What a great kid

Mark Newhouse’s daughter Jordan donated a 14-inch ponytail to Locks for Love on Valentine’s Day, and Mark has documented the event in the form of a QuickTime movie:

“Locks of Love is a non-profit organization that provides hairpieces to financially disadvantaged children across the U.S. under age 18 suffering from long-term medical hair loss.
“It takes ten to 15 donated ponytails to make one hairpiece because Locks of Love only uses lengths of 10 inches and longer. 80% of donors are children.”

Liberal radio talk show hosts?

Ann cracks me up:

“If liberals cared about ideas or knew any facts, they would cease being liberals. Even the audience for the left’s government-supported radio network, National Public Radio, has more conservative listeners than liberal listeners. According to a Pew Research Center study released last summer, conservatives consume far more news than liberals–including listening to NPR and watching PBS more than liberals. (As Mickey Kaus said, ‘No wonder conservatives are so pissed off.’)
“Liberalism thrives on ignorance. Their media are ‘Lifetime: TV for Women,’ NBC’s ‘The West Wing’ and 4 billion ‘Law and Order’ episodes in which the perp turns out to be a Christian, white male who recites the Second Amendment before disemboweling a poor minority child.
“Liberal persuasion consists of the highbrow sneer from self-satisfied snobs ladled out for people with a 40 IQ. This is not an ideology that can withstand several hours a day of caller scrutiny where their goofball notions can be shot down by any truck driver with a cell phone.”

I don’t know why my wife watches “Law & Order,” “NYPD Blue,” et al, when she spends half the episode complaining how the cops twist citizens’ rights to gather evidence and/or get a confession. No, she’s not a criminal attorney, but yes, she is a lawyer and remembers all of this good constitutional stuff from law school.
(Thanks, Rick!)

iChat logs

I share Michael’s iChat irritation. One of the things I love about Fire is that I can drag a log file onto BBEdit and have it open up in the text editor. iChat logs have to open in iChat, presumably so you can see the pretty word balloons. The solution, obviously, would be the ability to open my iChat chat log in BBEdit and read it in plain text glory, or open it in iChat and get it with the balloons.
From a UI perspective, I prefer iChat over Fire, since most everyone I know uses AIM. Two friends stubbornly cling to MSN (Hi, Wil!). I have accounts with ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo! Messenger, but with the aforementioned MSN exceptions, everyone I know on the other services also uses AIM, so iChat it is.

Cool new PDF trick

Michael notes Bill Bumgarner’s example on using Mac OS X 10.2.4’s new PDF Workflow feature. I tried out Bill’s example, since it plays into my own web reading habits, and it’s wicked cool. Bill also says:

“But PDF Workflow is even more flexible than that. It isn’t limited to just saving PDF. You can also drop scripts, apps, filters, and other mechanisms into the PDF Services folder. That’d be the Workflow part of the whole thing.”

Doing the right thing, rather than the “popular” thing

Doing the right thing is oftentimes not the easy thing to do. With regard to Saddam Hussein, President Bush’s course of action is the right thing to do, though it certainly isn’t easy. This is counter to the Clinton model of executive leadership, always putting a finger to the wind to test popular opinion. What amazing foresight Winston Churchill had:

“Nothing is more dangerous in wartime than to live in the temperamental atmosphere of a Gallup Poll, always feeling one’s pulse and taking one’s temperature.”

This is why President Bush is also not listening to the “news” media and the peace protestors (whom with, again, I have no problem regarding exercising their right to protest, rather with their reasons). Despite what the “news” media would have you believe, the current peace movement does not reflect the popular will of the American people. Even if it did, that still wouldn’t make it right.

“The Founders understood that democracy was important, but if you didn’t filter it through a republican system you’d be just as likely to end up with a tyranny of the majority as you would with a healthy society. Don’t worry, I won’t quote the Federalist Papers, but trust me, it’s in there.” —Jonah Goldberg

The “news” media and peace protestors would be wise to hearken this advice, as well:

“We do need to remind everybody that tyrants don’t respond to any kind of appeasement. Tyrants don’t respond to negotiation. Tyrants respond to toughness. And that was true in the 1930s and 1940s when we failed to respond to tyranny, and it is true today.” –Condoleezza Rice, U.S. National Security Advisor, over this past weekend

Tyrants don’t respond to peace protests and sycophant “news” media in other nations as well. At least not in any way that would make them less of a tyrant.

Hypocrisy, anyone?

Riddle me this: why was it okay for President Clinton to go into the Balkans without approval of the U.N. Security Council, but it’s not okay for President Bush to go into Iraq–where there is a WMD threat–without the approval of the U.N. Security Council?

NetNewsWire + Safari = Power

Ok, I’ve finally used NetNewsWire consistently for a couple of weeks, and now I’m hooked. Like Michael admitted, my vision on NNW’s potential was limited. Like Rands, I’m reading more weblogs, collectively, than any other type of site. Combined with Safari, NetNewsWire is a powerful tool for weblog reading, as well as accessing any other site with an RSS feed, such as ATPM. The two form a potent combo for accessing nearly any info on the web you might need.

Stolen Computer Registry

Lose or have stolen your laptop–or desktop, for that matter? You can register the serial number with the Stolen Computer Registry. That great system you just picked up on eBay for next to nothing? Check it against the registry; if something seems too good to be true…

Marijuana DOES lead to harder drug use

A study by Washington University (of St. Louis, MO), published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, of 311 Australian twin pairs, concludes that teenage pot users are five times more likely to use or abuse cocaine, heroin, hallucinogens, sedatives, or alcohol. The study was undertaken to prove the opposite.
Sorry, NORML. Keep trying to spin the positive aspects of marijuana. I’m sure Woody Harrelson needs something to do with all of his copious spare time.

California Patriot

You have to admire and respect a conservative startup at one of the bastions of leftist thinking. They give away the 4,000 copies they print to Berkeley students, and have no advertising, relying on donations.