"Yellow wakes me up in the morning.
Yellow gets me on the bike every day.
Yellow has taught me the true meaning of sacrifice.
Yellow makes me suffer.
YELLOW IS THE REASON I'M HERE."

I am glad that these have gotten so much support and attention because it is a really important message. But on the flip side I hope other people remember the meaning and not just that it's the cool thing to do right now. If you're interested in the background check out this site or the Lance Armstrong Foundation.

LiveSTRONG bracelet

] This is what the Earth looks like at night.

[ These pictures are increasingly easy to locate, but still always impress me. Very cool. -k]

APOD: 2004 August 22 - Earth at Night

An amazing origami dragon.

Yahoo! News - World Photos - AP

] Amazing photos of cool-looking Chinese cop dressed in
] black shooting a kidnapper who was sitting on a
] windowsill. The kidnapper, who probably died from two
] slugs to the head, fell five stories to the ground.

Boing Boing: Chinese cop on window ledge shoots kidnapper in head

Its almost 2005. It seems like time stopped on September 11th and hasn't really moved forward since. Everything since has been a dream... It doesn't feel like the decade is half over.

This decade doesn't have a style yet. It doesn't have a message. It doesn't have music. And its half over. The only thing about 200x is blogs and terrorists and camera phones. What the fuck? By 1995 we had seen the rise and fall of grunge rock. By 1985 we'd had Atari and Devo and MTV and Madonna and RunDMC. In 1975 we had disco and Ozzy. In 2005 we ain't got shit.

What are the cultural themes of this decade??

1. Strife - Terror. Fear. Security. War. Partisanship.
2. Marketing killed the human spirit - The new music sucks because its too marketed. Too much a product and not a statement. The spirit of the Olympic Games is hard to hold onto when people are getting fired for wearing the wrong brand of tennis shoes. The internet is a cesspool of pop up-ads and spam. You can't believe in anything anymore because the minute someone makes something worth believing in they try to use it to sell soda pop.
3. Bloggers.

Is that it? Am I being too cynical here? What am I missing?

] TypeKey helps ensure that people who comment on a site
] have a verified identity, keeping conversations on track
] and helping to prevent abusive or offensive content
] (comment spam) from being posted.

Moveable Type's solution to comment spam was to build their own version of Microsoft Passport.

1. One wonders why they didn't just use Microsoft Passport.

2. I predict that because most net users have the IQ of a rock they won't understand that this is exactly the same as Microsoft Passport. Furthermore, they will think its a "great idea" and wonder why no one did it before. They won't be at all concerned about the privacy of their data because its not the architecture of the system that is important but who made it that matters.

3. TypeKey currently doesn't share information about how to interoperate with their system. They hint that people will have to pay them money in order to interoperate. Depending on the costs associated with that they may or may not expand this little service outside of the world of their own software. They are unlikely to get this right.

4. It will be interesting to see how their system actually works. If they developed a good enough protocol an open source typekey system would enable people to run their own identity servers that are compatible with moveable type. Its easy to mis-design a system like this so that it doesn't really work well for such a purpose.

5. There is a remote possibility that if the protocol is right, the money is right, and MT's perception in the user community is right that this could become the way that everyone shares authentication information on the internet. Its unlikely, and it won't happen in way that MT likes (they'll loose control). But its possible.

TypeKey

A neat little tool for creating virtual sticky notes on a web page. Somewhat wiki like. Worth a look. Unfortunately does not work in Safari.

Webnote - an online tool for taking notes

] According to an article in EcommerceTimes, Microsoft is
] trying to migrate Office from a product to an online
] service with a focus on automating collaborative work.
] Quote: 'Making collaboration faster, easier and more
] efficient will be the next revolution in worker
] productivity, and we want to be in the forefront,' said
] Peter Rinearson, vice president for new business
] development in Microsoft's information worker group

wikiwiki

Slashdot | Microsoft Renovates Office Suite as a Web Service

] The images presented on this page show a selection of the
] types of art that can be created using POV-Ray. To a new
] user the concept of creating such images may seem
] daunting, but remember - all of the artists featured here
] were one day new users themselves.

POVCOMP 2004: Hall of Fame

] A sensor discerns and categorizes dog barks, translating
] them through 7 modes into words and pictograms that
] humans can understand. See what your pooch is saying, and
] gain a deeper level of understanding.

[ Japanese phones are *SICK*, man. We americans are all "Woo! Text messaging!" while these motherfuckers have a fucking universal translator for DOGS! Not to mention cool barcode readers, TV output and crazy data services. I shit you not, NTT DoCoMo's gonna market the first computer/brain interface and 15 year old girls all over japan will be talking to each other like fucking telepaths over high bandwidth wireless links. Americans will finally get decent wireless data services around the same time. -k

edit : actually, i don't know how fast they are, but Vodaphone's data rates are like 1.5 cents per K (0.2 Y/128B), which is pretty bullshit. Maybe that's just Vodaphone or maybe the actual data services aren't as good as I think. Still, the initial statement, that their phones are ill, stands. ]

Vodafone