Grand Theft Mario (NSFW, funny as hell).

_NY Times_ laments the deterioration of _Gilmore Girls_ now that its creators have left the series. It’s been on my “to watch” list forever and I still have the season 1 DVDs sitting here unopened.

_Fortune_ reports on the history of Diebold and its forays into the elections business, and suggests that the company’s new CEO is considering getting out of the messy business entirely. I say good riddance. The only election systems anyone should be content to let run in polling places is one that is as transparent and auditable as possible. Open-source should be the only software on the boxes, and only machines that conform to open reference implementations should be allowed to run that software.

I was watching _High School Musical_ tonight (don’t ask) and there was a commercial for another Disney show, during which I recognized a very familiar voice. Turns out Daran Norris, who plays Cliff, one of my favorite characters on _Veronica Mars_, has an extensive list of voice acting credits. Nifty.

“Whoever said people never get over their first loves needs to die. Normally cliches dont faze me. This one terrifies me. Haunts me. I do not want to be that girl who spends her whole life wishing she were still with that guy she dated in high school.”

A while back I applauded the BBC convention of not capitalizing all the letters in acronyms that are pronounced as words. Thus they write about Nasa rather than NASA and Nato rather than NATO, but still print USGS in all caps. The _New York Times_ is getting closer, but you can’t write an article about an agency that is pronounced U-S-A-I-D and call it Usaid. Keep trying, though.

Dear Reader, How do you address your email correspondance?

When you use a well-designed computer program, you’ll occasionally stumble upon amazing little touches that you never noticed before. It is the mark of something well-crafted that it gives you what you need in an intuitive way and hides complexity under the surface so that as you use it more you gain additional functionality without additional confusion. How marvelous, then, when I discovered a few days ago — purely by accident — that most applications built natively for OS X support built-in functionality for auto-completion of words by using the escape key. Just another little design flourish that makes me a happier and more productive Mac user.

“Weird Al’s essential service is to point out that, from the perspective of the middle-class suburban lifeworld, pop culture itself is weird. This is the paradox of Weird Al’s weirdness: He’s actually Normal Al, a common-sensical, conservative force. He’s Everyman trapped on Neverland Ranch, exposing as many stylistic excesses and false profundities as he can.”

If all human life on Earth were to vanish tomorrow, how long would it take for every remnant of our civilization to be wiped away? Remarkably less time than you might think, according to an in-depth study bo _New Scientist_.

On MetaFilter, a link to a 1947 piece penned by King Abdullah of Jordan for American readers about the escalating problem of Jewish settlement in Palestine, and an interesting number of comments supporting and contesting his facts and views.

“Thank you, Mr President, for giving us the axis of evil.

“[W]hile the elements are there, “Battlestar [Galactica]” is less an allegory about current events than a rumination on how we might view things if tables were turned.”

Dr. David Weinberger lays out his ’08 presidential run campaign promises. I’d vote for him. So would Ethan.

“In just about any other community, a deadly school shooting would have brought demands from civic leaders for tighter gun laws and better security, and the victims’ loved ones would have lashed out at the gunman’s family or threatened to sue. But that’s not the Amish way.[..A]n Amish neighbor comforted the Roberts family hours after the shooting and extended forgiveness to them.” If only we could all be so understanding.

“For the five years since 9/11, […t]his president has held detainees in secret prisons and had them secretly tortured using secret legal justifications. Those held in secret at Guantanamo Bay include innocent men, as do those who have been secretly shipped off to foreign countries and brutally tortured there. […P]assage of the new detainee legislation will be a different sort of watershed. Now we are affirmatively asking to be left in the dark. Instead of torture we were unaware of, we are sanctioning torture we’ll never hear about. Instead of detainees we didn’t care about, we are authorizing detentions we’ll never know about.”

Cringely talks about Apple’s movie strategy. I often disagree with him (and he is often wrong), but in this case I think he’s fairly close to the mark. It was immediately apparent to me that with its soon to be released “iTV” device Apple is once again cutting out the (evil, obsolete) middle man that is cable companies and, to some extent, TV networks themselves.

Is it necessary that one have ambitions to make it in the world, or to change it, or is it enough that one simply have the ambition to enjoy it?

I just read something that made me so angry I had to walk out of the event I was sitting in and go for a walk. Want to talk about everything that is wrong with our country today? Try to find the Plan B emergency contraception pill in rural Ohio.

Sam Brown laments his titanium PowerBook G4 laptop, which finally died for good after five years of use. His remembrance makes me nostalgic. I loved my TiBook; it is probably my favorite computer ever. I got one and then I convinced Adam to get one (his first Mac) and it had a long battery life and a huge bright screen and wireless networking, which was amazing and new, and it was thin and light and didn’t get too hot. And I didn’t get the AppleCare, and after 18 months it died, and a few months later Adam’s died too, and it was too damn expensive to justify another one. I’ve had several machines since that PowerBook, all costing less, but I still remember it with great fondness. I think its still my favorite computer.