pinkasphalt

10 worst album covers.

Markos Moulitsas from the Daily Kos writes about the Rightwing Noise Machine for the Guardian.

The past couple of weeks have been insanely busy at work and now that things are settling down, I am taking stock of what has been going on in my absence. Upon my return here, the first thing I noticed is that the comment spammers have been hard at work and there were several hundred spam comments awaiting moderation. Happily none of them actually made it onto the site (take THAT you evil scum-sucking spammers), but sadly, in a bout of batch deleting I also deleted a few vaild comments. My apologies to the authors. I don’t have very many comments on my site, so I was sad to have lost them

The other thing that came to light as I resumed my daily routines, is that something is seriously wrong with my iPod. It still plays and still charges, but it is not recognized by my Mac. It doesn’t mount on the desktop, it doesn’t show up in iTunes, and it doesn’t show up in Disk Utility. In spite of following all the different suggestions I found scattered around the web (because it seems I am not alone in this problem), it still stubbornly refuses to mount. I am not quite sure what to try next and since it is out of warranty, my options are fairly limited. Any suggestions are welcome.

Other events of note, The System of the World, the Dark Tower VII and the Stars Wars Trilogy on DVD were released, Kottke and others have put together a handy-dandy Voters Information Guide for the upcoming U.S. elections, a new beta of Sype for the Mac was released, and most importantly, John Joseph Spelker came into the world.

An adware free version of Real Player, courtesy of the BBC. [via] Update: Looks like it was taken down and replaced by the usual bloated version.

I saw Angels in America at the video store and since I had a vague recollection of having heard postitive things about it, I decided to get it. I have just finished watching it and I think it is the best thing I have seen this year. It is epic and operatic and intimate and witty and heart-breaking and inspiring and a million things more. Jeffrey Wright is fabulous and Mary Louise Parker is quietly brilliant. And because you might not realize it otherwise, the old rabbi at the beginning, that is Meryl Streep.

Night flight to San Francisco. Chase the moon across America. God! It’s been years since I was on a plane! When we hit 35,000 feet, we’ll have hit the tropopause. The great belt of calm air. As close as I’ll ever get to the ozone. I dreamed we were there. The plane leapt the tropopause, the safe air, and attained the outer rim, the ozone, which was ragged and torn, patches of it threadbare as old cheesecloth, and that was frightening. But I saw something that only I could see, because of my astonishing ability to see such things: Souls were rising, from the earth far below, souls of the dead, of people who had perished, from famine, from war, from the plague, and they floated up, like skydivers in reverse, limbs all akimbo, wheeling and spinning. And the souls of these departed joined hands, clasped ankles, and formed a web, a great net of souls, and the souls were three-atom oxygen molecules, of the stuff of ozone, and the outer rim absorbed them, and was repaired. Nothing’s lost forever. In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead. At least I think that’s so. – Harper Pitt, Angels in America by Tony Kushner

My application to be a DMOZ editor was accepted! Guess what section I will be editing

The latest version of Firefox is out. New features include:

• Live Bookmarks
• Improved Find
• Managing Annoyances and Protecting Security
• Better Bookmarks
• Strong Encryption For Passwords Available
• Improved Compatibility for IE users
• Better System Integration for GNOME users

Go get it. And The Extensions Mirror is infinitely useful for finding repackaged versions of your favorite extensions.