexts so I have no beef with him. In fact, his buying that bar a round of drinks was very funny so maybe I'm warming up to him. But the coverage has been very good and aside from the occasional diversion into someone's life story, it's been mostly back to back sports and that's all I really wanted. And I can't wait for Skeleton sledding next week...

Six Million Dollar Man feature proceeding. And Richard Anderson reprises his role as Oscar! I love it! (Yes, I am also a child of the 70s)

Al and Sam, together again...sort of Excellent! (Yes, I am a Quantum Leap fan. Sue me. ;)

BBC News | ASIA-PACIFIC | China arrests foreign Falun Gong activists. My friend's second cousin is an American who emailed before going to a protest today. He has not been heard from since. The article above doesn't mention any Americans arrested in the latest set of protests but we assume he is among them.

Mysterious Force slows Pioneer 10: "As it moves further away from our solar system, pioneer 10 is slowing down. A mysterious force is reducing its speed by 6 mph per century. Not much, but baffling when you consider that effects like gravity and solar radiation decrease rapidly with distance. Other possibilities have also been ruled out." The above was posted via newsisfree.com to Radio and then to blogger from Radio's blogger bridge. Very cool.

Scientific American: News In Brief: Diminutive Dinosaur from China Sheds Light on Bird Evolution: February 14, 2002: "It demonstrates that major structural modifications toward birds occurred much earlier in the evolutionary process than previously thought," Mackovicky asserts. "Furthermore, these findings help counter, once and for all, the position of paleontologists who argue that birds did not evolve from dinosaurs."

Well, I bought Radio.

JP Brown's Serious LEGO. Damn, I want to do this kind of thing...

'Use It or Lose It,' New Alzheimer's Research Concludes [Scientific American] I heard about this on NPR on my way to work this morning. Very interesting though not completely unexpected.

Dave Winer writes: "Thanks to Zeldman for the pointer to a table-less three-column liquid CSS-based site that degrades gracefully (that's a mouthful). Now I've been trying to figure out why this is so important. I wrote XML-RPC for Newbies, to help people understand why it's so important to geekish Web developers. Would a designer please write a Table-less CSS Templates for Newbies, to explain why tables are evil. I don't get it. Or is this just gymnastics, which is cool, but tell us so, please." Here's my take: tables are fine for layout if your readers are not in the least disabled and are using browsers over fast connections (most browsers wait for the closing table tag to render the page which can take a very long time over slow connections.) But if your users are on slow connections, are disabled, or simply have their own needs for viewing content (more on this in a sec), tables are very limiting. The original intent of HTML was markup, that is, taking content and defining what it is, not necessarily how it was to look. This latter decision was left up to the user (remember those horribly complicated style preferences in the old web browsers?) We've drifted from that and now people are marking up their content full of styles and rules for display and making their pages largely a single thing which cannot be altered. Tables do not degrade well for blind users. They are read row by row, left to right. For most users it means that they have to sit through useless information which is horribly repetetive. Take Dave's own Scripting News site. A blind user would have to sit through the entire left blogrolling column before getting to the content, every single time they load the page. What a nightmare! With CSS, this information can be placed last in the HTML and yet displayed in the same place making the content come first. Of course there are workarounds (invisible skipnav techniques, for example) but these are kludges. Table-less design allows for pure content leaving the look and feel to a separate file and making the content far more accessible. If the Web is truly the medium for all people, then we need to be aware of all users, including the disabled. One caveat: it's not a panacea. I still use tables for layout if I cannot achieve a goal using CSS. There are times when it makes sense. But I still design so that I am following all of the guidelines of Section 508 and the WCAG 1.0. To do less would be a disservice to the web community.

Toddlers Cannier than Scientists Thought" One-year-olds are supposed to learn by copying adults - but now it seems they only copy us if it what we are doing makes sense to them."

TidBITS: Printing Digital Photos, Part 1 Excellent article!

So, I haven't linked to my friend Donna's website in awhile, so here she is. Donna is one of the many great reasons to like Canada. Skating is another. But let's not go there.

Design for Community

Three magic little words "Whenever a phone solicitor calls in the middle of dinner, don't get sore. Don't slam down the receiver. Don't hang up. Just say, "Hold on, please." Then gently set the receiver on the table and go about your business." Brilliant.

So, today is the last day of my Radio demo. Do I purchase or do I let it go by? Pros

• News aggregates automatically in my chosen RSS feeds. One stop shopping (of course, I can do this via other sources, notably NewsIsFree.com, which also lets me post directly to my blog)
• Through services and Radio Express, I can post directly to my blog from almost any app under OS X and from any website. (of course, I can do this using AppleScript and Blogger's own javascript popup box)
• I can easily theme my site using a variety of looks and feels (then again, Radio's templates make it somewhat difficult to design my own site the way I want it through a somewhat convoluted interface and with blogger I have much more full control which has worked well for me).
• An RSS file for my site is automatically created and weblogs.com is updated when I update my blog. (So what? What, exactly, does that get me? My readership hasn't changed as far as I know and I never really did this for a wide audience but friends, family, and interested parties. I am not interested in becomming a popular blog so what do these features really gain me? And I can still achieve both of these goals using blogger pro.)
• Neat little calendar on my site to go to past days (and I can do the same thing, less attractively, with blogger.)
• Posts are mirrored to my blogger-based blog. (So what? Why do I need two blogs at all? In fact, it would be much easier if I *only* had the blogger blog and not the radio-hosted one.)
• Ability to build my own services (so what? I can't think of a single one I need or want. This is a neat idea which I have no need for.)
• Extremely handy method of adding images to my blog. (I know HTML, I did fine doing this manually before).

Cons

• Yet one more application I have to leave running and one which spikes the CPU ever 5-10 seconds. Just watching in top and with a load monitor running, I see a 20%-40% hogging of the CPU ever 5-10 seconds. (So what? It's UNIX. I haven't noticed any slow-downs on the front-end and UNIX is designed to handle these situations gracefully and does. And leaving another app running means little. Again, UNIX handles this just fine and I have a boat-load of RAM.)
• I cannot make the aggregator run when I want it to. Sometimes I get a free minute and want to see what's new but it's been less than an hour since the last run and I have to wait. I have found no way to make it go manually. (I'm sure there is a way or there is a way to hack this functionality in. And there's nothing stopping me from still using newsisfree.com and so forth.)
• It costs money while other things which do what I need are free. (Well, true, but $40 isn't a lot in the grand scheme of things and to achieve the same functionality I have to cobble together a number of other resources into a loose confederation of software packages which is a pain. And Radio is being actively developed. New features are coming out all the time.)
• Very hard to find certain items in the documentation. For example, I remember an announcement for a spam-free email link but I cannot find it at all at Userland's site. I've done searches for "spam-free" and "spam" and "email" in radio userland's site, I've wandered the discussion boards (I did find a message about someone having trouble with it but nothing about it itself). For the life of me, I can't find it at all. OK, I finally found it by searching scripting.com's archives. Why is there nothing about this on Radio's site?

The Bottom Line Honestly, I don't know. I do know that I have been blogging more and reading more since using Radio so it is clearly making my blogging-life easier but it's not clear to me if that is Radio's doing or the fact that I never bothered to get the other tools doing what I need them to do. If I can find a way to NOT have the radio blogger and only have this publish to my blogger blog (or if a reverse bridge allowing posts made to my blogger site to come over to the radio site existed) then I'd be truly content. Any thoughts out there? I'd love to hear from you.

ZDNet: Story: How schools are tricked into using PCs--when Macs are better. Simple, to the point. I haven't yet read the feedback after the column to see what the other side says. It will be an interestind debate, to be sure.

Diary of a Start-Up: "This is a story that will teach you something about building a software product, about profitably running a company, and about what can happen if unqualified organizations obtain control."

JSPWiki: WikiRPCInterface: "Here's an idea: Let's define an XML-RPC or SOAP? interface to Wiki. I don't exactly know what we could do with it..."

My radio trial is about to end and before it does, I wanted to see whether I could duplicate the functionality by using newsisfree.com's service. On the plus side, I can blog many articles at once. But they are all treated like one big single element rather than individual elements. Not that big a deal but still something that bothers me. I'll have to keep on playing around with all of these to see what works for me. So far, Radio has been working very well. But as the time for me to pay for it looms, I start to question whether I am paying for services I can otherwise do for free or whether there truly is some extra value to be had.

Simple error means big change "Scientists hail new research which claims to show how simple genetic changes could produce entirely new animals." Deaf go mobile phone crazy "The mobile phone has become popular among what at first may seem an unlikely user group - people who are deaf or hard of hearing." Study Hints at How Genetic Mutations Led to Macroevolutionary Change Uncertainty over Heisenberg's bomb making ends "Newly released documents show unequivocally that the renowned German physicist was building an atomic bomb for the Nazis" Inventor Of Artificial Hand Sees "Bionic" Replacement Parts Becoming More Human Chandra Scores A Double Bonus With A Distant Quasar Hubble Spies Backward Galaxy "The galaxy is perplexing astronomers by rotating in the opposite direction than normal."

Review Of Netflix DVD Rental Service Hmmm....

Something Awful Rejected Valentines!

Call Centers: America's Sweatshops. "Customer Service Representative, Technical Support Analyst, Help Desk specialist, no experience necessary. That's what Lisa saw as she skimmed over the want ads for technical support jobs. She was working her way through college, not enough experience to take a job as a Database Administrator yet. Getting her feet wet in the tech field, that's what she was looking for. What she found however was something completely different. Below you'll read some statements from former and current Call Center employees, and a few statistics about the industry." [kuro5hin.org]

maudlin: Dictionary.com Word of the Day. maudlin [Dictionary.com Word of the Day]

EO News: NASA Olympics Blue Marble Release. Beautiful pictures.

Phonetic alphabets (Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta) (Apr 99): "Alpha Bravo Charlie Delta Echo Foxtrot Golf Hotel India Juliet Kilo Lima Mike November Oscar Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra Tango Uniform Victor Whiskey Xray Yankee Zulu" Just in case you ever need to know these or others...

NBC's Opening Night Coverage Is More Limp Than Olympic (washingtonpost.com)"World-class mistakes and monumental errors of judgments were, perhaps appropriately, part of NBC's coverage last night of the opening ceremonies for the XIX Winter Olympic Games from Salt Lake City." Shales is dead on. Last night NBC's coverage was, as always, amateur and annoying. I know some don't agree with me, but I still don't know what anyone sees in Bob Costas. I have not enjoyed anything he has ever done in terms of sports. He is distracting, pedantic, and plain useless. Sue me. I hate NBC sports.

shakeitbabe. Holy mackeral! This is wild...

DVDFILE.COM: Genre Spotlight - BBC On DVD. I wish I hadn't found this on Andrew Pulrang's site. I may end up spending a lot of money...

Slashdot | What Kind of PHB Do You Want?. This is a fascinating debate.

University of California, San Diego: External Relations: News & Information: News Releases : Science: "Biologists at the University of California, San Diego have uncovered the first genetic evidence that explains how large-scale alterations to body plans were accomplished during the early evolution of animals. "

Solomon Short. "The only winner in the War of 1812 was Tchaikovsky" [Quotes of the Day]

Superbowl PDFA Ads. David Kurtz makes some excellent points about the drugs/terrorists commercials from the superbowl last night.

Accessibility Features of CSS

Are Political Parties Inherently Undemocratic?. "In George Washington's Final Farewell Address he warned against the dangers of adopting a system based on political parties. However, despite the urgings of the first President, the government of the United States is dominated by two major parties. Is this a twisting of democracy or an inevitable practicality?" [kuro5hin.org]

Yasir Arafat's Op-ed Piece. "Yasir Arafat has written an impassioned op-ed piece for the New York Times (free registration required) outlining his vision for the future of the Palestinians. It is well-written and does not waste words. Arafat states his desire to return to peace talks and expresses regret at the activities of the Palestinian fringe which has resorted to suicide bombings. He asks for Palestinians displaced from their homes 54 years ago to be allowed to return, while acknowledging Israel's demographic concerns. He asks for an end to occupation and subjugation of the Palestinian people." [kuro5hin.org]

Sunrise in Annandal, VA this morning...

kuro5hin.org || technology and culture, from the trenches: "Some of you might of already had this experience, when interviewing for a new job, how do you explain your last boss what a lunatic, without coming off sounding like one yourself?" In my case, at least the offending boss was let go a week after I voluntarily left the company but this was a challenge for me. I had to explain why I voluntarily left a good job in a terrible job market. Thankfully, it worked and I have a good job now, but for awhile there, this was really bugging me...

O'Reilly Network: AppleScript Primer for Mac OS X [Feb. 01, 2002]. What a great little intro. Good ideas!

O'Reilly Network: Cocoa for your Python? [Jan. 31, 2002]. What I really want to see is wxPython for OS X...