It's the little things that matter
In the Starkist Lunch To-Go "meals", or as I refer to them, "snack packs", you have six crackers (when you really need seven to eight), a sealed pouch of Starkist white albacore tuna, a pack of reduced-calorie mayonnaise, a pack of sweet relish, a small plastic spoon to mix the previous three together, a napkin, and an after-meal mint. A mint. Nice touch, Starkist. Well done. I'm still hungry.
Compassion's AIDS Initiative
As we enter the holiday season, please consider a donation to Compassion International's AIDS Initiative. More than 12 million kids have been left orphans in sub-Saharan Africa, and Compassion's efforts are among many trying to stem the flood. Donations to the AIDS Initiative provide food, shelter and basic care for AIDS orphans, as well as medical treatments, including AIDS-inhibiting antiretroviral therapy, and HIV/AIDS awareness education for surviving adults and children. You can make a one-time donation, choose to donate monthly, or, better still, choose to sponsor a child on a monthly basis in the affected areas. Sponsorship is certainly worth the time and effort; we look so forward to the letters, photos, and drawings from the child we sponsor in Tanzania. This season is big on gift-giving, and here is an opportunity to give the gift of live in a land where survival is beyond anything most of us can imagine. Please consider a donation today.
links for 2006-11-28
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A color theme web app from Adobe Labs. You can create your own color themes, see what others have created, and download the themes for use in Adobe Creative Suite products, for print or web design.
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Single-page news aggregator which combines "old media" sources with blogs.
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A new shopping deals and coupon site from the folks who brought you Uncrate and Outblush.
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Don't spend $60 on that HDMI cable at Best Buy when you can buy the same thing at Monoprice.com for $7.
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How far are we really going to push this whole social networking thing? On Quotiki, you can post and search for your favorite quotes.
More Get a Mac
There are three new "Get a Mac" commercials: "Gift Exchange", "Sales Pitch", and "Meant for Work". The worst of the three, and probably the worst of all the "Get a Mac" ads, has to be "Sales Pitch". I really like "Meant for Work", especially the end when PC wanders off in disgust, saying, "I have got to go...listen to some emo." I'd probably feel the same way.
The News Right Now
I'd say something pithy like, "All the news you can use in one spot", but for quite a few folks, it may not, in fact, be all the news they could use, and it may not include all of the news they may want to use. Be that as it may: The News Right Now. TNRN is a news aggregator which combines "Old Media" with "The Blogs", their titles, not mine. The sources are divided on the page, with the former being on top, and the latter on the bottom. There are preferences to switch this, and to even exclude one or the other from being displayed. Another preference to tweak is the displaying of news by the source, or by topic, by source being the default. These preferences are in handy drop-down menus at the top of the page. In the Old Media wing, one can find the headlines from The Wall Street Journal, the AP, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, WSJ's OpinionJournal, Philly's Inquirer, the LA Times, the Washington Times, and a few others. The Blogs range from Washington Monthly to The Corner (National Review), The American Prospect to Townhall.com, Eschaton and the Daily Kos to Instapundit and Hugh Hewitt. Joshua Micah Marshall, The Plank, Michelle Malkin, Power Line, and Ed Morrissey round out the featured bloggers. There is no way to delete or add an individual news source or blog, but for a lot of folks who may engage several of these sites per day, The News Right Now is a good way to get an overview of the latest news from a single source.
links for 2006-11-24
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A jacket for women that's a real shocker. That porcupine jacket shown in the Sci-Fi Channel commercial isn't looking quite so far-fetched.
links for 2006-11-16
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The Gorillapod is a wrappable mini tripod for your camera. There are different sizes of Gorillapods for different sizes of cameras, i.e., one for point-and-shoots, one for SLRs, etc.
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I've seen several photos of these guys on Flickr, and thought I'd track them down.
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Make a keyfob out of your Moo cards.
links for 2006-11-14
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Conference database with social networking tools.
links for 2006-11-12
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A lot of why I love having grown up in Baton Rouge and raised on LSU football is explained here.
We give thanks
Today is Veteran's Day, and we offer our heartiest and most humble thanks for those who have served, and those who are currently serving, in our nation's armed forces.
"Across America, there are more than 25 million veterans. Their ranks include generations of citizens who have risked their lives while serving in military conflicts, including World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf and the war on terror. They have fought for the security of our country and the peace of the world. They have defended our founding ideals, protected the innocent and liberated the oppressed from tyranny and terror. They have known the hardships and the fears and the tragic losses of war. Our veterans know that in the harshest hours of conflict they serve just and honorable purposes. Every veteran has lived by a strict code of discipline. Every veteran understands the meaning of personal accountability and loyalty and shared sacrifice. From the moment you repeated the oath to the day of your honorable discharge, your time belonged to America; your country came before all else." --President George W. Bush
links for 2006-11-11
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I especially like the Command-shift-click in Safari; I didn't know that one.
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Just goes to show what can be done with some clever editing and a few soundtrack additions.
When keyboard shortcuts collide
I just tried to mark as read all messages in a Mailsmith mailbox by hitting the K key, which is what you use to mark all messages as read in NetNewsWire. (For what it's worth, marking a message as read in Mailsmith is accomplished by Cmd-M.)
links for 2006-11-09
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I finally found a video on YouTube I wanted to save, and this is the easiest free way to do it. Thanks, Eric!
March of Dimes + MasterCard
November is Prematurity Awareness Month, and the March of Dimes has teamed up with MasterCard to raise awareness and double fund-raising efforts. If you use your MasterCard to make a donation to the March of Dimes, MasterCard will double it! As parents of a preemie (though you'd never know it to see him now!), the March of Dimes is a charity near and dear to our hearts. Please consider using your MasterCard to double your donation this month. Thanks!
One of many things I love about our town
I bet you didn't get offered homemade carrot cake by the workers at your voting precinct today. You did vote, didn't you?
Don't Change
I'm not sure what external or internal stimuli prompted it, but "Don't Change" (iTunes Store link) by INXS popped in to my head about an hour ago. I've been listening to it repeatedly since. The last time I heard this song was when I took my beloved to the INXS concert in July. The band closed the encore with it.
Yesterday's shuffle first ten
Kicked on ye olde iTunes in shuffle mode yesterday morning, to give myself some background music while I commenced writing this year's novel. What's funny is that I had earlier finished the chapter on the beauty and apparent oddities of the iPod's shuffle mode in Steven Levy's The Perfect Thing, his book devoted to the little white wonder from Apple.
Part of the chapter was devoted to the randomness of shuffle mode, the mathematics behind it, and how when true randomness is really at work, we begin to believe it's not really so random at all. Like say when people notice their iPod--and here I'll also throw in the iTunes application itself--seemingly playing a lot of the same type of music in a row. Such it was this morning, when I had an all-mellow mix.
As before, songs are linked to the iTunes Store, albums to Amazon.
1. "Never Say Goodbye" - Bon Jovi - Slippery When Wet
2. "September Skies" - The Brian Setzer Orchestra - The Brian Setzer Orchestra
3. "Yellow Ledbetter" - Pearl Jam - Jeremy
4. "Flesh for Fantasy" - Billy Idol - Greatest Hits
5. "DJ Culture" - Pet Shop Boys - Discography
6. "If I Leave This World Tomorrow" - Glenn Kaiser - Spontaneous Combustion (I've always loved Kaiser's voice, and think his blues work is so much better than when he fronted Resurrection Band/Rez)
7. "Understand Your Man" - Johnny Cash - Unearthed, Vol. 1 - Who's Gonna Cry
8. "Last In Love" - George Strait - Pure Country
9. "Your Presence" - By the Tree - These Days
10. "(Now and Then There's) A Fool Such As I" - Elvis Presley - Elvis 30 #1 Hits
and a bonus, because I like the song so much:
11. "Loved and Forgiven" - Lost Dogs - Gift Horse
ATPM 12.11
The November issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure. Mike Chamberlain notes some of the odds and ends one might take with them for their mobile computing needs, based on his five-week European trip this past summer. Mark Tennent manages to weave together Keats, the MyBook Pro (yes, MyBook, not MacBook), the Honda Civic, and Mac OS X, as he looks at function versus form. Ted delves in to writing environments and their relation to outliners in this month's ATPO, including the one I'm currently using for NaNoWriMo. PageSpinner is the latest web development app to go under Miraz's web accessibility microscope, and Sylvester has a tour of an app on your Mac you may not even realize is there, Activity Monitor. Lee got some great shots at a butterfly garden, which he shares in this month's Desktop Pictures section. The misery of Cortland's search for work continues, leading him to Wieser Graphics and his first--and second--embarrassing moments with Angie. It's been four years since Lee first reviewed EarthDesk, and a lot has changed in that time, so he took the opportunity to look at this intriguing app again. He also looks at RouteBuddy, a mapping application for your Mac that can work with supported GPS devices that have USB. Finally, while the Spaces virtual desktops feature of Mac OS X is still on the horizon, David Thompson sees if one can get similar functionality now from VirtueDesktops. We're still looking for help in the editorial, writing, and art departments. If you would like to contribute cover art to an upcoming issue, have a keen eye for grammar and spelling to edit copy, or have an itch to write about the Mac world, drop us a line. As always, at ATPM we are proud to offer our readers choices in how they consume our product. Enjoy!
Round Two: So it begins
Those of you who read my musings via this site's RSS feed (you are using the Feedburner one, aren't you?) will not see the new graphic at the top of the right-side column on the main page. Yes, I will again be taking part in the annual self-flagellation event known as "NaNoWriMo", or National Novel Writing Month. The insanity will commence shortly, at 12:00 AM, Wednesday, November 1st. Writers will have thirty days to write 50,000 words. The goal is to suppress your inner editor and just write, going for quantity over quality. An average of 1,667 words a day is what you're shooting for. Doesn't sound like much, does it? You try it. Last year, I flamed out some where around 18,000 words, not even making the halfway point. I've been doing some brainstorming the past week or so, and I think I've got a story I can take the distance this year. (No, Rich, it's not the one we've been talking about; that's on the back burner for now, but still something I'd like to pursue.) I've been fleshing out the main character, even made a few notes. I've set up the PowerBook as the primary writing machine. For those of you in and around Lewisville, Texas, there's a write-in scheduled at the Lewisville Public Library this Saturday, November 4th, from 2:00-4:00 PM. Bring your laptop, they have wifi. Our church has the Roads Coffee House, open on Sundays from 10:15 AM-12:45 PM, and Thursdays from 5:30-9:00 PM, and I'm going to try to organize a write-in for a Thursday night. (Hey, Brent, you want in on this? This could be a kick start to getting some writing done.) NaNoWriMo participant "ShatteredByRain" has posted some encouraging--or maybe sado-masochistic?--calendar wallpapers for the NaNoWriMo crowd. I'm using the one titled "Shore". Hopefully it will inspire more than depress. "Thirty Days and Nights of Literary Abandon." Let's hope so!