The Samsung Digimax L85 is very nice looking, but I think I'll stick to my old 1980's Pentax manual. 
I found Austin Cline's excellent biographical article on Kierkegaard while browsing through my flagged and unposted entries.
I do have some sympathy with the conservative intellectuals who claim that they are discriminated against. Certainly in certain fields ideas which aren't Marxist or which question the value of Marxist analysis get shunned. But then again, when some of our right-wingers write shit like this, it puts the whole thing in to perspective. It's an expanded version of "if we evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still here?". I hope the lecturer rips this to shreds in class.
Austin Cline: "Conservative evangelicals seek to insulate themselves from outside influences rather than discover ever more influences in order to learn new things."
Wowza. I missed Reggie talking to Dawkins. I'll be there later grabbing up the archive. First me, then Professor Dawkins. Reggie's on a roll! 
William Dembski, the information theorist's Isaac Newton, getting slapstick over the Bible Code? You don't say. It is so thoroughly lovely to think about.
What makes a good Panda's Thumb post? Well, DaveScot being a moron, the ACLU, ID advocates being hypocritical dipshits and Keith Miller tearing these people a new hole. Here you go!
I forgot to mention: Science won in Ohio! That's good!
Josh Rosenau points to someone from the US government admitting that US copyright is Fucked Up. Now to get someone from the UK to do the same. 10 years, renewable to 20, then a £1 a year renewal until it hits current copyright standards. This will free up all of the currently commercially unavailable work unless it gets renewed.
Kottke has realised Web 2.0's dirty secret.
Mike Arrington is discussing Meebo's upgrades. I do like the new Meebo functionality. I also got a Mabber invite a while back, but it's not very speedy compared to Meebo, and I'm not bothered about being able to IM from my phone.
Another old story: Techdirt on pop-ups. However much we like the Guardian for pioneering RSS among the UK newspapers, they still have loads of popups.
Last year: we were preparing for the Rapture, looking for annotated rap lyrics and watching Blair squirm as he got defeated in the Commons.
This is a good idea. I'll record one later. Perhaps we could have an opmlcommunity podcast?
Dave is right. We've got lots of work to do.
My NewsRiver crashes my computer. I've switched back to that unholy partnership: Bloglines and NetNewsWire. I'm hoping that NewsRiver is slightly more stable on my new machine, because it's a great aggregator. Meanwhile, it would be very neat if someone could make an AppleScript to make posting to OPML easier from NetNewsWire. I know that NNW developer Brent Simmons is an ex-Userland guy, so why not?
I'm just reading through Feed Butler on the train. I just leave Tonbridge station and this Reuters article pops up from Tonbridge. Coincidence!
The Trainline's horrendous service 
Here in Britain, a company called TheTrainline offers train ticket booking. I'm going up to Birmingham tommorow, and so I thought I'd go online and buy my tickets from The Trainline. Simple enough.
I click through the fairly user-unfreindly interface - and find a service which I can take. I investigate further and find it goes from Marylebone, and you can't pick up your ticket from Marylebone using "FastTicket". What this means is that you simply put your card in to a machine, tap in the details which they send you by email, and your ticket gets printed out. It saves you from having to wait for them to post your ticket to you.
You can, though, pick up FastTickets from any train station on their list. Two stops from Marylebone station is Paddington. I wanted to double-check that it was possible to do so, and decided that giving The Trainline a call would be helpful.
So I click 'Contact Us'. No phone number, only email and postal address. I hop off to a whois site and look up thetrainline.com. They've got a London phone number listed for administrative and technical contact. I call it.
It tells me to call a different number. I call that number, navigate through a very complex button-punching system and get nowhere. I try again. Nothing. Then I google for phone site:thetrainline.com and get a few phone numbers I can try. One of the 0870 numbers seems to work, and I get through to someone, get the answer to my question. Then I say that it might be useful to put the phone number on the Contact Us page.
I go back to the website and finish booking my tickets. I've decided to travel Euston to New Street rather than Marylebone to Snow Hill because it's quicker and easier for a few pounds more.
Total time elapsed: about forty minutes. Sorry, but why exactly should it take forty minutes, five phone calls and a WHOIS lookup in order to book a train ticket between London, Europe's largest city, and Birmingham, Britain's second largest city?
If you want to contact someone to ask a simple question and you want it responded to quickly, the best way is to have a phone number. TheTrainline is perhaps the worst service I have ever seen, but they are pretty much the only option. Of course, when I get to Euston tommorow and the machine doesn't work or Virgin take us on a merry tour of the countryside or we've got the wrong type of rain. This shit is so thoroughly annoying...
