On vacation

I’ll be on the East Coast until July 12, so I probably won’t be posting or responding to email until then.

Perfect Day

Today was fabulous, weather-wise. A light, dry breeze; a bright, warm sun (74°, not blazing); scattered clouds for random patches of shade. Not humid in the least. An island of a day, converging at the exact sweet spot of comfort. The sheer perfection of it…

Catalog.com is good for you, and me

Free Web Hosting with Domain Registration
If you sign up for Catalog.com’s great free Web hosting service from the above link I get a kickback. Thanks…

Yahoo! Mail decides to compete

Yahoo! has wised up and increased their free email service’s storage capacity from 4MB to 100MB. Now they can somewhat compete with Google’s Gmail that offers 1GB, by not having to worry yet about droves of users abandoning Yahoo! Mail as their mailboxes approach the storage space limit.

Coke 2: Electric Boogaloo

The monicker “Coke” is back as a low-carb alternative to the liquid sugar bomb that was allegedly once made with cocaine. If you were conscious in 1985 you remember the marketing debacle that was “New Coke”, Coca-Cola’s attempt to revitalize their market share and celebrate their centennial. Are Atkins adherents delusional enough to sustain this product? (Well, they’re eating up Apple’s low-carb iPod mini…) The new commercials for Coke 2 have a catchy Rolling Stones soundtrack that suckers you until the product reveal at the very end of the spot. Nicely done. One question: Shouldn’t it be Coke 3…?

Rest in Peace, Ray

Ray Charles has passed on. I knew him best from The Blues Brothers in which he played a musical instrument store owner with keen marksmanship…which is to say I didn’t know him well at all. He was a great performer and will be missed. Many comedians too often relied on an impression of him for laughs. Hopefully that will die with him and a serious appreciation for his talent will be passed on to young people.

Condi Rice is Angry!

‘Nuff said.

Shell to leave Nigeria?

Royal Dutch/Shell oil company has admitted some responsibility for “poverty, violence and corruption” in Nigeria according to a report on its ethical and environmental record. According to Reuters:

The company also acknowledged it was “difficult” to operate ethically in the Niger Delta, where conflict has surged periodically since the early 1990s, and said its attempts at community development had been “less than perfect.”

That they will cease operations in Nigeria in the near future was denied by a spokesperson.

War and Prisoner Abuse

I’m really sick of hearing about prisoner abuse in Iraq. What would life there be like now if the U.S. had arrested the “bad guys” looting their own nation’s treasures after the fall of Baghdad? Would their arrests have cut down the ranks of the rebels now killing young Americans? Would reduced ranks of rebels have reduced our soldiers’ impulse to mistreat them once imprisoned? I think so. I can see a correlation between those groups, but there’s no way to be sure they are the same Iraqis. Maybe it’s not a one-to-one correlation, but there must be some overlap between those groups of angry men…