Jimmy Kimmell: Unnecessary Censorship.

Possibly the funniest thing I've seen all week. Thank you Screenhead!

"overall, i felt that the movie was directed by Tom Hanks, produced by Clint Eastwood and Jay Leno, written by my entire writing workshop at NYU last semester, and script-doctored by the writers of Saturday Night Live

it might win an oscar"

POTD

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Vatican City

Wow. Freaky.

"The horns and boom boxes echo louder within your steaming head, the habiliment of the orthodox diamond merchant looks all the more unbearable, you become more acutely conscience on the subway that you are sharing that vaporous pocket of air with 200 other commuters, the scantily clad residents are all the more beautiful because of their glistening skin and the aroma of urine is all the more perceivable on the subway platform."

Freak.

POTD

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Island of Murano, Venice, Italy

DPReview.com: "Kodak to end production of black & white paper"

Good God. Will I be able to do darkroom work in a few years?

"To say that she was not interacting is ludicrous," said Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist who has served as a [Schiavo] family spokesman. "It would mean that every family member and every friend that came out of that room lied to us."

"Our contention all along is you err on the side of life." [via Newsday]

I'm sorry to resurrect and beat this dead horse, but the depth of Randall Terry's denial fascinates me.

The battle, and this was a battle, was divided pretty clearly on ideological lines, disregarding the family's and Terry Schivao's best interest. The ideology was so powerful, in fact, that many of the "right to lifers" ignored all common sense, feigned some sort of medical understanding, and claimed that "with therapy" Ms. Schiavo would somehow recover to live a somewhat normal life.

Now that the autopsy results have been released, showing that Ms. Schiavo suffered profound, irreversible brain damage, Mr. Terry's continued denial seems almost sinister.

My God -- it is June 16. Bloomsday!

I have to get a Gorgonzola sandwich.

The Iraqi Premiere Football League was launched on June 13 after several years' absence.

So Gamma and Beck are releasing a new version of JUnit. Cool. JDK 1.5 only.

I just clicked on one of my own Google ads. Will I be arrested?

An encounter with a Michelin reviewer.

Caption contest, I should think.

POTD

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Rome, Italy

Congress is playing politics with Public Bradcasting. If upsets you, MoveOn.org makes it easy to send a note to your representatives.

I'm terribly disturbed to hear that congress is considering cutting public funding to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcast System.

NPR and PBS are world-renouned for their quality and are sources of great pride for Americans. Both do invaluable work to educate and inform citizens. Though PBS and NPR are often associated with Washington, Boston, New York, and other large cities, the proposed funding cuts would most hurt small-town America. Rural public radio stations would all but disappear without Federal assistance.

Given that Federal funding to the CPB is roughly $400 million, money is clearly not the primary motivation for the proposed cuts. The Federal Highway Bill alone, currently under consideration, is spending $295 billion of taxpayer money.

The State of Alaska will receive more than $490 million per year in Federal funding from the Highway bill, including more than $400 million to construct two bridges serving less than 10,000 Alaskan residents. If the small amount of Federal funding to the CPB is cut, however, Alaska's Public Radio stations are likely to cease operation.

If Congress can see fit to include this kind of pork barrel spending in the $295 billion highway bill, it can certainly set aside $400 million to fund institutions as valuable as NPR and PBS.

Congress must save NPR, PBS and local public stations. We trust them for in-depth news and educational children's programming. It's money well spent.

I don't know which I like better: stuff on my cat, or drunk jenga.

POTD

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Vatican City

Please, people, I don't care about "the trial™." No one cares about it.

Lets not mention it any more. Let it die. Lets pretend it was all some sort of twisted, double-wide trailer culture, John Waters bad dream. There was no trial. There is nothing to be said. Nothing to be debated, no need to weigh in with incisive commentary. Lets all pretend we have lives.

Haven't we Americans sufficiently debased ourselves already?

POTD

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Santa Croce, Florence, Italy

Visual Paradigm for UML: why have I not heard about this product until now?

For ages I've been looking for a capable UML-based design tool that isn't Rational Rose, particularly one that runs well on MacOS X. I stumbled upon VP UML this weekend, and I'm really impressed.

Written in Java, VP UML runs well on OS X (I haven't yet run it on Windows). It handles all the static and dynamic diagrams you would want, and has nice documentation / model annotation features. I'm still trying to figure out how to organize classes into packages, as I really like to have namespaces in models. It seems to support this, but I haven't quite got it.

It has exhibited some minor funkiness, but no deal breakers.

This could potentially replace Rose. Very interesting.

The fourth meeting of NYC photobloggers will be June 17. I'll be there. You?

Questions for someone who has sprung for Apple's Power PC -> Intel Developer Transition Kit or who noticed these things at WWDC:

• Were there any rumors about VMWare running on the MacTel machines?
• I'm assuming there is no Open Firmware; are the machines booting from a plain-vanilla BIOS?
• Was there any mention of how MacTel laptops would sleep? The ability to put my PowerBook to sleep and leave it, unplugged, for hours or days is something I really like. Intel-based laptops have not done this, and Intel processor "sleep" modes have traditionally been different than PowerPC's sleep modes.


• Do USB keyboards and mice work before the OS loads (at boot)?


• Did Apple have a message for people who have taken the time to code to AltiVec, or was it a polite "you are basically screwed?"