Retrophisch

Miscellany

The iPod cases from ifrogz look very nice. I like the customizable aspects of the design, but would love to be able to upload my own image for the Screenz. A Retrophisch-branded iPod case in “Gun Metal” Wrapz and “Thick Black” Bandz would rock.

Amazon Grocery is now out of beta after more than 200,000 people have used it to shop for food staples.

One of the recent winners of a Flickr Pro account speaks to my childhood.

Stuff a calendar into your Backpack

So the calendar feature for Backpack launched today. I like how easy it is to add items to the calendar, and I realize this is a 1.0 release (Note to Google: it’s not a beta.), but I’m greatly disappointed it didn’t roll out with repeating events as part of the feature set. I was looking forward to using iCal solely as the desktop conduit between an online calendar I can access anywhere, and my mobile devices with which I would like to sync calendar events.

Sure, I can do that with Google Calendar, but I’m already in Backpack so much, and I like 37signals’ implementation and interface better. Besides repeating events, other features I’d like to see added in a future update, ranked in order of personal importance:

• Events added to Backpack’s Calendar do not show the scheduled time within the calendar. Mark Gallagher notes this in the announcement’s comments, because to see an event’s time, you have to click on the event, instead of just being able to glance at the calendar and seeing all of the times in context.

• The ability to toggle the time on the reminder. For some events, I need more than 30 minutes notice, my parents’ anniversary, for instance, which I need a few days notice so I can buy a card and put it in the mail to them. Yes, I know I can use Backpack’s Reminders feature for this, but it would be more productive to have this built in to the Calendar side of the house. It seems like overkill, and double work, for me to enter the event of my parents’ anniversary in to the calendar, then have to switch over and enter a separate reminder to buy a card days in advance.
  
  Commenter “D” notes: “Quick hack to get repeating events: enter them as reminders and then subscribe to your reminder feed within calendar.” This is working well for me, so far, but then you’ll get in to the situation of all of your reminders being in a single calendar, when you would like to have reminders in different calendars: Personal, Work, Pet, and so on.
  
  In the Backpack Calendar forums, 37signals’ own Jason Friedman notes that they weren’t happy with the repeating events implementation, and decided not to include it the 1.0 release. So at least for now, the best way to get this function is D’s suggestion, but it’s nice to know it is being worked on, and we can expect it in the future. I hope this upcoming implementation allows for the setting of a time other than thirty minutes before.

• Single, all-day events should be displayed in the same way as multiple-day events. This was a suggestion by Ryan Christensen in the announcement’s comments. This would distinguish the all-day event, like my aforementioned parents’ anniversary, from a time-specific event, like “Give the dog his heartworm pill at noon”.

• To-do list implementation for the calendar. Again, from the comments to the announcement, Jeff Croft asks about this, specifically that supported by the iCalendar format. Probably ninety-five percent of what I personally use Backpack for is some sort of to-do list. For short-term stuff, I would love to see this implemented in the Calendar, but have lived without it this far. I would much rather see 37signals devote developer time to repeating events and print styles, something they still need for Backpack’s regular pages.

All in all, the Calendar function in Backpack is simple and elegant, and on par with what I would expect from 37signals. It took them two and a half months to arrive at this point; I hope the next two and a half months result in usability improvements which put the Backpack Calendar over the top.

Where are the revolutionaries now, indeed

Jeff Harrell has a great piece which essentially asks the oppressed of the world what are they waiting for:

As long as amoral regimes wrap themselves in the cloak of legitimacy while permitting, sponsoring or even initiating guerilla and terrorist wars against their neighbors, citizens who are held captive by those regimes are going to die. They can choose to die as bystanders, to be numbered among the ranks of the unintentional dead, to be dismissed as collateral damage, or they can pick up a rifle and start a revolution and give up their lives fighting to free themselves, their families and their national brethren from the despots whom they presently protect and on whom they can blame all the death and destruction to which they’ve been witness.

Shilling for Hezbollah

From the Toadpond:

It does not require much observation to understand that there is a large faction on this planet that lives only to see Israel’s destruction. But to stand up in public and declare that Hezbollah is anything but a terrorist organization demonstrates how this deep this hatred runs, and how oblivious to truth these minds have become.

I keep thinking no politician can be as looney as Howard Dean, but then George Galloway keeps popping up to snatch the title.

Unity

Bret Stephens:

Tel Aviv may be the economic and cultural capital of Israel, Jerusalem its political and symbolic capital. But the Galilee is where Israelis come to play, the forested and breezy getaway from the sweltering coast and the incessant dramas of everyday life in this region. Israelis were prepared to give up sandy Gaza and might also have been prepared to do the same with the rocky West Bank, if only the Palestinians would behave themselves. Yet places make a nation as much as principles do, and the Galilee was one place no Israeli could part with if his country was still going to be worth living in.

So even as terror-stricken residents of the north flee, the rest of the country is prepared to fight, whatever the cost: A recent poll found that 80% of Israelis support the present military operations, and three-quarters of those would be prepared to launch a full-scale invasion of Lebanon if that is what it takes to defeat Hezbollah. No similar consensus has existed among Israelis since the 1967 Six Day War.

Up in his winery, Mr. Haviv fears that if the war continues, he will have no one to tend the vines and take in the harvest, and an entire season’s worth of business will be ruined. Yet as we stand beside one of his fields, watching an Apache helicopter fire missiles at a Lebanese village visible in the far distance, he muses on what his decision to remain here means. “Being here is part of defending the country. If Hezbollah wins this, the terrorists win this war, and not just against us but against the free world. You think I’m coming down from here? Never.”

Once again, the Israelis seem to grasp the concept of unity in the Long War on Terror, while it eludes many in our nation.

And we’re back

Mucho gracias to sysadmin extraordinaire Jim, who was up late last night with the server transition.

There is nothing like a fast server on a fast pipe to give you the warm fuzzies in your little geek heart.

Sorry, Wes

Couldn’t resist.

Server migration

We’re moving servers, thanks to the efforts of Jim, our sysadmin extraordinaire, so this site and its related entities will be unavailable for a while, beginning around 8 PM CST this evening. This includes e-mail, so if you try to send anything to my e-mail address at this domain after 8 PM, you may want to wait until tomorrow.

Miscellany

This whole “Numa Numa” thing is out of control.

Tim Zimmerman:

What swims at 20 miles per hour, can carve out hunks of human flesh, and will attack anything that moves? The Humboldt squid. Brace yourself for a dive with the eeriest beast in the ocean.

A fascinating read.

Jeff has an outstanding parable of the recent Hezbollah attacks on Israel.

Israel Update

If you’d like a first-person account of the Hezbollah attacks on Israel, and the Israeli response, head over to David Dolan’s site and subscribe to his e-mail list.

David is a Christian pastor and author who has been resident in Israel for many years. Last year, David spoke at our church, and even for someone like me, who has followed the Mideast conflict, and the region’s history, for many years, it was eye-opening.

Quote of the Day

Tiffany:

The Cheesecake Factory always looks like a mosque to me. Only, a mosque out of Willy Wonka or something. Sort of an Oompa-Loompa faith community.

I have never really thought about it before, but now that she mentions it, the Cheesecake Factory does look like a Willy Wonka mosque! I guess I’ll have to remember not to order bacon on my burger the next time I visit.

Chad Vader

“Life is hard when you’re Darth Vader’s less-talented, less-charismatic younger brother and you manage a grocery store.”

I love the Imperial March on acoustic guitar.

[Via Eric via IM.]

Miscellany

If only I had room in any of my bathrooms for one of these.

Just when you think there might be some hope in this world that the tide of sexual immorality would take a turn for the better, something like the Shame On You Kit pops up. How about never putting yourself in the situation to have to have a “Shame On You Kit”?

As a satisfied customer, I highly recommend KnowledgeNews, which today had a bit on the differences between viruses and bacteria. I loved this analogy:

Imagine it this way. If just one of the 10 to 100 trillion cells in your body were the size of a baseball park, the average bacterium would be the size of the pitcher’s mound. The average virus would be the size of the baseball.

A thought on taxes and wages

There’s a movement afoot by the Democrats to get the minimum wage raised again. Despite historical financial evidence to the contrary, raising the minimum wage does not help those at the low end of the wage spectrum, as our nation’s leftists would like us to think. Raising the minimum wage means businesses are less likely to hire more workers, due to their increased costs with the raise in the minimum wage.

Contrast this with the fact that, according to today’s Political Diary, Germany is set to cut its corporate tax rate to thirty percent, down from thirty-nine percent. Once it does so, the United States will have the highest corporate tax rate of the industrialized world.

How does this affect the minimum wage? I’m glad you asked. It seems high corporate tax rates, according to a “new study by American Enterprise Institute scholars Kevin Hassett and Aparna Mathur…is for the most part paid by workers in the form of lower wages.”

Ergo: cut the corporate tax rate, workers’ wages will rise.

You can not get even odds in Vegas that the Democrats would sign on to such a policy.

Happy Birthday, my love

Yesterday was my wife’s birthday, and I didn’t get around to posting birthday wishes for her. One of the dilemmas for married guys—at least, I hope this is a dilemma for married guys, or else it’s just me—is the older we get, the harder we find it to pull off those grand, romantic gestures for our beloved.

Such was the case yesterday.

I thought a lot about what I wanted to say, but couldn’t get thoughts converted to bits on the screen. So here is what I’m left with:

Kel, I love you more now than when we first said the words sixteen years ago. I love you more now than when we exchanged vows and rings fourteen years ago. I love that you’re my best friend, and you love me even when I’m not very loveable. I love that you’re the mother of our son, and how awesome you are at being a mom.

I hope you had a good birthday.

More miscellany

Liechtenstein is 200. The total population of the nation is a little over half of that of my town.

In the market for a new mortgage? Be sure to check out the Mortgage Professor, who has a list of “Upfront Mortgage Brokers”. These brokers promise the transparency of disclosing “the loan’s wholesale price (the interest rate and points), plus the markup, in writing and in advance.”

[Via Newsweek, June 26, 2006.]

A thought on why Honda rocks:

Last week, during swim lessons, I had a moron moment and forgot to take my Pilot’s key and fob out of my swimsuit pocket. An hour later, after drying off the tyke (the lessons were for him, in case you were wondering), I went to change in to some dry clothes and had one of those Seinfeldian “Oooohhhhhh” moments.

Just out of curiosity, I hit the lock button on the fob. Twice. I heard the Pilot’s horn blast a single note.

And I smiled.

It’s still working, with apparently no ill effects. So is the little keychain LED light my sister-in-law got as a stocking stuffer for me two Christmases ago.

Miscellany

The federal government is apparently looking at creating a national SMS alert system.

[Via MobileTracker.]

Congratulations to Kyle MacDonald, who, one year and fourteen trades later, bartered a red paper clip for a house.

Making sure you tipped the right amount after the fact doesn’t do your server much good, does it?

Happy Birthday, Lee!

I’m so glad that forever shall I be five months younger than mi amigo, who apparently is already feeling the effects of age, having to recycle his birthday blog post because he cannot muster the mental faculties to create something original. ;-)

Va l’Italia!

In recognition of the nation with the better food, better skiing, and better people winning the World Cup, I thought I would share my favorite French joke. (Blame FranX, as this came up in an IM conversation with him this evening.)

Q: Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees?

A: Because the Germans like to march in the shade.

Miscellany

John points to a 94x magnification of Velcro being pulled apart. Wicked cool.

You can also see Scotch tape being ripped, more Velcro, still more Velcro, and Equisetum strobilus, all worth a look.

How much do I love Default Folder? Its functionality should be built in to OS X.

(I was just using it quite a bit today, lots of saving in different locales, etc., and I thought a shout-out was in order.)

After months of waiting, I found it. Part of a pint was consumed this evening. It was yummy. Retrophisch™ Recommended!

Tivoli’s latest iPod accessory

It’s a shame that at the time I reviewed the Tivoli Audio iSongBook, there wasn’t the black version. Such is life.

Now, Tivoli has the unusually-named iYiYi coming in the fall. Billed as a digital home entertainment system, the iYiYi doesn’t look to have many more features than the iSongBook, but it does have a deeper casing. This means it’s not as portable as the iSongBook, but will likely sound better, since the iYiYi will be capable of delivering deeper, fuller bass sounds, one of the areas in which I found the iSongBook lacking.

[Wave of the phin to Uncrate.]

This is how you remind me

I like iCal’s alarm features, but there is one feature request I have: I’d like to have both an e-mail sent and have an alarm message pop up on screen. For now, it’s an either/or proposition, and which one I select depends on the type of event I need the reminder for, and when said event takes place. Having the option of setting both types of alarms covers all of the bases.

Miscellany

Oh, if true, a tabbed Finder would rock.

(Yes, I am aware Path Finder has this functionality already.)

You may have seen Seurat’s “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of LaGrande Jatte”, not realizing what a masterpiece of impressionist painting it is. My first exposure to it, and I’m betting for lots of children of the ’80s, was thanks to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

Now, the famous painting has been recreated by those crazy cheeseheads.

It kind of sucks that the 1.0b1 version of a piece of software has crashed more on me in two days of use than the alpha verisons have in the past year. Update: I guess I wasn’t clear in my above disappointment. For those keeping score, I’ve “downgraded” to Adium X 0.89.1.

Part of a conversation with a fellow parent

How do I love thee? Let me check the pitch count

In an IM conversation earlier this evening, a friend was telling me of a conversation he had had with an acquaintance. The acquaintance could not understand my friend’s love of baseball, and I thought his answers were worth sharing:

It’s the thinking man’s sport, to me. It’s the game within the game. Where a team sport can have one hero. Where great hitting teams can get crushed by great pitching. Where no-name guys with sub-par careers can make history by pitching a no-hitter, and the greats who pitch seven no-hitters.

The game of inches and 90 feet, strange-shaped ballparks with short porches and high walls.

Where fans root for the opposing hurler because he pitched a no-hitter against their favorite team.

Well, except in New York.

Where players come back out for a curtain call.

Batboys, batmen, batwomen.

Batgrannies.

Where a regular $40 baseball shoots up to $1 million just because some guy hit it for his 500th homer.

Where caps first got their bills bent, and a player can go from goat to hero in the span of an inning.

Where there is no clock and you play until the tie is broken, but the home team still has a chance to win.

Where the managers dress just like the players and aren’t called coaches.

And umpires put on the armor, too.

Where fans are so much a part of the game, they can even affect a play, like robbing a flyout into a home run or turning a triple into a ground-rule double.

Where a guy’s speed turns a triple into an inside the park home run. Where teamwork can create two outs on one pitch, and, on the rare occasion, a triple play.

Where sacrifices are also a statistic.

And it’s the only American past time that another country made into their present time: besiboru … Japanese baseball.

Why do you love it?

A quick note on my past

Marriage is where it’s at.

At least for me.

Mostly baseball miscellany

Sometimes, it seems like the Starbucks growth pattern really is this bad, doesn’t it?

Texas Rangers All-Star Michael Young became the 10th-fastest MLB player to reach the 1,000-hit milestone, cranking off a single in the fifth inning yesterday. Last year’s AL batting champ continues to impress, and remains one of our favorite Rangers.

I should also note that while my little phisch will see a game on the tube and remark, “Baseball!”, he’s not to the point where he knows players’ names.

LSU athletics director Skip Bertman was inducted in to the College Baseball Hall of Fame. Topping Bertman’s impressive accomplishments are the five NCAA championships he led the LSU Tigers to, making them the dominate team of the 1990s.

I can still remember where I was and what I was doing when the Tigers won the first championship in ‘91. I was at my hometown church, in the gymnasium, buffing the floors, while my bride-to-be was cleaning the kitchen. Starting in high school, I took on the janitorial duties there as a part-time job, and the once-a-month gym floor buffing happened to take place the weekend of the College World Series finals.

Congratulations, Coach, and Geaux Tigers!

Adium 1.0b1

I note with amusement my pal Damien’s post on TUAW regarding the release of the 1.0b1 version of Adium, in which he writes, “Please note that this is still in beta, though I was using it last night without any significant problems presenting themselves.”

I realize TUAW’s audience includes many non-geek types, who are happily using iChat, and haven’t yet discovered Adium, but it still brought a grin to my face to see a somewhat boilerplate beta-warning line for software that, while technically still in development, has been very stable—for me, at least—over the past year I’ve been using it. This is the first version I’ve seen with the 1.0 moniker attached to it in any form.

If you don’t use the voice and video chat features of iChat much, you should check out Adium (new beta). It supports multiple chat protocols (AIM, Yahoo, MSN Messenger, Jabber (Gtalk), ICQ, IRC, and more…), has a logging feature I have found most useful in finding URIs or other bits of info I forgot to note elsewhere, and is open source, so there’s no proprietary lock-in, if that’s something you’re concerned about.

Miscellany

I would pay good money to see “The Running of the Congressmen.”

You know the Oprahfication of America is out of control when Cookie Monster is reduced to introspection.

McSweeney’s:

Me love cookies. Me tend to get out of control when me see cookies. Me know it not natural to react so strongly to cookies, but me have weakness. Me know me do wrong. Me know it isn’t normal. Me see disapproving looks. Me see stares. Me hurt inside.

You, too, can help Cory Doctorow remove his Apple tattoo. I join Gus in snickering.

Another Firefox benefit

Blake Ross gives yet another reason to consider Firefox over Internet Explorer:

People ask me, “Well, gee, if IE7 is starting to catch up to Firefox, and if they’ve got their hand back in development right now, and eventually they might actually catch up to Firefox in terms of features, what’s the benefit of using Firefox? Why are you guys still around if you say that your only goal is just to make the Web a better place?”

My answer to that is, how much can you really trust a company that five years ago completely left you abandoned? If they do, in fact, succeed in taking back some of the market share that Firefox has gotten back from them, who’s to say that they’re not going to disappear again? My issue is not so much at a product level, it’s at a company level. How do you trust a company that left everyone out in the cold for five years?

Independence Day 2006

A Nation of Resolve

Two-hundred-thirty remarkable years have passed since July 4th, 1776—but what lies ahead for our liberty-blessed land? Let us take stock, at this anniversary of our nation’s founding, of how we started on our course as a nation, and whether we still possess the character of that free people our Founders envisioned us to be.

Read the Declaration again with a fresh appraisal, and note the measured tones of the stirring words that begin the treatise: “When in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.”

“When…it becomes necessary…” Armed hostilities had commenced on 19 April 1775, at the battles of Lexington and Concord, and a year before asserting American independence, on 5 July 1775, the Continental Congress adopted the Olive Branch Petition, beseeching the British king for a peaceful resolution of the American colonies’ grievances. As with tyrants ever, the King declined the proffered peace.

The Founders further remarked on their natural hesitation to act boldly in severing ties to England: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” A second time in this passage, the Declaration signers contended they acted out of necessity.

The Founders described their entreaties to the British government: “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

Once more: “We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation…”

It is remarkable, indeed, how our nation’s character has changed. Upon deciding that independence was necessary, our Founding Fathers acted decisively. How often these days do we match such resolve?

Postmodern American man, steeped in moral relativism and doubtful of ascertaining truth, is a bundle of eclectic capacities and features—-a far cry from the Founders’ notion of human nature. They believed that each individual human is created in the image of God, with the stamp of that divine impress best seen in the fact that each of us is a morally choosing being, fully capable of knowing and distinguishing right from wrong.

Our Founding Fathers thus treated liberty of conscience, most particularly in regard to faith, as central to the project of freedom: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” The Founders believed our lives are not vehicles of pleasure but have moral consequence based on our chosen path of conscience and that government should follow our lead.

So started the American Revolution, with this formal statement: “We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States…”

The signers concluded, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” The Founders forged the earliest temper of our populace on the anvil of freedom, and we diminish such courage and resolve at our own great peril.

These were men, “heroes and patriots” in Noah Webster’s words, intent on founding a country fit for citizens possessed of sturdy virtue, firm determination and sound judgment, and to inculcate within the new land’s citizens a resolve for liberty. This is the heritage we celebrate this Independence Day. Let’s live up to it.

—The Patriot Post, 06-26 Digest

On flag burning

I admit to having varied thoughts with regard to the free speech versus protecting our national emblem from being burnt aspects of the “protest” burnings of the American flag.

Men and women have bled and died for our flag, from the time when our fledgling nation did not have a single standard, but several, to the present day and the present conflicts of the Long War on Terror. Yet it was not a scrap of red, white, and blue cloth these men and women sacrificed, but what that cloth represents. For anyone to burn a flag of the United States of America, except as the proscribed method of taking said flag out of service, dishonors the memory of those men and women.

The other side of my mind, however, screams that the protest burning is the kind of freedom those sacrifices were made for. Quite the contest of ideals raging in my grey matter.

Yet another reason to love the Internet: if you wait long enough, someone’s going to come along and say what it is you want to say, only better.

Tod Lindberg:

To tell you the truth, I’m not that crazy about such a constitutional amendment, for the simple reason that flag-burning is unique in the annals of protest for the way in which it perfectly encapsulates what a jerk the person burning the flag is. It is auto-discrediting in a way that no placard or chant, however idiotic, can equal. To set fire to the national emblem of a country that allows you to say and do as you please, including burning the national emblem, is to make the point that your freedom is so visceral a part of your nature that you are oblivious to it. It doesn’t reflect well on you to be oblivious in this fashion, but it reflects well on your country for how deeply it ingrains the spirit of freedom into those lucky enough to live here.

That said, the last thing that a constitutional amendment banning flag-burning strikes me as is a slippery slope toward broader restriction on freedom of expression.

Besides, our nation has more important things to worry about, like stopping radical Islamists from popping a nuke in one of our major metropolises. I don’t think a majority of voters, while perhaps concerned one way or the other on the flag-burning issue, have it ranked as a high priority. It’s more of a “when the jihadists are all dead or in prison” sort of issue.

The always popular double standard

It’s nice to see anti-Semitism alive and well at the Guardian. Then again, at least it’s nice to see a major media source wear its bias on its sleeve, rather than pretend it’s purely neutral.

Will Hutton decides to rebuke Israel for its recent incursions into Gaza, which netted eight cabinet members, thirty members of parliament, and thirty other officials of the Hamas-led Palestinian government, calling these acts, as well as the bombings of infrastructure targets in Gaza, a declaration of war by the Israeli state.

Memo to Mr. Hutton: Well, duh.

Hutton notes “Missiles from Gaza are regularly fired at Israel.” Yet in Hutton’s world, this apparently does not constitute an act of war against Israel by the Palestinian state, despite his earlier statement, “The Hamas government has not yet renounced its commitment to the elimination of Israel or to the use of terrorism.” The “elimination of Israel” as a tenant of what Hutton claims is a legitimate and sovereign government is not a “declaration of war”? I’m not sure how much clearer Hamas, and thus, the Palestinian people, who put Hamas in power, have to be in their declaration of war against Israel to satisfy Mr. Hutton.

Far from being, as Hutton claims, an inexcusable act of war, Israel’s bombings of and raids in to Gaza are more of what Israel needs to be doing to stand strong in the face of an enemy which seeks its utter annihilation. There may be a sliver of hope for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, if Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas were not being undermined by the Hamas majority in the government.

But when a majority of a nation seeks not only the defeat of its neighbor, but the elimination of that nation’s people, there is little reasoning that can be done with such persons to secure peace. Israel must project strength to protect itself, to assure the Palestinians and any other group or nation that it is willing to do whatever it takes to ensure “Never again.”

Writers such as Mr. Hutton would do well to pack away their double standards for the Israeli state and, well, “remain silent” would be the polite term.

A compliment from MDJ

MacJournals recently released the third installment of its 2005-2006 MDJ Power 25. The Power 25 is a ranking of the twenty-five most influential persons with regard to the Macintosh platform. These persons are voted on by a select group of Apple insiders, developers, and media types.

In the “Unheralded” section of the final installment, MDJ had this to say:

Only writers from TidBITS and Macworld made the list again, blanking out the talented staffs at print publications like MacAddict and at online journals such as About This Particular Macintosh (whose editor, Michael Tsai, is also the author of DropDMG and SpamSieve, two best-of-class shareware products).

I have long thought that we have a fantastic staff working on ATPM, one reason why I continue my involvement with the publication.

Unlike the other publications noted in the MDJ quote, our staff is all-volunteer; we all have “real” jobs. (Well, most of us do, any way.) Each month our writers churn out reviews and how-to columns, as well as opinion pieces, you won’t find anywhere else. We don’t regurgitate product specs and marketing materials, throwing in a few hours of the product use. We live with these items, attempting to integrate them in to our daily workflow or play time. Many a reader has told us how much they like our publication because of that depth. We strive, each issue, to be the “e-zine about the personal computing experience”.

I feel as though this publication is, in a way, an extension of my family, and I always like to see my family’s work recognized and appreciated. Thanks, Matt, for the recognition. Kudos, and thanks, to the staffers of About This Particular Macintosh. You guys and gals rock.

Every day at the ballpark is a good day

It’s an even better day when your team wins.

Last night I took in my second game of the season at the Ballpark in Arlington. (New readers should note I try not to dignify the Ballpark by its new, corporate name.) My good friend Francisco organized a gathering of friends and coworkers, but it ended up just being four of us, which included his coworkers Patrick and Russ. We had wanted to sit in the Home Run Porch out in right field, but was told by the nice lady at the ticket office that it was sold out, so we went to the upper deck behind home plate. The Home Run Porch never did fill up.

Vicente Padilla had one of his best games for the Rangers that I’ve seen, going eight innings, allowing only four hits and a single run. He threw an impressive 79 strikes out of 111 pitches; it would be nice if games like this became the norm for Padilla, rather than the exception.

With the bases loaded in the seventh, Astros pitcher extraordinaire Roy Oswalt walked Brad Wilkerson, giving up the go-ahead run. The Rangers notched a third in the eighth inning and closer Akinori Otsuka did what he was brought from Japan to do.

I always have a good time at the Ballpark, no matter if the Rangers win or lose. Jumbo hot dogs (all-beef Hebrew National, of course; they answer to a higher authority) and peanuts, chilled Ozarka bottled water (brought in to the park, not purchased), and good camaraderie with pals makes for a great outing. We missed you, Brent, but given the circumstances, totally understandable. Hopefully we can all get together at the end of July.

ATPM 12.07

The July issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available. Paper or plastic?

Wes ponders the news of Mark Pilgrim’s publicized switch from the Mac OS to Ubuntu Linux, as well as the ensuing conversations around the blogosphere. He also points to items on OS X’s kernel, the Apple v Does case, Apple conspiracy theories, John C. Dvorak’s admission that he trolls for Mac users, and Windows Vista running on a MacBook Pro.

We have another double-dose from the prolific Mark Tennent, who loves Call of Duty, but wonders where Apple’s next design inspiration will be springing from. Ted takes a rabbit trail off the outlining pathway in this month’s ATPO, exploring some of the nature and philosophy behind outlining. Chuck looks at script parameters and results for you FileMaker jocks. Miraz Jordan notes how iWeb’s current incarnation isn’t a friend to web accessibility, and Sylvester gets around to using Automator.

This month’s desktop pictures are of Alaska, and are courtesy of John Lowrey. Some of you may know John from Northern Softworks. I have several of John’s photos in my desktop rotation, and we thank him for sharing his work with our readers.

This month’s Cortland features a radical departure as artist Matt Johnson explores a corner of the web comics universe.

Looking for a solution to his DVD-burning needs, Chuck reviews DiscBlaze, then turns his attention to Dobry Backuper, which, if you failed to infer from its title, is yet another data backup app. Wes wasn’t blown away by Google Map Hacks, while Matthew attempts to find out if he indeed did assassinate the President in XIII.

I hope ATPM offers some cool news as the northern hemisphere slides through the hot days of summer, and as always, we thank our readers for…well, reading.