Tom Tomorrow

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I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: Tom Tomorow really should be on your reading list. He should be on everyone’s reading list. I end up wanting to point people over to his site with nearly every post some days. So, failing either that, I’ll just point you to his site (again).

Safe abortion in jeapordy

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Meg reminds us that in the midst of all the brouhaha in Iraq and Korea, things are still downright scary here at home.

With legislation that would impose sweeping new restrictions on abortion seemingly headed toward approval by the Senate this week, the assault on women’s reproductive freedom has reached an ominous turning point.

Although billed as a narrow attack on one particular late-term abortion procedure, the measure’s imprecise wording would criminalize the use of the safest and most common pre-viability abortion method used after the first trimester, namely dilation and evacuation. The bill would thereby replicate a key defect that caused the Supreme Court to reject a similarly worded state law in 2000. Moreover, the bill omits an exception in cases where the mother’s health is in jeopardy, ignoring the Supreme Court’s insistence that such an exception is a constitutional requirement for any abortion regulation.

It may be too late to do much about this, but we can hope that it will get struck down if it gets contested and goes to the Supreme Court — though at the moment, it looks like the bill’s backers are counting on a newly conservative Supreme Court to rule in their favor by the time the case makes it that far. Not encouraging, in the least.

Do you blog? Why?

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My thesis is an attempt to fill in the void in academic work about blogs. Previously in articles and commercial books published about blogs (Rebecca Blood’s books and the O’Reilly book, for example), why we blog has been researched using personal experience, with a few indepth interviews, or by analyzing websites. None of these three ways can come close to providing as accurate a depiction of the blogging population — who we all really are, why we blog, and how we’re using our blogs — as a survey.

(Via Wil)

New job position!

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I’ve got a new position at work! My first full day was yesterday — I hadn’t written about it yet, both because it all happened fairly quickly, and because I don’t like to jinx things too much before they happen.

Last Friday, my boss came up to me and told me that one of the guys in the EDS area (where customer submitted files are tweaked, adjusted, set up, and sent to the printers) was leaving, and asked if I’d be interested in taking a shot at the spot in there. Hm. Was I interested? You bet’cha.

So starting this week, I’m now a member of the EDS team at MSCopy, Xerox’s print shop on the Microsoft campus. I’m finally away from the Big Green Button! I’ll now be spending my days bouncing among Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Acrobat, Illustrator, Photoshop, Pagemaker — and probably more, those were just the ones I got to play with yesterday — making sure everything we’re sent is ready to go flying out of the machines. Fun stuff!

Happy Space Alien Day!

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Dad sent me a link to an amusing story today about how New Mexico Representative Dan Foley has proposed legislation to create Space Alien Day — to “enhance relationships among all the citizens of the cosmos, known and unknown.”

Amusing enough on its own, but the kicker for me was the final quote from Rep. Foley, which goes down in my book as one of my favorite political quotes ever…

If we can capitalize on something that did or did not happen in 1947 then it can help the entire state.

Oh, the number of times in my life — past, present, and future — when it’d be so nice to capitalize on something that did or did not happen!

Quiet time

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I’m around, I just haven’t been feeling overly talkative lately. Not sure why, really, but figured a couple days away from the weblog wouldn’t really hurt anyone.

I’ll surface a bit more later on tonight, after I’m home from work, but I wanted to get a quick note of this up — the Seattle Times is starting a weblog tracking the Iraq conflict called Battle Lines. No clue where it’ll go, as they’re still on their first post, but it might be worth keeping an eye on.

Oh, and while they’re not linked from the main page, you can find RSS feeds here (RDF) and here (XML).

Update:

There are also two associated weblogs as part of the site — one by a family against the war, and one by a family in support of the war.

Interesting approach, this. Could it be one of the first signs of corporate media “getting” blogs? Dunno yet, too early to tell.

Nice to see they’re using MovableType, though! Now the just need to turn on comments, trackback, and all the other associated goodies!