Recently in News Category
The Crest Art Show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn (which includes one piece of mine and one from my mom) was featured over the weekend in the New York Times.
In Williamsburg Store, Customers Find Art Among the Wrenches
One night last month, Joe Franquinha closed the store after the last customer left and turned the artists loose to set up their work... Read more >>
When he was called on his "Hillary" habit by a male news guest the other day, MSNBC's Chris Matthews huffed that he was only trying to distinguish her from her husband. Never mind that Bill Clinton was never Sen. Clinton or that Matthews never refers to any of the many other male contenders as Rudy or Barack or Joe or Mitt.Words are always loaded and laced. I hear the Hillary and Mrs. Clinton thing as dismissive, whether intentionally or not. It pounds on my eardrum the same way it did recently when a local crusader against the Iraq war was described as a "63-year-old grandmother of five" as a means of marveling at the ambitiousness of her cause.
Who refers to Vice President Dick Cheney as "66-year-old grandfather of five"? Who knows, or cares how many grandkids Sen. John McCain has?
It's time to stop calling her 'Hillary' | The San Diego Union-Tribune
South Carolina may cut jail time for organ donors - Yahoo! News
Lawmakers are considering legislation that would let prisoners donate organs or bone marrow in exchange for time off their sentences.
A state Senate panel on Thursday endorsed creating an organ-and-tissue donation program for inmates. But legislators postponed debate on a measure to reduce the sentences of participating prisoners, citing concern that federal law may not allow it.
China Harvesting Inmates Organs - Washington Times
A Chinese journalist has uncovered a secret detention center in northern China that is being used by a hospital to harvest human organs for sale to domestic and international buyers.
On the prisoner abuse, Mr. Jin said he first learned of the harvesting operation between October and December and that the prisoners used were members of the outlawed Falun Gong religious group.
"This is murder, and murder sponsored by a state," said Mr. Jin, who in the past has been a contributor to a Japanese news agency. "It must be stopped."
no comment.
Peace Action West: Stay Strong!
This is something I set up for Peace Action West this week. I think it's pretty cool. It's essentially a prettified LiveJournal Blog, with VoicePosting enabled, thanks to some friends at LiveJournal.
Yesterday, Peace Action West sent out an eAlert to all of their members (around 40,000 of them) and gave them VoicePost instructions. You can also get instructions and post, by signing up on the page (this also signs you up for the mailing list, so there is a bit of marketing involved too. But isn't there always?).
I've been monitoring all the posts as they come in, and we've been transcribing them too. It's been pretty amazing to hear everybody, especially the people in places I would otherwise never really hear from...
...like from Lexington, Kentucky.
107K 0:32
The clips from the first two weeks of the Peace Action West Audio Petition is getting sent off today - all three hours of audio!
It got a nice writeup in the Post Conflict Resolution Blog as a good example of Web 2.0 advocacy.
"Today's new cool example of these technologies in practice is from Peace Action West and their online audio petition to Representative Pelosi and Senator Reid regarding President Bush's threatened veto of Congress's Iraq war supplemental funding package. Whatever you think of the current debate on the direction of the Iraq war, we're sure to see more of this type of advocacy work."
Postage in sheets of 20 - 1 sheet for $20 | GoodStorm.com
This is brilliant. I'm still not sure how they got around the postal service bit, since I don't think you can get these at the post office (officially endorsed, yadda yadda). My guess is that they got that barcode in the corner to work like a metered mail stamp.
In any case, I think its a worthwhile effort. It also made me think of Rich Mackin's recent letter about those completely obnoxious yellow ribbon magnets.
The U.S. military has found the perfect way to demonstrate that it's purely the thought that counts. This bugle emulator sits in a real bugle and plays a collection of calls, including "Taps." Due to a shortage of actual bugle players, the Pentagon had already ordered 700 of these to be used at military funerals in 2003.
Apparently it took congress passing a law to allow for Virtual Bugles to be used in public ceremonies. No, I'm serious.
This made remember something. A few saturdays ago I was sitting on my porch in the morning and I noticed a boy, maybe 9 or 10 on one of the adjacent porches. He very solemnly brought out an american flag, hooked it to a clothesline attached to a post, raised the flag. He pulled out a piece of paper and started laboriously reading the pledge of allegiance out loud.
It struck me as really weird. Or one of those weird things that I just don't encounter in my life anymore, and certainly not in San Francisco. I assumed it must be something boy-scout-like that was going on. I think the last time I heard the pledge of allegiance (outside of a ballpark) was probably in my high school homeroom class, long after I refused to say it. It's sort of strange to me that its even still around with all that god and republic stuff.
While I work at Six Apart, I, personally, don't know the reasons for this right now, as I am not in that particular chain of command. Thank Jebus.
Since approximately 4:00 pm Pacific Daylight Time, Six Apart has been the victim of a sophisticated distributed denial of service attack. This has affected all of Six Apart's sites, causing intermittent and limited availability for TypePad, LiveJournal, TypeKey, sixapart.com, movabletype.org and movabletype.com. Our network operations staff is working around the clock with our Internet access providers to resolve the issue. We appreciate your patience and support, and will provide updates as we have them.
I'm not sure how I feel about all the blogging about 'attacks' - Of course the nomenclature is accurate, that seems to be exactly what happened, it just smacks of Fox News Terrorism Reports a little too much for my liking. It's the internet people, nobody died or anything.
It created an interesting situation at around 4pm though. Its essentially the web service company equivilent of the wheels spontainiously falling off the tourbus.
:: Throws hands up to the sky ::
Why did that happen? How can we fix it? How do we get it to the mechanic? Where is the mechanic anyway? I'm late for a meeting! Call my secretary! Why does this have to happen right before I'm about to go home? (and from the kids in the back) Why doesnt the radio work?
Thankfully there were several great teams working on it immediately and answering all those questions and trying to get the wheels back on. It is clearly a help-or-get-out-of-the-way kind of situation, and for those of us who couldnt do much to help, it left us scratching our heads wondering what to do without the all knowing internet. We might have to actually talk to eachother.
Once everything was back up (spotty but online as of 11ish) I could finish what I had to stop working on at four this afternoon (this is why this post is dated at 1:30 in the morning). I know I'm not the only one working on things right now, at least I get to go to bed soon. But with all the crankypants bloggers out there writing about downtime and reliability, I just wanted to say thank you to my fellow six aparters. Good job, and try and catch a nap soon okay?
Designed by ad agency Leo Burnett with the input of an engineer, the billboard features a real sundial whose shadow falls on a different breakfast item each hour until noon, when the shadow of the McDonald's arches are dead center.
There are so many reasons this is a cool idea. I think its really depressing that it was wasted on McDonalds.
McDonalds's launches next strike in breakfast war in Wrigleyville
