Today is the 1 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and the flood that nearly wiped out New Orleans. Jodi and I heard snippets here and there about it, but at the time we were in Kiev, Ukraine, adopting Adelina. So, we missed the media blitz, for which I’m actually grateful.
Today, in memory and for a view of the devestation “from the ground”, I’m browsing Flickr photosets of New Orleans in the aftermath:
While reading blogHelper’s post about using Wordpress as a CMS, I noticed the menu of views in the upper right corner. You can select “normal” (blog style), “discussions” (most commented posts), “book” (all posts arranged into a hierarchical book structure), or “best” (highest rated posts). I thought this was a very clever and interesting way to expose users to various aspects of the content.
Sound Opinions - Listen Critically - I can’t find now where I got a link to these guys, but Sound Opinions is a rock and roll *talk show* (sweet!) on Chigago Public Radio. It’s excellent, geeky stuff, and it’s a nice antidote to most music radio.
Particularly good (and this was the topic of the aforementioned lost link) was the show with producer Jon Brion, who demonstrates on piano a fascinating comparison between Nirvana’s “Lithium” and Gershwin’s “Someone To Watch Over Me”.
Scott Adams, the creator of the way-too-like-real-life comic Dilbert, also has a blog and has commented a few times on the colloquially named “Middle East Crisis” (with surprising lucidity and insight). Today he discusses how both sides can be claiming victory, and gets a bit into cultural matters over there.
What if the Muslims in the Middle East, and the Arabs in particular, want dignity and pride while the Israelis and Americans want physical safety? Then we’ve got something to deal with.
Unfortunately we (in America at least) are poorly equipped to understand that sort of model. Our favorite form of entertainment involves watching people trade pride for money on reality TV shows. You can convince almost any American to humiliate himself in return for cars, money, jewels or real estate. It’s fair to say we don’t “get†why anyone else would feel different.
If you want to win the Nobel Peace Prize, figure out a way to trade land for pride. I think it could be done, but you’d have to find a non-lethal way to fuel pride that doesn’t involve the material world. It sounds impossible but consider that Gandhi turned not-eating and not-fighting into a source of power, and no one saw that coming. His method probably wouldn’t work in this case, but it does show that one good idea can change the game.
Interesting stuff.
(Via Lee)
A co-worker, Lee points out that Intel just posted info on new Core 2 Duo desktop and Core 2 Extreme processors. Looks pretty ripe for a new Mac Pro to replace the (cliche alert) aging G5 desktops, perhaps?
UPDATE: Mac Pro, yes, but Xeon based. W00!
So, most of us Mac users don’t care about a developer conference, right?
BZZT! Wrong!
Apple’s WWDC may be a techie conference which is mostly covered in a shroud of NDAs, but El Hefe’s Keynote speech is always an opportunity for The Steve to show off new stuff. This year it’s going to be a preview of OS X 10.5 Leopard, and who knows what else.
The Unofficial Apple Weblog will be covering the keynote, as will Engadget, MacNN, and a host of others.
According to Adobe:
The Photoshop trademark must never be used as a common verb or as a noun. The Photoshop trademark should always be capitalized and should never be used in possessive form, or as a slang term. It should be used as an adjective to describe the product, and should never be used in abbreviated form.
Oh wow, I’d better make sure I’m always compliant with the Permissions and Trademark Guidelines… but wait! I’m looking at PS (photoshop) on my taskbar and what do I see? Photoshop’s taskbar label is a Guidelines violation!
Again, according to Adobe:
Trademarks are proper adjectives and should be followed by the generic terms they describe.
CORRECT: The image was manipulated using Adobe® Photoshop® software.
INCORRECT: The image was manipulated using Photoshop.
Hey! I could comply with the Guidelines and help Adobe do the same! So I photoshopped a quick version that Adobe is welcome to:
