Hard-working Americans come in lots of educational backgrounds and colors (in case you didn't know). Hillary Clinton's current attempt at overtly dividing us into such neat, classist and racist categories is just one more reason she's unfit to lead the country. That and the constant lying, of course.

HC has done a good job, so far, of framing the debate in terms of Obama's weaknesses. But the framing is starting, I think, to break lose. Just yesterday--and for the first time--I heard a reporter on NPR question a Clinton handler about her lack of support from urban black voters and educated voters in general. What, after all, is the deal with that?

Of course, she'll just claim that she "misspoke." But it's a bit like the sort of misstatement a lawyer makes before the jury and then, when the objection comes, respectfully withdraws the question, knowing full well that the message was sent. We're seeing HC call out to her base here. And it's just as disturbing as it is when republicans do it. Obama has bases too, of course. But I'll take his rhetoric of unity over her rhetoric of division any day.

From an email today: I get these from time to time and always just give them away here. So, if any of you are not on the Netflix tip by now and want to check it out email/IM/FB/MySpace/Twitter/call/comment or otherwise contact me and I'll send you an invite.

I hadn't done an old-school computers wallpaper in a while, so I threw together this one honoring the computer I learned to program on in high school, the TRS-80 Model III:



Some details from old-computers.com and Wikipedia. If you want to get a hands-on appreciation for this one (or most of the others in the TRS-80 line), there's an emulator. The "Trash 80" was a computer only a mother could love, but I did learn some useful things on it.

I made a photoset on Flickr for this and the previous ones.

White Bob is 17 today:

Haden is three months old, so we had some new pix taken and uploaded some others that had been sitting around. They've all been added to his photoset on Flickr.

Really, words can't describe how cool Audiotool is. Kiss your week goodbye and get back with your old-school electronica self. At your disposal are emulations of a TR-909, two TB-303s, five stop-box effects, and a 12-channel mixer. Patching and routing is entirely up to you. There are buttons to push, knobs to tweak, and plenty of fun Roland-inspired fun to be had. This is a preview demo-type thing. So there's no way to save your composition (that I know of). But, man, it is fun.

It's from the evil genius who brought you the FL-909.

Google App Engine lands. It lets you develop and share web apps and is the same engine that runs Google's own. It runs on Python (and Django templates). Curious? Watch Google's developer Bret Slatkin code up a guestbook demo at the speed of thought.

Tracks is a great web-based (Ruby on Rails powered) application for managing Getting Things Done. I've using Tracks for about a year now. I'm currently running one of the development snapshots, so I'll probably set up the new version and see what made the final cut.

Blackboard, makers of a badly designed but incredibly popular Learning Management System (LMS) in use at about eighty percent of colleges in the USA, got a big smackdown on a slew of bogus patents they had been using to fend off competitors and stifle competition. This is a "non-final" decision, which means both parties have time to comment and Blackboard has the right to appeal. But it doesn't look good for them, and that's a good thing for educators and their IT departments. They have rival LMS-maker Desire2Learn and the Software Freedom Law Center to thank for funding the case.

My friend Ray finished designing a site for Cool City Customs, a custom bike builder. Their site has a cool Flash-based feature that lets you create your own bike, and they're having a contest and giving away a bike to the winner. So go there and vote for my bike! There's no way to permalink a design, but mine is called "Slow Ride" (oh yes it is). Here's the gallery of designs.