from the apparently-i'm-always-the-last-to-know department, i happened upon 2blowhards by way of morelikethis. good stuff if you're into loquacious verbosity and wordy witticisms.

given that i'm experimenting with wikis in a variety of private contexts, it's interesting to see the recent flurry of comments related to wikis and blogs. i think kevin marks comes up with one of the most cogent analysis:

"Blogs amplify individual voices. Unlike mailing lists, they don't get lost in the hubbub. Wikis are different - they blur authorship, and drive towards a consensual style. Blogs' temporal flow creates an affordance for conversation that is diluted and washed away in Wikis."

i think this is why blogs and wikis are perfectly complementary, and in most cases can live together in perfect harmony. sometimes a little blurred authorship and consensus building is good and sometimes you need a strong voice with a conversational style. this is a far more important to picking and using the right tool in the right context, as compared to the relatively trivial criticism that wikis are ugly [ which, of course, they sometimes are ]. but i don't think ugliness is an inherent trait of wikis. the osaf wiki certainly has as much going for it, aesthetically speaking, as your average blog.

so i boxed-up the ibook, which if you'll remember is a lemon disguised as an macintosh and took it to the local office max to be shipped back to apple. i walk up the counter and have the following conversation, which is yet another bit of evidence that i'm not the freakish outlier that apple keeps insisting i am:

me: walks up to counter holding boxed lemon
clerk: got a laptop?
me: yeah.
clerk: what kind?
me: mac. laptop.
clerk: yeah. we see a lot of those. it's incredible. i'm glad i have only peecees, they sure seem like they're less trouble.

it looks like i missed a bullet with all the issues at cornerhost. somehow, luck was on my side, and my machine wasn't affected. michal, the force behind cornerhost, has put together a nice set of packages and has managed to attract a cadre of smart people as customers, including brent simmons, sam ruby and mark pilgrim [ just to name a few ].

how do you get and keep customers like this? service. almost without fail, michal is in constant, early and often communication when things go awry. they always will. and when they do you want to have someone like michal around. he's a great example of using genuinely great service to differentiate yourself in what would otherwise be the cut-throat commodity trenches.

oh yeah. serverbeach sucks.

that's right. in one week i'll be huffing and sweating around cincinnati. it's almost sad that the training is winding down. who knew that this endurance running thing could be so addictive?

it's interesting to juxtapose the comments from anil about computing and communication:

"One of the things that I keep coming back to is the importance of communication. I started using computers regularly when I was about 5 years old. At that time, we thought computers were for, you guessed it, computing . Even some of the people who invented the PC itself took 10 or 15 or 20 years to figure out that a personal computer's highest calling was for communication."

with an oldie but a goodie from the archives on why content isn't king :

""Imagine the discussions that must have gone on around the invention of the telephone: a new medium for delivering content directly to households. Indeed, that was exactly how some people did use it. In Budapest you could pick up the telephone and listen to music and news until the first world war... It didn't turn out that way because people preferred listening to each other: they preferred "self-generated" content."

"Companies with a strategy that facilitates communication between people, a strategy that facilitates self-generated content, will prosper as the world becomes more interactive and broadcast becomes just one sector of a much richer media world.""

there is nothing new under the sun.

now that's dedication to a cause:

"The leader of a prominent U.S.-based animal rights group said she had drawn up a will directing that her flesh be barbecued and her skin used to make leather products in protest at man's ill-treatment of animals."

if my ibook wasn't on the fritz, i'd be testing istorm right about now. but it is, so i'm not. sniff.

"Introducing iStorm. The world's most innovative collaboration tool, that lets users work, talk, and think together. With iStorm, a user can open up a document, and immediately start brainstorming it with other collaborators over a network."

[ via kottke ]

just to round out a fabulous week, which included the glass-eating malamute, cadence went in to get "fixed" and has been, er, eliminating from all orifices since she came back. you can imagine that there's nothing that will put you in a superb mood like starting the day by cleaning up dog vomit and excrement.

so it's back to the vet, only to be told that they aren't really sure what the problem is, other than it was probably only coincidently related to the surgery. despite the indecision about the actual origins of the problem, they were fairly sure that a bottle of obscenely expensive pills would probably help.

what i did to deserve this week, i'll never know.

i've had it. my ibook is the shittiest piece of god forsaken hardware i've ever owned. it's dead, once again and it looks to be the oh-so-familiar hosed logic board. so what does apple do when a customer calls and says they've lost their patience and that maybe, just maybe, sending a box in 4 times in as many months is a bit much to ask any consumer to bear?

do they happily offer to give me a new computer?

do they do anything?

nope. the technician just tells me that i don't actually have a lemon by their standards. and as if to tantalize me, he says, "you're close."

i don't find this amusing. what the hell happened to customer service? what the hell happened to quality? [ insert ocean of curses here ]

so i'm back full-time to the trusty linux tower and dell laptop, which between them have nearly a decade of unfailing service. good, trusty steeds they are.

with all the hullaballoo surrounding typepad, all i can think about is whether or not it save foaf from geek backwater marginalization:

"Movable Type have just announced a new hosted blogging tool - it's going to produce FOAF automatically for every user, and detect the link rel to the FOAF file of anyone who you put in your blogroll...I saw it on Monday, it's very very very sweet. So, I guess the FOAF world is about to get very much bigger..."

so many things to check out and so little time. liason looks like a nice zeroconf implementation for 'nix and peecees:

"Liaison allows computers on a small network to discover other computers and their users. It requires minimal user interaction and no confusing settings. Liaison is fully compatible with Apple's Rendezvous and compiles with the zeroconf specifications.

Liaison is the prefect solution for home networks. Just plug your laptop in and you will be able to instantly access it from any computer on your home network. Home networks will no longer be limited by their user's intelligence. Finally, your Mac and PC can communicate easily."

kris and i are friends with a couple who recently birthed a child with a terminal birth defect. maya died on easter at the precious age of 10 weeks and her memorial was today. during what must be an unspeakably difficult time, i was asked to operate the video camera during the memorial. in a monumental moment of ineptness, after the ceremony i discovered that i had the pause button enabled during the entire ceremony.

how big a schmuck am i?

big.

beyond my ineptness, the strength and fortitude displayed by maya's parents today was simply amazing. i can only guess at the depth of your loss. you are amazing.

yeah, baby. who owns the annotated bookmark bin? i do. it's an honor and a privilege.

with a full qwerty keyboard and the motto, "mad about writing?", me suspects that someone in nokia is considering courting the blogging masses with the soon-to-be-introduced 6800. near as i can tell, there's no camera and the devil's always in the form factor details, but it certainly looks like an innovative offering, even if you might need a stylus to punch the keys.

interestingly, technorati tells me that susan kaup is also drooling over the phone. she blogs. and she works at nokia. too bad she admits to owning a sanyo :-)

in lieu of a proper "about" page or a disclaimer, i suppose this is the part where i should own up to working at motorola. opinions expressed herein are solely those of the... [ via nooface ]

got mozilla? if so, then you might want to give xul channels a spin. while it's currently a fairly rudimentary 3-paned rss aggregator written in xul, it should be pretty interesting to see how it comes along. [ via blogzilla ]

alerted by mitch kapor , i see that chandler 0.1 has been released:

"The purpose of releasing version 0.1 Chandler source code is to provide an architectural and technical overview of Chandler, give the community a chance to review a skeletal framework and tentative APIs, and to provide more details about future Chandler plans including a few cool features to give a glimpse of what is possible. In general, this is a chance to show that OSAF is "for real"."

don't mind me. just tossing Geo::Sketch into the annotated bookmark bin:

"Geo::Sketch provides a Perl API and SOAP interface for generating an array of PNG images with accompanying JavaScript to facilitate simple geographic animation on the web."

[ via sixapart ]

after paying-out for anesthesia, x-rays, and medicine, mauja seems to be doing o.k. the vet wants close observation, but nothing else showed-up on the x-rays. everyone is amazed that the glass didn't seriously injure him. he seems happy to make up for a week's worth of not eating.

so, mauja hasn't been eating for a week. or rather, when he has eaten, he's puked it all back up. while this might sound immediately alarming, we've learned in the past that he has a finicky stomach and occasionally can go a few days without eating, although this has never gone on for a week. we usually sit and wait it out, feed him a "bland" diet of boiled beef and rice and carefully observe him for any of the serious danger signs, such as instantaneous puking and lethargy. immediately puking after eating likely means that he doesn't have a mere upset stomach, but rather something is obstructing his digestive tract.

today, i fed mauja ayet another savory meal of boiled beef and rice, and he immediately lets me know he needs outside - now - and promtply pukes. and this is no casual puke - it was, um, strained. bad. very bad. the last time this happened we unloading our bank account for emergency stomach surgery. on that particular occasion the vet pulled an intact, large play toy "squeak" from his stomach, which was just moments away from making its way into mauja's intestines, which is deadly.

i immediately call the vet and make the dreaded "emergency" appointment for tommorrow morning and am told to "watch him carefully". i then go outside and slowly approach the steaming mass of beef, bile and rice mush and find that neatly, almost elegantly, on top of the mess there is a frightenly large piece of brown glass. it's roughly the size of the cross section of a large avocado. luckily, it's slightly smoothed around the edges as if it's been sitting in the back yard for a half a century.

based on the size, i can immediately deduce how it ended up in his stomach. it's the perfect size for playing "keep away" from cadence. the dogs will play "keep away" for hours and hours and i guess glass is as good as anything else. a slip and a tumble and down the gullet goes the glass. even smoothed, i'll can't imagine how on earth the glass didn't rip his esophogous to shreds on the way down or up.

mauja has immediately perked-up and has downed more beef and rice without puking, so i'm cautiously optimistic that we'll be paying the vet a boatload of money tommorrow, just to have her tell us that he'll be o.k.

sigh.

iWebCal looks to be an interesting alternative to php iCalendar for viewing iCal calendars on the web. the difference with iWebCal is that users can easily post their calenders and get a permanent url to hand out to unsuspecting victims. check it out at iwebcal.com.

looking to get into the wild, wild world of strict xhtml and css 2.0? builder.com has a handy template that makes it easy. it's a little wiggety in i.e 5.2 for mac, but who uses that beast anymore anyway? [ via dangerousmeta ]

neat. it seems that sputnik's new access point communicates with the control panel using the jabber protocol:

"Central Control and the Sputnik APs interact using the open-source Jabber IM protocol. Using XML streams, the controller and APs exchange authenticated, encrypted messages that allow the controller to sense the presence of newly installed access points, pass them configuration info, and detect problems on the WLAN. Proxim and Cisco are also looking at including XML communication protocols in future versions of their controllers."

put enough space on the ap to offer a few other lan services, throw in some multicast dns [ a.k.a rendezvous ] and you've got something interesting.

"Client/Server Rendezvous on the LAN" reminds us to not forget about security while we're sipping the rendezvous kool-aid:

" The moral is this: only use broadcast/response-based rendezvous mechanisms when security is really, truly of no concern to your application--in environments where either the physical network is secure, or applications where no sensitive information can possibly be transmitted, no harm can be caused by missing or tampered messages, and the protocol is robustly validated (on both sides)."

uh, oh. potential bad news for all those people who take delight in telling runners that walking is just as healthy:

"But a new study published today said moderate exercise such as a brisk walk five times a week has no impact on the risk of dying from heart disease.

Only vigorous exercise such as jogging and hiking seems to make a difference, says Dr John Yarnell of Queens' University in Belfast."

those with an eye for detail will note that the study designers defined "moderate" exercise as, "...golf, digging and dancing."

a bit of jobsian buzz mastery or a sign of something big to come? either way, apple did indeed purchase appleuniversal.com recently.

update: indeed, if i had bothered to check the dns record before posting, i would have found the answer to all questions:

"Hahahah!!! Tricked You!!!
April Fools
Tricked You!, HA HA HA HAHAHA
US

Domain Name: APPLEUNIVERSAL.COM

Administrative Contact::
NOC Apple: Apple-NOC@APPLE.COM
Apple Computer, Inc.
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014
US
Phone:: 4089961010"

i need to spend some quality time with eclipse, since amongst other things it has some handy xml development plugins:

"This article gives you an overview of how the Eclipse Platform supports XML (Extensible Markup Language) development. Eclipse does not support XML code editing right out of the box. However, because Eclipse is a platform-independent framework for building developer tools, you can add support for new languages relatively easily."

i forgot to mention that snipsnap is also officially in the running during my little personal, private wikki for self organization test. some people seem to like it and looks like a fruitful combination of the blog thing and the wikki thing.

sort of. somehow i missed the fact that last summer this humble site was mentioned in a "favorite sites" bit in fortune small business. and gosh golly, the columnist had some mighty kind words for the vast wasteland:

"Lastly, Snowdeal.org, with its dust-colored pages and philosophical approach to things like the digital music movement and biomedical news, preps me when it comes time to deal with Ivy League colleagues-- so I can keep that conversation running."

it still royally freaks me out whenever i see the site linked in something approximating a "real" publication.

i think i might be wheat intolerant and i don't really want it to be true.

i've always binned food allergies and intolerances in roughly the same category as sick building syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome. i won't deny your right to claim that you might suffer from these broadly defined and difficult to prove maladies, but i was quiet sure i'd never suffer from them and was always a little suspicious of people who claimed to fall victim to them. me thinks the previous statements require copious filling-in-the-blanks, but it's late and i'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

in any case, i've been feeling "not entirely correct" for some time and became increasingly suspicious that the symptoms might, just might, be indicative of wheat intolerace. just to prove myself wrong, i decided to gradually cut out wheat from my diet. and dammit, i feel better. some very real, yet difficult to quantify, physical symptoms have subsided and i'm feeling like i might just want to go completely wheat free. i have no idea if i'm gluten intolerant or wheat intolerant or what - all i know is the less foods i eat that contain wheat, the better i feel.

i don't think you realize how embarrasing this is for someone well versed in the the scientific method.

eppur si muove.

i know, i know. i arriving more than fashionably late to the netflix party. i never really thought it would be the thing for me, since i don't even have a dvd player aside the from ibook. but despite my initial misgivings, it's fascinating to see how it has subtly but quickly filled a need kris and i almost didn't know we had.

typically, kris and i will hear about a movie, try and remember it, promptly forget about it and then wander aimlessly around the local video store trying to remember all the good movies we forgot about. inevitably we end up renting complete shite, because of our horrid memories and the whims of inventory management at the store.

but now, when we read a review or hear about a movie, we open up the laptop, which is always nearby thanks to the wonders of wireless, go to netflix, order the movie and then forget about it until it shows up in our mail slot.

you won't get it until you do it.

nothing says spring like putting the galaxie on the road for the first time since fall. after a winter of driving the oh-so-sensible jetta tdi station wagon, i almost forgot how much fun it is fire up the old school badassedness that is a 1965 galaxie 500 .

i was surprised when it started, after judicious pumping of the gas pedal [ aha! how many of you remember when you hand to pump the gas pedal before starting a car? ]. i forgot to unhook the battery before storing it for the winter and i was pleasantly surprised when the i didn't find the battery to be completely drained.

unfortunately i was foiled in my first fix-it project of the year. the drivers side window won't roll down anymore, which i thought was a simple case of the crank being stripped. it didn't take long to determine that it wasn't the crank and before i knew it i more of the door disassembled than i planned and still couldn't get at the crank innards, which is hidden behind an acre of steel that doesn't want to budge. i'm fortunate to have the original shop manual, but it only dedicates a paragraph to fixing the window crank. i suspect i'm missing something blindingly obvious.

i rather enjoy getting greasy and finding an excuse to bang on metal. perhaps i'll have to start a new blog to chronicle the trials and tribulations of restoring the galaxie to her original glory.

i'm sure the neighbors will appreciate it if i put it up on blocks in the front yard.

i'm holding out for more evidence than idle speculation, but i'm sure conspiracy theorists everywhere are getting frothy over indications that SARS might be engineered in the lab:

"The virus, according to Academy of Medicine member Sergei Kolesnikov, is a cocktail of mumps and measles, whose mix could never appear in nature.

"We can only get that in a laboratory," he told a conference in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency. "

[ via ben hammersley ]

someone once said that there's a time for runnin' and there's a time for drinkin'. i think a little grey goose is just the ticket for post run pain.

simon willison is using a "private personal wikki" for organization, which is something i've been contemplating for some time. i've been debating between moin moin and tavi and will probably go with tavi since it has mysql on the backside.

my life is littered with the remains of attempts at personal organization gone awry, but who knows. maybe the wikki way is the wright way.

or something like that. i think jason kottke actually owes me 20 bucks for the increase in my bandwidth bill that will result from the linkage.

maybe he wants me to pay up for the snippets of css which i've swiped from him over the years.

the secrets out. it looks like dano.blogger.com really is the new version of blogger. however, as far as i know, it's not friday, april 14th as the site says. ahhh, the joys of rolling out a beta. it doesn't look like i get to see any of the new features though, unless i want to create a new blog.

04.12 update: dang. i should have taken a screenshot - it looks like they've taken down the branded page, so you won't see what i saw and all the other pages are 404ing. fun's over until things go official.

it's nice to see that peter merholtz is back to blogging after an extended hiatus.

imagewell is a fantastic little image manipulation app for os x that does a few things very well:

"Tired of launching several programs to simply resize and crop and image, perhaps add a label and then copy it to your iDisk?

ImageWell works with all your applications from iPhoto to Finder. Simply drag the image into the well, add a border, a label or two, then slide the slider to resize and click send. It just doesn't get any easier."

[ via john robb ]

yes, that's right. you read the title right. according to a new study, the more you consume the fewer kids you'll have. and well, the theory holds up when you compare things with gorillas. really, heavy gorillas:

""North Americans' energy consumption is equivalent to the metabolism of a 30,000-kilogram primate," says Moses. And they have a birth rate to match."

i almost missed the fact that technorati is growing exponentially and now hits over 200,000 blogs while simultaneously making news.google look like an ugly redheaded stepchild. technorati has cleverly insinuated itself into my daily routine to become an invaluable resource. three cheers to dave for giving me another tool for my information forager toolbelt.

interesting. i had no idea that the recent update includes a rendezvous apache module that can be tweaked to serve locally hosted sites to nearby rendezvous-enabled computers.

Apache::VMonitor:

"The Apache::VMonitor module provides even better monitoring functionality than top(1). It gives all the relevant information top(1) does, plus all the Apache specific information provided by Apache's mod_status module, such as request processing time, last request's URI, number of requests served by each child, etc. In addition, it emulates the reporting functions of the top(1), mount(1), df(1) utilities. There is a special mode for mod_perl processes. It has visual alerting capabilities and a configurable automatic refresh mode. It provides a Web interface, which can be used to show or hide all sections dynamically."

i have no idea what to make of the fact that two of my alma maters, hope college and the evergreen state college have made it into the "top 50" results of a very unscientific survey of colleges worth considering. both schools have their merits, but in the official snowdeal lore, i abandoned hope for the siren song of oly, the evergreen state college and temperate rainforests.

curiously, dano.blogger.com has shown up in my referer logs, with an enticing blogger v5 moniker, a link to an [ old? ] wireless interface and a prominent recently updated page.

tim o'reilly makes an interesting observation regarding the marketplace speaking clearly about which interface more developers prefer, at least with regards to amazon:

"Amazon has both SOAP and REST interfaces to their web services, and 85% of their usage is of the REST interface. Despite all of the corporate hype over the SOAP stack, this is pretty compelling evidence that developers like the simpler REST approach."

i've been mostly ignoring the blogshares phenomenon because it seemed just too wierd. but it has come to my attention that i've been automatically added to the database, so if you're interested you can help boost me out of pennystock oblivion.

oh ye of little faith - just because it's coming a day late, don't go thinking i didn't run 18 miles today. sweet holy ol' hanna 18 miles is long distance.

intrigued by the new york times article on the martian netdrive, i contacted the developers to see if you could run the slimp3 server, which could make a snazzy, networked wireless music appliance. they promptly replied that they've been in talks with the slimp3 people and will be including the server soon, which could make this an interesting option for a few projects i have in the queue.

it's a bit pricey at nearly $500 for the 120 gig model, and you could conceivably make something similar for less with a little ingenuity and a via eden/mini-ITX board running linux, but its priced smartly enough to make it enticing to pick up one for testing. hmmm

between the new york times purportedly making their archives for-pay [ although curiously, i can still access the archives ] and the nando times shutting down, it has been a dark week for persistant online content.

there's an absolutely horrifying story behind the family killed at a checkpoint in iraq last week. the story is graphic, but it reminds me that there are real people that get hidden behind innocuous euphemisms like the "fog of war":

"Details emerging from interviews with survivors of yesterday's incident tell a distressing tale of a family fleeing towards what they thought would be safety, tragically misunderstanding instructions.

Hassan's father, in his 60s, wore his best clothes for the trip through the American lines: a pinstriped suit.

"To look American," Hassan said. "

life got a little more complicated as an ice storm of some repute moved through michigan. and i got a good lesson in just how unprepared i am for any sort of disaster be it natural or otherwise. the power went out at around 7 p.m. and i sat around for a few hours listening to big, old trees in our neighborhood creak, groan and crack under the weight of the ice. bored, i went to bed full of faith that the power would be back on by morning. so full of faith that i didn't even bother to dress warmly, which made the then 40 degree wood floors pleasant at 6:30 a.m. no power.

i'm feeling lucky that we have a gas stove for cooking and coffee. things would have been measurably worse sans the coffee. and i'm feeling doubly lucky that we have a fireplace, with a few pieces of dry wood. things are looking up as i reheat yesterday's coffee and manage to barely avoid filling the entire house with smoke. cold floors, wood smoke and coffee always remind me of waking up at my grandparent's place in maine. i briefly contemplate going out to get two pounds of bacon just to complete the olfactory walk down memory lane. instead, i decide that i'll get all anachronistic and actually read the local newspaper. i find, in the always entertaining editorials, that a local woman is extremely disturbed at the local dead sea scrolls exihibit because a bible and the koran are placed in close proximity to one another.

infused with coffee and a bit of humor, i'm venture outdoors to inspect the damage. lots of arm-sized and a few torso-sized limbs and branches are down in the front and back yards, but amazingly i don't see any serious damage. my neighbor has a large bit of a tree in her backyard that will likely require a city crew to come mop up. she says she's talked with power company and they don't the power will be on until tuesday.

tuesday? the statement takes its time settling in and making the full weight of its meaning felt. tuesday. but it's only saturday. tuesday is many cold days and nights away. i don't have enough of anything to last until tuesday. not enough batteries, matches, candles, firewood or patience. luckily, our neighbor has a stockpile of seasoned firewood, which means i only need on thing. i don't have any kindling, so i decide to get some of the firestarter kits that you use while camping to get a fire going under less than ideal conditions. as it turns out, so is everyone else in the city.

this is when i get the smallest of tastes of what things could be like in a real emergency. the local grocery store is closed because the power is out. indeed, the entire strip mall is closed, and the parking lot is filled with a small battalion of power company cherry pickers that are waiting to be called into active duty. i decide to go to meijers, a local superstore roughly akin to a walmart, and it gets even more surreal. the store is on reserve power which means that entire acres of the store are dark. these happen to be the very acreage of store that i need to be in, so i'm wandering around in the dark with strangers who are cursing because there aren't any d batteries left in the city. i'm mildly amused at the spectacle until a store employee tells me that they are also out of firelogs.

all the wierdness naturally forces me to my local bookstore, which is where i find dozens of families without power - but with screaming kids - who have decided to transmorgify the bookstore into a daycare center. no firelogs at the walgreens, either. and they're running low on batteries too. i'm not panicky during this whole process, because i know the storm hasn't been that extensive and that i'll probably be able to drive to the other side of town and get firelogs. but it was interesting to see just how distruptive a relatively minor ice storm can be. of course in "these times", it's difficult not to think about how things might play out in a "real" emergency.

as luck would have it, after four hours of looking for firelogs i finally find some and by the time i get back home the power is back on.

stop the presses. tacoma, the formerly awol minesweeping dolphin has been found - all safe and sounding.

from the you-knew-it-was-going-to-happen-sooner-or-later-dept. i just got an email from tellme stating that it is ending its free, hosted voicexml service on april 9th. few people knew that i provided a voice portal that would let you hear the latest cpan uploads or listen to a variety of rss feeds over the phone and even fewer people used the service, but it's still a drag. i wonder if there are any other free services out there.

exactly one person might be interested to know that i've fixed a longstanding error in my rss feeds. the timestamps are now in ISO 8601 format, which according to the validator was the only thing standing between me and piousness.

slashdot picks up the news that the mozilla roadmap has been substantially revised, with new emphasis on quality over quantity:

"The reasoning behind these new roadmap elements comes down to preferring quality over quantity. We must do less, but better, and with sound extension mechanisms, so that (for example) the community does not fight over user interface pigeon-holes such as the main menu items."

i've been in chicago this week at the mothership, and unfortunately there's been a death in the family so kris and i need to go to the upper penninsula of michigan for a funeral. thusly, things are likely to be a little slow around the vast wastland over the next few days.

o.k. with everything else going on, i guess this is small potatoes. but i'm utterly fascinated with the brazen show of political cahones that our own mayor daley recently flashed when he decided to remove an airfield. at midnight. without warning. in a odd way that's difficult to describe, it's awe-inspiring:

"In a stunning move decried by critics as "the epitome of arrogance," Mayor Daley closed down Meigs Field by tearing up its only runway--without warning pilots, air traffic controllers or many of his political allies."