Quotation of the Day: “I’m Captain Asphalt.” TIMOTHY J. GILCHRIST, newly appointed stimulus czar for New York State.

via Today’s Paper - New York Times.

Love this. Is civil engineering going to become cool again?

Screen much sharper, controls much better, lighter, thinner, ui better.

But guys, why f$&k with the keyboard shortcuts? Why change the Alt-TextSize shortcut for toggling awake? The key combo doesn’t do anything useful now. And why drop the Alt-t shortcut to show the time? Again it does nothing now.

Nits I know but annoying.

Amazon.com: Kindle 2: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device (Latest Generation): Kindle Store. - damn my family has theirs already. Apparently all shipped out of Indianapolis and so Midwest buyers already have their hands on. First reports are that it comes preloaded with all your existing book purchases, that is awesome.

* “Matter”:amazon by Iain M. Banks. Solid far future science fiction set in the author’s Culture universe. First I’ve read in this setting, interesting characters tho mostly dead by bookend. I admire an author who can kill off their main characters in furtherance of the plot and emotional impact of the book. * “The Creator’s Map”:amazon by Emilio Calderon. At first I feared this was one of the legion of Da Vinci Code clones, but it is really a spy and love story twisted together. And a deep look at 3 characters who experience the same events, but have profoundly different experiences based on their own issues and emotions.

FrightProps - Halloween Props, Pneumatic Props, Animated Props, Halloween Accessories. Need to start thinking about.

One of my relatives recommends BetterPhoto.com for photography instruction. One of these days

Suit Names 2 Judges Accused in a Kickback Case - NYTimes.com. This case just stuns me. The plea agreement is way too lenient. And every kid who passed thru these judge’s courts should be freed immediately and have any judgement stricken from their record.

“When Will There Be Good News”:amazon by Kate Atkinson. Wow, a great book. The lives of 4 people, each with life-altering disasters in their background, come together amidst a new set of disasters. And through this they all find some sort of redemption and hope. Really excellent.

* Downloads: Fences is a Seriously Awesome Desktop Icon Organizer. This thing is pretty useful. Kind of like the “group items” feature in powerpoint. Wish there was a Mac equivalent * Free Disk Analyzer. Reasonable. * Ubiquity. Intrigued but not committed yet.

New SF&F Writers 1990-2009 – great guide to modern SF writers. Via DarkRoastedBlend

SanDisk to mass produce 64GB memory cards. I currently use a 64G USB for partial backup of my photo collection, it works great.  I need a 128G (and soon 256G) tho to backup up everything. These things are going to eat away the USB hard disk market.

Gmail keeps dropping all kinds of cool new features – offline use amongst them, which some people claim makes gmail the be-all and end-all of mail clients. A reasoned discussion of the pros and cons of native clients vs web clients is up here – Alex Payne — The Problem With Email Clients.

For me tho, all these discussions miss the mark. I make regular use of 4 email addresses – two business, two personal – which I have acquired over the years and I want to maintain. And I don’t want to forward them all to some uber address. So my minimum bar is a client that can handle multiple inboxes with multiple addresses. This drives me to: * the browser, where I can use the various web interfaces of the various systems. This is a little unsatisfying as the web interfaces vary so much across the different mail systems. * the default mac mail client which works reasonably well * the iphone which handles multiple accounts reasonably well (tho the limitation of one exchange account sucks)

I use the iphone for about 60-70% of my mail, the mac mail client for about 25-30%, and the web clients for about 5%. The innovation that google is putting into its gmail client is thus largely wasted on me. It all sounds cool but without the ability to handle multiple accounts, I will rarely use it.

Rich has done a good job scrounging up info on this camera. Now that I have one, time to take advantage of.