The feature that surprises me the most for being useful is the TV playback mode. Very comfortable looking at photos on a TV screen, and handy in a hotel room.

Trying to find an honest online camera store that will ship quickly and reliably is unnecessarily difficult. I ended up at B&H for rapid shipping. Amazon has it for $480 via J&R.

But the game makes me so damned tense! I find that's true of many good video games. Hacking Python is more relaxing.

According to the paper Thousands of people roaming the streets in an organized/chaotic way, hundreds of cops doing battle to control the situation. In Portland in the early 90s when this kind of thing happened the cops went apeshit and started bashing heads. In SF it sounds like the police just calmly did their jobs. Could have been a lot worse.

12 years ago, that was me. It's not me now and I'm of mixed emotions. Blocking traffic isn't going to stop the war. But doing nothing encourages complacency. It is wrong that the US is off killing thousands of Iraqis and our biggest concern is which freeway offramp might temporarily be shut down.

Gillmor's own concerns are expressed much more clearly than mine:

Watching the video you have no real sense that there are actual people dying down below. Just little bright blobs on a dark backbground. The soldiers are remarkable, too. So many people involved, so calm! War machine.

Listen to the voices at the end:

Thanks to Diffuse Shadows for the link and Obey the Fist for the video. I think it's interesting how most blogs picking this up are pro-war.

Isn't this what computers are for? Can't the code remove the punctuation for me? And why do I have to tell them whether the card is a Visa, Mastercard, or Amex? The first digits on the card make that clear.

It's like the site wants to make it hard for me to buy something. Is this some sort of Visa requirement, to only accept the number exactly as typed by the user?

The other day I was picking up my shirts at the Freedom laundry when I met a handsome man with his hair in a long Freedom braid. I invited him back to my house for some Freedom wine and before I knew it we were Freedom kissing. Turns out he's into Freedom active; we had a lovely time and then he left, promising to write me Freedom letters. I sure hope I didn't end up getting the Freedom disease. That'd be doubleplusungood.

These Tom Clancy games are creepy military porn. Fans love them for their realistic weapons, tactical planning, corpses, etc. I confess to an uneasy enjoyment of this kind of fantasy. Hitman 2 was awesome.

What surprises me is how much of the fan activity for Raven Shield is European. I would have expected something this militaristic would be most popular in the US. Maybe the realism of it turns off American Rambos.

PS: Amazon has a $10 rebate.

The review is a bit goofy but does have one insight I particularly liked:

gdchart is good software; simple code to draw graphs and save them as GIF or PNG files. The Python interface makes it really easy to do some serious charting.

In the meantime, the US has produced no compelling evidence of the alleged weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Let's ask another expert, Hans Blix, lead UN weapons inspector in Iraq:

I guess I was naïve to think that my government wouldn't just lie about the evidence we claim to have.

A pox on DRM software, btw - I couldn't get a decent screencapture of the video or even a link to the actual video. Grr.

The crazy thing about watches is you can easily spend $20,000 on one without getting gold or jewels. Just a lovely skeleton movement or a beautiful A. Lange & Söhne 1. The workmanship on the inside is as beautiful as the exterior. Alas, not in my range, so I just read along with the watch geeks.

I don't want to be that smart to write simple scripts. I started learning Python a month or two ago and I'm a much happier person.

No fewer than 71 different hosts grabbed my robots.txt in eight days. Two creepy ones: NameProtect (trademark enforcement) and TurnItIn (anti-plagiarism). This doesn't bug me too much. I do wonder why some of these crawlers felt it necessary to fetch robots.txt forty times in eight days.

The comic is fun - it neatly captures the wonder and mystery of Lovecraft's epic fables. I like the everyman aspect of Mock Man, a nice rendering of Lovecraft's own generic men. The thing that I think is coolest is that in the comic book is a URL and email address from 1997, and they still work! The Bits out of Time.

I was prompted to write this by Kottke's post about a change Amazon made to URL formats. Used to be you could go to Amazon, copy the URL for a page, paste it into your blog and slap on your associate ID and you'd get the credit. No more, now you have to construct the URLs very carefully. This plugin makes it simpler.

I hope I got the URL format right. I'm sticking in the undocumented ref=nosim - I think it's obnoxious that Amazon defaults my links to 'buy more crap'.

There's also a new version of the imagesizer plugin to automatically add size tags to your story's images. Thanks to Todd for the Perl-fu to do this more cleanly.

Finally, I now have a place for all my Blosxom plugins. Apache stylin!