I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we’ve been charged with and automatically throw them out.

(via ABCnews.com)
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Ben Gibbard (from Death Cab for Cutie) covering Thriller:

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The nonsensical lame duck excuse:

Bear in mind that the election isn’t next month but about 16 months from now, in November 2010. Using this logic, Palin should never have run for the first term unless she was willing to run for the second, and not run for either if she wasn’t willing (or legally able) to run for a third. Politicians don’t enter lame-duck status until their successor has already been elected and they’re running out the rest of the term. And all politicians become lame ducks at some point — and none of them quit just to avoid it.

And the miscellaneous other reasons:

I’ve seen a myriad of excuses on Twitter and e-mail for this bizarre resignation: her legal bills are too high, she’s putting her family first, she doesn’t want to distract Alaskans because of cheap-shot ethics complaints that are distracting everyone. None of those make any sense. If the spotlight was too much, then she shouldn’t have run for office in the first place. If she’s quitting because people are taking potshots at her, then she’s not the kind of political fighter we thought she was. The legal bills might be a rational reason, but thoroughly insufficient for betraying the people who put her in charge of Alaska — and her memoirs would have paid for her legal bills many times over, had she completed her term.

The funny thing is, she says these things in one breath, then hints toward running for President in another. She can’t handle being the governor of Alaska? No way she can handle being president. What she sees is just the tip of the iceberg. And what did she expect as a governor of small-time state thrust into the limelight as a major VP candidate? No one was going to pay attention to her? Ask questions about her background? Make charges (bogus or not)? Give me a break. I just can’t see any way she lives down this move if she is expecting to continue running for public office, much less the White House.

Pit bull? Nah. Quitter is all she’ll live up to from here on out. See you on Fox News, Sarah! (Just what we need — another wacky talking head. Her and Glenn Beck would make a great team.)Similar Posts:

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With all the reboots in Hollywood, why doesn’t someone re-do this great story?

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What intrigued me about Fever was the ‘Hot’ feature, which analyzes the content and links in your feeds to put together a list of ‘not-to-be-missed’ stories, weighted and displayed by temperature (’fever’, get it?!) The higher the temperature, the more links and buzz a subject has in your feeds. And this feature is supposed to work better as you subscribe to more feeds — so no more “I subscribed to it, but don’t have time to read all the news (even though it’s probably really important and I should)” guilt. Huffington Post, I’m looking mainly at you! That also means no more declaring feed bankruptcy (hitting ‘mark as read’ when your unread items count is very overwhelming) — I can just move those feeds to the Sparks section. Just the thought of a program aggregating news and lifting the important things to the top sold me on the app. I had to try it out.

So how does this all work? Well, Fever at the core is a standard RSS reader. You import your feeds, the program polls for updates, and serves them up to you in your web browser. What makes Fever unique is how you organize the feeds (and what that organization does), not to mention the clean beauty of the UI.

There are two main areas for your feeds:

• Kindling, which is where you put all your ‘must read’ feeds.
• Sparks, which is the non-essential stuff you don’t necessarily have to read, as Fever takes the links and content from these feeds and uses that data, in addition to your Kindling, to come up with the best of the best for your Hot section. No unread count either, so just throw your feeds in there and let Fever do it’s magic. This section is perfect for link blogs, those sites that regurgitate stories from other top blogs day(s) later (but occasionally post interesting stuff), and news sites that post a bazillion items a day.

That brings me to Hot. Not only does Fever do everything I mentioned above, but it can do it for pretty much any time frame you want. So, if you miss a week of feed reading because of vacation, just open up Fever and select a weeks worth of feeds, starting now. Fever will pull up the hottest stories from the last week, based on your feeds. (In this case you can see why subscribing to more feeds will give you better results.) No reading through hundreds of posts or just marking all as read to start fresh. You get all the good stuff in a fraction of the time.

So what else?

Did I mention it’s beautiful? (See the screenshots.)  It also pulls in the favicons from all the sites, so it makes scanning sources a lot easier.

Did I mention it was super easy to install? Like Wordpress easy (maybe easier!) Or that the software gets updated automatically?

Or that you can blacklist domains to block ad spam?

Not to mention all the standard feed reader features: OPML import/export, groups, search, saved items, and easy keyboard shortcuts.

OK. So that sounds great. Is this just a puff piece? Well, no. Here are the negatives…

• It can be slow. Maybe it’s my hosting (Dreamhost. Eck!) package, but at times the app runs slow. Generally it is decent to good, though.
• ‘Hot’ works, but sometimes not all that well. I’ve seen articles linked with pretty bad titles (i.e. ‘the following statement’), which gives me no clue what the story is… and I’ve also seen a topic grouped together multiple times, with different sources in the groups, all due to slightly different wording. For example, prominent Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin was fired recently. The topic showed up multiple times in ‘Hot’ because certain outlets described it differently. Would be nice if Fever knew those articles were on the same topic and grouped them all together, so I could see all of the coverage on Froomkin at one time. (I’m sure Fever would have rated the story higher if they were linked too.)
• Occasionally, items spontaneously expand from excerpt to full article as I am scrolling through items. Not the worst thing in the world, but if it’s a long article it can throw you off pretty good.
• Hitting the right arrow while on a new items takes you to the post in your browser. But it also opens up another instance of Fever too, which is kind of annoying.  (I am using a Fluid site-specific browser instance of Fever, so maybe that is causing the problem.)

That’s all I’ve found so far. I believe version 1.01 is coming out soon, so we’ll see how much things improve with that and future patches.

Overall, I am very pleased with my purchase. I was a die hard Google Reader user, but I do really enjoy having my reader and the data on my own domain… not to mention a growing confidence in not having to read everything in my feed inbox. I can just sit back and let Fever do the the heavy lifting, while I enjoy reading the most important news of the day.

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Unbroken (Burning Fight, Phase 1) from hate5six productions on Vimeo.

My all-time favorite hardcore band. Wow. Watching this still gives me chills, just like it did when I first heard them, first saw them. An amazing band that embodied everything I felt and believed. And I know, from talking to others, many kids felt the same way and still do. Not too many bands make that kind of impact.Similar Posts:

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Ringworm (Burning Fight, Phase 1) from hate5six productions on Vimeo.

The Human Furnace!
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Damnation AD (Burning Fight, Phase 1) from hate5six productions on Vimeo.

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Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s defense Thursday of the Bush administration’s policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements.

Surprised? Didn’t think so…  read the article for the many examples.Similar Posts:

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However, I am still very disappointed in the pricing. There must be additional instant rebates involved for the two-year upgrade price to be $299 before the mail-in rebate, since when you subtract the extra $75 the two-year folks get from the $474 it’s still only $399. Unless, of course, the $199 after rebate price is only for new customers and the two-year upgrades will end up paying $299 after rebate. The press release didn’t make it seem that way, however.

My theory is Sprint knows there will be a shortage at first, so they are making an effort to limit the device to new customers (switchers) and folks they can easily lure into contract extensions. Not sure many folks will be willing to drop $474 for a phone, so right away they can meet demand by limited the number of potential buyers. We’ll see how that works out… but it’s not the kind of strategy you’d expect from two companies that have been on many of the “likely to go out of business” lists market analysts have been posting since the recession started!

Well, October is a long way off, so I will consider all of my options at that point. The Pre may still win out, but I will be looking at the iPhone and various Android-based phones that will be released between now and then – not to mention the possible plan pricing changes I mentioned yesterday. Lots of options, at least.Similar Posts:

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