The death is not real when you're not allowed to feel 

Amy Goodman on the Connecticut high school play about the war in Iraq, banned by the principal for sensationalizing the topic.

Right. Don't put the war in an artistic emotional context and maybe the slaughter won't get to us. Don't let us see coffins of returning soldiers and maybe it will slip our minds that kids are dying and their families will never be the same.

Just go shopping.

Curious about the new feature 

So Dave, tell us more about this new wrinkle of the OPML Editor's Flickr tool, or are you still working on it? Sounds interesting. Could it also sync up a /blog/decorations folder with a Flickr account?

Looking at things sideways 

Inspired in part by David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous notions, I'm pretty much dumping out of categorizing content at work by traditional library subject areas, except as it helps me organize it for newsletter layouts. I'm now thinking searches will reveal most any topical queries anyway, and we'll be better off tagging news items to pull out those that cannot be picked up in searches. Example: a category for selected summaries of government reports with links to the full documents, a frequent story type in our weekly news briefs.

Let me know if you'd like to see how this works out. I'm going to start with the first such sideways slice by searching in the CMS's admin for items containing terms like report, survey, study and pdf, and assign to some of them the new additional category.

Aww, poor Tom 

Tom's got the repetitive blues. I do a good healing mom's "you poor thing." I'll record you a custom one if you think it might help.

I've spent my life on the keyboard and mouse for decades, and never had a problem. I think it's because I built muscle playing piano from the time I was little, but nobody ever buys that theory.

My learning project for tonight 

Jon Udell remixed health care data. I want to figure out how this works. I've never played around with DabbleDB. Maybe I won't get it, you never know; the gaps in my fake programmer abilities are huge and I never know where they might surface to grind an experiment to a halt.

So nice when bloggers and analysts like Udell are able to show you how they mashed up something, not just tell you on a surface level how they think other people might be able to do it. I can see why Steve Gillmor was sorry to lose Udell from the Gillmor Gang. It needed that practical input.

On not jinxing the cool effect 

Liz Gannes at GigOm on parent companies tippytoeing with acquired properties. She's such a good writer and really understands the tech business culture. I'd have liked to see her coax some quotes out of the acquiring companies on what they're tempted to do to their prizes. And maybe something on the cases where acquisitions seem to languish, maybe out of fear of screwing them up.