Friday, December 07, 2007

Meatpacking Apple

An hour ago Apple opened a new store in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District (at the corner of 14th and 9th). So cool… but perhaps the coolest thing is its third floor Pro Labs: Free multi-session classes in Logic, Final Cut and Aperture. Six students sign up for 2hrs, once a week for four weeks. The classes are TOTALLY FREE.

Photo from the Gothamist store preview. Gizmodo has the press release, a photo gallery and video. I found it all via Towleroad’s Towletech V.83.

Baltimore Sun: DADT is “pointless discrimination”

Momentum is building:

A brigade of 28 retired generals and admirals, following the lead of a former chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, has joined the campaign to repeal the insult that forces gay military personnel to stay in the closet.

Congress should take its cue to quickly dispatch the infamous “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that denies the most fundamental personal freedom to the men and women who are fighting to protect such freedoms for all other Americans. [...]

This policy of pointless discrimination perhaps serves only cowards in Congress and demagogues on the campaign stump. Anyone who truly supports the troops will vote to treat all of them with the dignity and respect they deserve.

My Blogiversary!

I almost forgot. Today is 3 years and over 4,400 posts (4,464 but I’ve had some guest bloggers) since I started blogging.

Here’s my first post. And the original why I blog post. Three years later and I plan to replace it with this one.

I am working to address the technical challenges the site has presented to visitors (and me!) this year. I have contracted with E. Webscapes to tweak the design, optimize the engineering, upgrade the blog software and move back to my old host, ICDSoft.

I’m looking forward to a banner blog year in 2008! I hope you’ll all stay with me.

See Spot Blog*

Started as simple photo-sharing site in 2004, Dogster is now a popular online meeting place for pet owners. From the Fashion & Style section of yesterday’s NYTimes:

Think of Dogster as Facebook for canines. There, my dogs (along with 346,639 other four-legged members, as of last week) had their own profile pages that listed their likes and dislikes, personal mottoes — Otto’s is “Are you going to finish that?” — and best tricks (“catching seedless grapes in mid-air").

So what if my dogs could barely type, much less upload photos of themselves wearing Santa hats?

We live in an era where there is a social network to cater to any niche group you can think of, including infants whose parents create Facebook profiles for them and then expect the godparents to pretend to correspond with the babies. Why shouldn’t pets arrange play dates online or blog about their health issues?

* I’m wondering how many of you will understand what the wordplay in the title of this post is about. For those who don’t… when I was a small child the standard grade school reading texts were the (now classic) Dick and Jane books.

The main characters in these books were the children Dick and Jane. Prominently featured was their dog Spot in paragraphs I remember like so:

See Spot.
See Spot walk.
See spot run…

Such paragraphs have been parodied by the Simpsons and can now found on t-shirts like this:

C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN

Apparently the books were effective. And still are.

Silent Debate. And Barack OBollywood.

Joe Gandelman (who graciously included my more-marginalizing-our-media-reaction to the YouTube debates in a recent Around the Sphere) points us to…

Harry Shearer hosts another informative Presidential silent debate via My Damn Channel (which makes a lot more sense than the presidential debates we’ve heard so far..)

Harry Shearer’s close, “Thank you all gentleman. You’ve given us a lot not to think about.”

LATER: Barack OBollywood...

Via Blog for Democracy.