One of the things I noticed this morning is that I haven’t even turned on the TV all week. I’ve noticed that the TiVo’s red “I’m recording something for you” light is on a few times, and idly wondered what’s getting added to the hard drive, but I haven’t been curious enough to even turn on the TV to see what’s piled up. I expect that when the Saints home-stand is done, I’ll spend a few evenings just deleting things and “thumbs-down”ing the misfires in the suggestions, and then a few more watching the various things that got recorded. But I think a real good measure of how much is going on in my life is how many hours of TV I look at, and this week, it’s been zero.
Last night’s Saints game looked like it was going to be another loss, as TC had a rough start, but then in the bottom of the sixth, the Saints caught fire. Ten runs, and a half-inning that stretched almost 45 minutes. Wow! Julio Perez and Chriz Chavez combined to keep the fish off the board after that. Fun game!
- There’s an article in Slate that looks at The economic logic of executing computer hackers and finds that it’s probably better to execute malware authors than murderers. I wonder if that would make a dent in the spam hitting my inbox… [slashdot]
- Cool! Buffalo spammer gets 3.5 to 7 years, not for spamming, but for stealing someone’s identity and then using that stolen identity to send out his spam. [slashdot]
- Apropos of Columbia’s Newsblaster, is The Hive Group’s Newsmap, which gives a graphic representation of how much any particular story is being covered in the world media by allocating an appropriate amount of screenspace to the link. This is an awfully cool view of the news, but it’s a little sad to see the lack of coverage for some stories. I think the useful trick may be to mouse-over the headlines that are too small to read to see what people aren’t covering. [Michael Chaplin]
- A tool that looks at weblogs is the Waypath project, which includes searches for weblogs linking to a story, books related to a web-page, and other “what else is like this” kinds of analysis.
- In Abu Ghraib, Three Accused Soldiers Had Records of Unruliness That Went Unpunished. The lack of discipline is the same sort of problem that I see in the Minneapolis police. Officers who have repeatedly been accused of brutality get a slap on the wrist at most, and then a couple years later are found doing the same sort of thing again. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops who were beating people up on Art-A-Whirl weekend were in that class. I also haven’t heard anything back from either the Mayor or the council-members I wrote.