Apples for Alaskans

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Looks like high schoolers in Alaska’s Denali Borough School District will be getting Apple PowerBook G4 computers for their school year!

When school begins Sept. 15, the Denali Borough School District will become the first in Alaska to provide a laptop computer for every student in grades 9 through 12. A total of 129 laptop computers are being prepared to hand over to high schoolers at Tri-Valley, Anderson and Cantwell schools.

This “one-on-one initiative” is the result of a partnership between the Denali Borough School District and Apple Computer, and is based on programs in other states, particularly in Virginia and in Maine.

(via MacBytes)

Opus is back!

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Penguins

(This picture has nothing to do with the story aside from the fact that it’s penguins, I’ve been looking for an excuse to use it, and it cracks me up. Anyway…)

After eight years away from newspapers, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is creating a new comic strip called “Opus,” starring his beloved penguin of the same name.

The Washington Post Writers Group, which will syndicate the strip, is expected to officially announce Breathed’s return this Sunday. The reclusive Breathed, who rarely gives interviews, could not be reached yesterday for comment.

The new strip will appear on Sundays in The Washington Post starting Nov. 23.

(via /.)

How much to ship…me?

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Okay, so on one level, this article about a man who shipped himself from New York to Texas is kind of amusing. Wanting to save a few bucks, he somehow puts himself in a shipping crate, manages to survive two flights in cargo planes, then pops out of the box once he arrives at his parents house — at which point the surprised delivery man calls the police, who arrest the man on an outstanding warrant.

But, on another level — aren’t we supposed to have more stringent screening of airline flights, and what’s getting shipped around the country? While I’m sure they can’t x-ray or check every box that gets shipped around, it seems to me that this one might have had something about it that might have raised some questions. Apparently the guy had enough room to move in the box to use a prybar to open it when he arrived at his destination — wouldn’t that affect the balance of the box enough to catch someone’s eye while it was being moved around? I don’t know what all else, but it just seems amazing to me that this guy successfully did this, and that he’d have gotten away with it if he hadn’t opened the box while the delivery driver was still there.

Fred Phelps needs help

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Somehow until now Fred Phelps had managed to slip completely under my radar, but from what I’ve seen this evening, this man needs some serious help.

It seems that today was opening day for New York’s Harvey Milk School, a high school for GLBT teens who do not feel safe going to normal public schools. The streets outside the school were filled with demonstrators — primarily many people giving their support to the kids, because Phelps had arranged his own demonstration. Phelps and his small group of “Christians” (and I use the term very loosely here) were protesting the school and its students with signs with such warm, Christian sentiments as “God Hates Fags”, “Fags FDNY”, and “Thank God for Sept. 11” while standing on American flags.

It never ceases to amaze and sadden me the horrible things people will do in the name of Christianity.

(via the go fish)

Updated iPods and iMacs

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Oh, and just in case you’ve been considering upgrading or switching, Apple announced bigger iPods and faster iMacs this morning. The iMac base models are now \$1299 for a 1Ghz G4, and \$1799 for a 1.25Ghz G4. Not bad at all.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for my new G5 to show up — which is okay, since I’m also still scraping together the last little bit of cash I need to finish paying for the fool thing!

The Doctor is in!

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Real life imitates art.

(via Dori Smith — sorry for the word-for-word copy, but with four words to work with, it seemed silly to rework it)

Update:

Of course, the thing about flash mobs (at least originally) is that they were underground, unpublicised, seemingly-spontaneous events. With this particular one originating in a comic strip, being turned into reality, and then posted around the ‘net (here, Dori’s post, Blog for America, The Democratic Primary 2004 Thread, The Mediaburn Radio Weblog, Pacific Views, and probably many others), doesn’t that more or less kill much of the original spirit of the ‘flash mob’ meme?

Or maybe I’m just grumbling again.

Working out the bugs

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I’ve been getting some great feedback on the new design, and it’s very appreciated. The kind words on the new look are always flattering, and pointing out areas that are confusing is wonderfully helpful. Things that make sense to me as I’m putting it all together don’t always fly in the real world, and I’m never upset by constructive criticism!

A ‘home’ link has now been added to the navigation bar for all the sub-pages. While I’d had the ‘eclecticism’ title linked back to the home page, it wasn’t terribly obvious, so this should clear up any confusion there. Besides, a little redundancy never hurt.

I’m going to need to do a little tinkering to the display of the comments. I decided to break with convention a bit and put the byline of each comment above the post, rather than below, which seems to be a tad disorienting. Breaking conventions is all well and good — doing so at the cost of usability isn’t. Fixing that is high on the priority list.

Next on the priority list will be adding a bit more space between individual posts on the main page and comments in the comment threads. I’ll need to figure out the best way to do that — because I’m using a display: inline; declaration for the h3 tags to set the border just around the text rather than across the width of the div, simply adding a margin-top: 10px; argument won’t work. I could simply add one or two p or br tags to add some lines of whitespace, but that introduces some unnecessary (purely presentational) code, which I’m trying to avoid, so I’d like to come up with a better solution than that. We’ll see how that goes.

How this page looks in Safari

Right now, the lowest priority is fighting with the skyline image at the top. If those of you that are seeing problems with the display of the image could let me know what browser/version/OS/resolution you’re using, as well as telling me that it’s ‘off-center’, it’d help greatly. I’m using Safari 1.0 on Mac OS X, at 1024×768, and the header looks fine to me. I also checked it in Camino (which should match with Mozilla or Netscape, as they use the same rendering engine), and it was good there. It was only in IE/Mac OS X that I saw any issues (and I haven’t looked into that yet). Unfortunately, my PC is dead at the moment, so I can’t test the site on PC browsers from home, but I’ll certainly be looking into it from work.

Anyway, I’m quite gratified that the design seems to be fairly well received, and that any bugs that have been mentioned so far are actually fairly minor. It’s about time I started exploring different ideas, and you all are helping me iron things out a lot. I’ll buy you a drink next time you’re in town. :)

Two girls in my bed!

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2003/09/graphics/dawnemilyamy

You will notice, however, that I am not in my bed. ;)

That’s Dawn, Emily, and Amy on the phone, planning the upcoming days as they get ready to fly up to Alaska, then drive from Fairbanks to Tennessee where Emily’s family lives, with stops on the way to return Dawn and Amy to their respective homes.

New Patriotism

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Newsweek asks this week if it may be time for a New Patriotism. I’d say yes.

…Was it patriotic for the White House to instruct the EPA to put out a press release after 9/11 saying the air around Ground Zero was safe when there was no evidence for it? Was it patriotic to invade Iraq when there was no sign of an imminent threat and plenty to suggest that it would seriously detract from the war on Al Qaeda? Was it patriotic for the White House to allow American companies that reap millions in contracts with the Department of Homeland Security to incorporate in Bermuda in order to avoid paying taxes?

Perhaps most important, is it patriotic to define patriotism the old-fashioned way — as a kind of narrow nationalism? That jingoistic definition is carrying a price for the president, who must now go on bended knee to allies he so recently scorned. When you’re spending \$1 billion a week in Iraq, dissing our friends, as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have done consistently, seems to be a tad … counter-productive. Those “freedom fries” in the House cafeteria are burning us now; those gibes that John Kerry “looks French” don’t look so clever.

(via Robert Scoble)

Feedster IM Searching

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Feedster is currently my favorite search engine for finding topical, up-to-the-minute information, and they just released a really nifty new feature today — the Feedbot.

Add ‘feedbot’ to whatever IM client you use, send it a message like ‘find apple imac’, and get the search results IM’d back to you. Very handy!