Betterness by Kawika Holbrook

Pretty Pictures for Sale

Hey! Real art. By a real friend. Dave has several pieces in the CORE art show in San Francisco, June 11th, 8:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. If I were a talented artist with ambition and persistence, I could do this.

Feed Reading

Next time I have to explain RSS, XML, Atom, feeds, or subscriptions to someone, I'm pointing them to Matt Round's subscribe page. Want to pull content from various sites onto one web page or into one program? Probably not, if you're the average web surfer. But this helps explain why you might -- and how to do it -- better than anything else I've seen so far.

Better Online Forms

I'm not a programmer, so I have no idea what lead me to O'Reilly's Radar article on improving pull-downs, checkboxes and radio buttons in online forms with some ajax wonder called sliders was supposed to make entering city and state information easier, but I wondered why any site even asks for it if the ZIP Code is already known. Can a ZIP Code cover more than one city? Why not simply eliminate the fields altogether and save everyone some time? Simplifying forms is just as important as improving the user interface, I suspect.

Paris Squared

Hotel heiress Paris Hilton to marry shipping heir Paris Latsis. God forbid she takes his last name.

American Idol Worship

I almost started to care who won, but ever since Constantine was ousted, Jenny's just been in a funk. I wish Americans would get this worked up about real issues during political elections.

Newsdesigner.com

The look of news for print design voyeurs (and the plain curious).

Blogorrhea

I save links in a vain attempt to return to writing. Here are a few dozen that I thought were important at one time. You can tell how long ago that one time was:

Democrats wound up their convention last night with a degree of unity that delegates said they had not seen in a dozen or more years, as party loyalists put aside differences over Iraq, free trade, and antiterrorism strategies to begin a relentless fight to Election Day to defeat George W. Bush.

Barak Obama wins the election. Great background. Hopeful future.

John Kerry uses some variation of word "strength" 17 times in his nomination acceptance speech. "America can do better," and "help is on the way." Now he's reduced to blocking fascists from the courts.

Wedding guests eat victim. That would have saved us some money catering our reception.

I wonder how AuctionDrop is doing. Seemed like a good idea to clean out the closet and earn some cash. Jenny's stuck on Freecycle, which doesn't earn anything but karma.

Donate your computer to charity.

Apple is the fashion brand. We're number one! And Duke freshman get free iPods to "facilitate communication between professors and students" at Duke. Yeah, "facilitate."

Georgia risks war over separatists. Thought they meant our Georgia for a minute.

Bought myself the Motorola V710 because of Bluetooth and got myself 37 other features I never use. Voice dialing, however, is worth it.

My local stationery paper and printing of choice, if I could afford it. Nothing pulls you in like letterpress. This guide would have been useful a year ago. Now it's just pretty.

This is the kind of war reporting I want to read. Intimate, detailed, and nuanced. Wait, that sounds like soft core p0rn.

Slick non-slip e-grips — just want I always never knew I wanted.

All the fancy weblogs have ISSN serials to identify themselves to the Library of Congress. Our government, however, still requires ISSN weblog submissions be mailed, just to break my will. Guess that's why it's called a submission.

America's next president: The incompetent or the incoherent? Many Republicans and conservative editorials favored the incoherent. America chose the incompetent. Soon, when our debt comes due, we'll all be incontinent.

Ten lousy listeners and what we can learn from them.

Hobbits hunted pygmy elephants. That would have been a sight for evangelicals.

The U.S. Senate versus the American People in the latest copyfight.

Conservatives won the election because they were optimistic. Americans don't like to be told we're trashing our planet, mortgaging our future, and selling out souls for feel-good pabluma>.

Do trendy educational methods deny children a good foundation in reading?

Your online passwords suck. 1) Letters and numbers. 2) Upper and lowercase. 3) Gibberish to anyone else. That's the ticket. (And shred those credit card offers.)

David Galbraith aims to argue that religious faith is to be tolerated where it itself is tolerant, but not to be respected. Science over superstition? What country are you living in, mister?

I don't necessary accept the arguments in this article, Four Myths About Social Security, but at least it's a reasoned point of view. Here's an opposing, reasoned point of view.

Why Bush won't debate privatizing Social Security. It's easier to stump, obviously, but the public deserves a better explanation. Here's a thought: why not use means-testing to weed out the rich and make it easier for Americans to save their own money rather than spend it like drunken sailors on foreign goods? Where are all my reasoned articles on taxing spending, not saving? Bush's "Ownership Society" sounds nice, but it would be nice to sock away a little something for a rainy day.

President Bush hoped to limit the political damage from the nomination of Bernard B. Kerik by cutting him loose as soon as he confessed he had not paid taxes for a Mexican nanny who apparently had been in the country illegally. Instead, questions about Bush's judgment have escalated because of a cascade of damaging details about Kerik's business and personal lives that White House vetters either missed or ignored.

Catastrophic Success — The worse Iraq gets, the more we must be winning, according to Bush.

A billion miles away, Titan should be worth visiting to see what worth was like before life took hold (or after we're done extinguishing it).

President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath. As Colin Powell said, "You broke it? You own it."

WorldCom's audacious failure and its toll on an industry. Prison rape is too good for the ringleaders.

I know I'm getting old when the new Ford Fairlane looks attractive to me.

Abstinence pledges may trigger risky sexual behavior. Just say no. Over and over. In a low, throaty voice.

Stuff.

Pope 'obstructed' sex abuse inquiry. Ratzinger ordered bishops to keep allegations secret. Uh oh. That's not a good way to start a Papal stint.

Clean diesel?

And that's it. For now. Thanks for reading to the end. Bye!

Verizon DSL

Lies have been told

Support

To get great customer support, it helps to be a great customer. Short version: be cool.

PowerPix?

The Times compares six small digital cameras. I'm deciding between the Canon PowerShot SD400 and the Nikon Coolpix S1. "Ask yourself deep down: is it more important that people marvel over your camera, or the pictures it takes? If it's the camera - really, it's O.K. to admit it - get the Sony T7. The pictures are excellent, the features are all there, and the camera is so small, you can practically carry it in your wallet. If the photos are more important, the Nikon S1 and the Canon SD400 are the best performers in all lighting conditions. (You can see sample photos from all six cameras at nytimes.com/circuits.) The Nikon offers a bigger screen, better battery life and slightly richer photos. But owning the slightly smaller Canon means never having to say you're sorry you forgot the docking station."