“Sometimes bipartisanship is grounds for celebration, but more often it is cause for tears. Last week, congressional leaders from both parties went into a room to hammer out a plan that would put taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion. But they assert that the investment is essential to the health of the economy. And they insist that if we make this investment, we’ll get all or most of it back.
“This promise would be more believable if the federal government had a long record of using tax dollars responsibly. In fact, it’s the equivalent of the guy who raids his kid’s piggy bank to feed the slots. The most notable impulse of our leaders is spending money the Treasury doesn’t have, piling up bills that future Americans will have to cover.”
Brunton Vapor™ AF All Fuel Expedition Stove
Runs on pretty much any liquid fuel there is: butane, diesel #1, kerosene, auto gasoline, aviation gas, white gas, and more.
Tags: camping, preparedness, stove, survival
“I can think of nothing more unfair to an unborn child than to come into this world unwanted,” declares the Rev. Dr. Susan K. Smith, senior pastor of Advent United Church of Christ in Columbus, Ohio. And that’s the difference between those of us who are pro-life, and those who aren’t: we, the former, can think of something much more unfair.
Fly tshirt Tshirt - PleaseDressMe
I can think of several teenagers who would wear this shirt…
The New York Times > Opinion > Image > Op-Art
“Statler & Waldorf come down from their balcony to agree to disagree about why watch the presidential debate.”
They accurately sum up my feelings on the matter.
“The last thing Jesus needs is the State. Stupid Christians like James Dobson and Pat Roberton like D.C. more than grace … sad.”
Canon Digital Learning Center - Sample Video: EOS 5D Mark II
“REVERIE, an independently-produced video by Explorer of Light Vincent Laforet. This video was shot with a pre-production Canon EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR. The files used to create this video were not manipulated in any way, only re-compressed for ¼ resolution display on our website.”
Pretty amazing for a $2,700 camera with the primary purpose of shooting photographs.
Tags: camera, canon, 5d mark ii, photography, video
Vincent Laforet : photos : Reverie - Behind The Scenes- powered by SmugMug
“Behind the scenes footage of Reverie the film by Vincent Laforet.”
Tags: camera, canon, 5d mark ii, photography, video
Helvetica and Alternatives to Helvetica | The FontFeed
You can certainly skip this one if you’re not a type nerd. My favorite of the alternative bunch is FF Schulbuch.
Tags: font, helvetica, typeface, typography
Leslie Carbone: Ten Conservative Concerns with the Treasury Bailout
The House Republican Study Committee, a group of conservative Representatives, yesterday issued a list of “Ten Conservative Concerns” with the Bush bail-out.
Tags: conservative, politics, republican, finance, money
“PhotoBook is a Facebook photo browser for Mac. It makes it easy and fun to manage, share, and view your friends’ Facebook photos in one intuitive interface.”
You can also import single photos or entire albums into iPhoto with one click. Handy for capturing those images of yourself others have taken.
Tags: facebook, mac, photo, photography, software
“[I] [w]ish more startups focused on what can we be AWESOME at rather than what can we be FIRST at. “First-mover advantage” can be a trap.”
(Of course, being first AND being awesome is the ideal…)
Subterranean Press » Blog Archive » A Brand New Short Story by John Scalzi
What might it look like if super heroes really existed in our publicity-minded, sue-happy society? This short story by John Scalzi nails it pretty well.
Tags: fiction, sf, science fiction, writing
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | New Hitchhiker’s author announced
“Children’s author Eoin Colfer is commissioned to write a sixth installment of the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy series.”
Tags: author, books, science fiction, sf, writing
PMSBuddy.com - The free online PMS reminder
“PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on ‘that time of the month’ - when things can get intense for what may seem to be no reason at all.”
Tags: web site
“[T]he present Constitution is the standard to which we are to cling. Under its banners, bona fide must we combat our political foes — rejecting all changes but through the channel itself provides for amendments.” — Alexander Hamilton (letter to James Bayard, April 1802)
Reference: Selected Writings and Speeches of Alexander Hamilton, Frisch, ed. (511)
Oh, how far we have fallen…
Andy Ihnatko’s Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA) » 1933-2008
Mac pundit Andy Ihnatko eulogies his mother on her recent passing after a nearly year-long battle with cancer. Grab some tissues.
Ironic Sans: In a political campaign far, far away…
Love the “A New Hope” poster. I would’ve already bought one if not for the fact that Lucasfilm is such a corporate copyright nazi that they don’t let fans make a few bucks off of brilliant stuff like this.
Has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the world yet?
Um….yeah. Like we’d ever see any other answer.
.- THE CHANGERING Obama 2008 - Home -.
My friend Tiffany accurately summed this up in her tweet where I saw this link: “I bet this idea made a lot more sense while the pot was still being smoked.”
Tags: meaningless symbolism, politics, stupidity
Upload a MP3. Add more cowbell to the song. Oh dear God.
From my good friend, Brent:
“[T]he only people who bring up the supposed value of IBM/Windows over Mac are people whose livelihoods depend on it. Those PC vs. Mac commercials are correct, and Jerry Seinfeld can’t fix it.”
(It’s worth noting Brent’s livelihood does not, in fact, depend on the Mac. He’s just a satisfied user of one at home, whereas his work computer is Windows-based.)
My friend Tom is interviewed about his relationship, proposal, and marriage to my friend Tiffany. I’m still pleased to have been somewhat on the inside track regarding Tom’s purchasing the ring, planning the proposal, etc.
Politely ignore that the last two paragraphs of the post are a none-too-thinly veiled advertisement for the blog’s corporate parent.
“With DiscCloud, you can transform a PC, Workstation, or other x86 based machine into a powerful Leopard Desktop Server. Once your desktop is in the DiscCloud, you can scale and manage it with VMware on standard x86 servers.”
Not that I plan on doing anything like this, I just found it intriguing.
Tags: cloud computing, leopard, mac, virtual machine
Police Get Geeky with Twitter | PSFK - Trends, Ideas & Inspiration
“Police in Scottsdale, Arizona are using the micro blogging service to send out alerts on pertinent town information such as road closings, traffic problems, power outages and severe weather warnings.”
(New) HD TiVo Coming to DirecTV!
Pretty excited, technology-wise. I believe this answers our question of whether to stay with DirecTV or move to Verizon FiOS TV when we’re ready to step up to HD. We love our TiVo…
The September issue of About This Particular Macintosh is now available for your reading pleasure.
Mark informs us that more ISP chicanery is afoot across the Pond, and how Mac users in the UK might be affected. Ed’s updated the master list of GTD apps with a new item: iPhone Presence. Does the app have an iPhone version, or a web version the iPhone can access? Pretty handy if you’re looking for an application to get things done with that will run on your Mac and your iPhone.
In this month’s Photoshop For the Curious, Lee shows us how to use the Merge tool to stitch together those vacation photos to get those great panoramic shots. Sylvester scratches the surface of Preview’s usability to help us get more out of that handy little app.
This month’s desktop pictures are again courtesy of Julie Ritterskamp, who took these great photos in various national parks throughout the western United States this past July. The identity of Lord Fate, present and past, is revealed, as Cortland’s saga comes to a close. Todd and Angie begin to move their lives forward again, though Angie is having trouble letting Cortland go. But does she have to…?
First Officer Chris Lawson, our nation-trotting staff pilot, pounds around on Das Keyboard Professional, while the Big Boss, Michael Tsai, reviews three hard drive enclosures which allow one to treat hard drives as floppy disks. (For you young’uns, we used to have to store our computer data on this pieces of five-inch discs, which were encased in a floppy plastic material, hence the name, floppy disk, or floppies.)
Lee looks at a pair of headsets from Maximo, while Ed does some recipe filing with MacGourmet Deluxe. Finally, Linus puts Séquence through its paces to see if it can dethrone screen-capture king Snapz Pro.
As always, this issue of ATPM is available in a variety of formats for your reading enjoyment.
Finishing Well: Strange responses to “pain”
Great piece from my friend Mike.
“We will do whatever is needed to keep from feeling pain in the moment. It doesn’t really matter to us whether the solution has actually changed anything, but in the moment we ‘feel’ better. Our whole culture has done that in our response to God. […] But we do….we will do whatever it takes to ‘be happy’ and avoid pain in the moment. We divorce our mates to ‘be happy.’ We hurt others so we can ‘be happy.’ We make a big change to get a little result in the moment so we feel like we have solved our problem without really changing anything at all. We have yet to resolve the problem, but we feel better.”
Tags: god, pain
The Tshirt and Tee Search Engine - PleaseDressMe
Pretty nifty. I discovered a new Star Wars t-shirt while playing around with it.
Tags: search, t-shirt
The curse word ‘Battlestar Galactica’ created - CNN.com
Humorous look at the fake curse word “frak”. Yes, it’s intended as a replacement for exactly the word you’re thinking of. I had no idea Glen Larson had coined it during the original Galactica series I watched religiously as a boy. I did, however, remember “feldergarb”.
Tags: battlestar galactica, language, words
D90 | D-MOVIE
“Special site for Nikon’s next-generation D-SLR, the D90. This features detailed product information and a variety of sample images, as well as movies captured with the D90’s new innovative movie function, D-Movie.”
The first digital SLR to shoot movies. And they’re pretty impressive movies, considering it’s a dSLR and not a dedicated video camera.
Tags: camera, nikon, movies, photography, video
bradandgeo: ‘cognitive surplus’ and the church…
“And when people come out of this stupor, what you find is people not wanting a passive, received religion, but a spirituality that they are a part of, or as the article says, an ‘architecture of participation’. And this is ironic because this is exactly the same shift that needed to happen 2000 years ago - the shift from one priest to the ‘priesthood of all believers’; the shift from a few select leaders to a plurality of ‘gifts’ making up the body as a whole.”
This certainly engaged my gray matter…
Tags: church, gtd, surplus, thought, time