It feels like it was a really long time ago when Facebook finally pulled the plug on FriendFeed.

So apparently this happened about four blocks from my office yesterday.

That moment when people who hate sampling and remixes forget that rock and roll totally appropriated aspects of R&B, the blues, gospel, jazz, etc., etc., and mashed it all up into an ill-defined genre.

It took me a really long time to learn this, but I finally realized that asking "what if?" unilaterally makes no sense. Because it doesn't matter if it never crossed her mind.

in the shadow of the white mountain gleaming
still ice-crowned though the cherry trees blossom
the sky pale blue as the warmth of daylight fades
I'm lost in a memory of a dream forsaken

This article in the Washington Post tries to argue that prevention is more expensive than intervention. The only problem is that they deliberately ignore two preventative measures that have clearly been demonstrated to decrease costs: immunizations, and colon cancer screening.

from my cousin J™

This is one of the happiest songs I’ve ever heard about such a depressing topic:

Tim O’Reilly’s post about a blogger’s code of conduct has generated much discussion across the blogosphere and has actually been picked up by the MSM outlets such as the BBC and the New York Times.

Just pondering Memory, Thorn, and Sorrow still. I think I thought this the first time I read it, and I’m not usually the gushy, romantic type, but I think the thing that sticks the most with me is the relationship between Simon and Miriamele and how painstaking Tad Williams actually fleshed out its nuances. I think my most favorite scenes are when Simon and Miriamele head out on there own to return to the Hayholt in their bid to try to stop the Storm King and to prevent the End of the World, and they have to seek shelter in people’s abandoned houses, and I was struck especially by the scene where she is doing common, domestic things that you wouldn’t expect a princess to know how to do (not that I’m suggesting that that’s women ought to do)—there is a sort-of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves quality to it. I guess the mundanity of it all really struck me, and how what moved that section of the plot along was the developing romance between the two characters. For some reason, these scenes actually seem to capture the sense of Home for me (which also happens to be a major theme in this book.) Whereas Tolkien touches upon the fact that “you can never really go home again,” particularly when he turns the Shire into a totalitarian state, Williams reiterates the (admittedly disgustingly trite) idea that “home is where the heart is,” which may or may not actually represent an physical place. In retrospect, I suppose maybe Tad Williams had the same idea that I did when I read Book IV and VI of LotR: how different the scenes would’ve been if Frodo and Sam weren’t both male (or, I suppose, alternately, how different it would’ve been if J.R.R. Tolkien wasn’t an old school Catholic and had tried to tap the homoerotic side of it all) and indeed I do find it very touching.

I had this working before, mostly with the help of this script [citation on macosxhints.com][post on patrickgibson.com] Because of my iBook mishaps, all my tweaks were wiped, and I haven't had the time to reinstate the changes.

Show me your poker face! You call that a poker face! Witchhazel, styptic, and death by crucifixion in the ICD-9 manual. Normalcy is basically impossible at this juncture.