I've just had a great Google Maps idea. Make it so that if you plan a route through central London, you could ask it to avoid the Congestion Charge zone. Go on Google - exercise your power to piss off the Mayor. 
Woo! New build! Go Dave!
Oh my, some lunatics have tried to attack an adult store in Florida. If you're in the area, why don't you pop on down to "Café Risqué" and purchase a bumper pack of dildos and a DVD to show that you support freedom! 
Nice. Someone's made a Flickr Automator Action. I'll probably put together an "upload cartoons" action so I can just drag-and-drop my finished JPEG on to a button and have it automatically posted to Flickr and an email to Valleywag sent if tag == "web2.0" (heh heh). O'Reilly have a good tutorial on writing Automator actions. I wonder whether we could have some OPML Automator Actions...
456 Berea St. has a post called "Levels of HTML knowledge". I'd say I'm at Level 3.5. I know why CSS is better, and I can hold my own if I have to build something simple, but I just haven't been bothered to retrain myself with CSS. I do most of my HTMLing by semi-hand (either doing it by hand or doing it with Frontier). Because of my use of the OPML Editor, I'm at level 3 on the CSS scale. Perhaps tommorow I should CSSify as much of my blog as possible, especially since I've just been whinging at someone else that their CSS sucks.
I'm just testing Bon Echo - the new Firefox alpha. It has a dictionary which it uses when you are typing in to an INPUT or TEXTAREA. Very nice. But it doesn't contain the word Firefox in the dictionary. Whoops.
DeviousMofo (aka. Todd): "Speaking of school, I'd just like to add that school sucked ass, and I hated everything about it - the students, the teachers, and the subjects all sucked ass. It was like being tortured for 14 years in a prison full of stupid fucking kids. Nightmare." Yup, sounds about right mate.
Want an interesting read? How about The Extraordinary Case of the Pagan and the Multicultural Prayer Room? Very strange.
Ed Brayton has a humourous write-up of how WorldNutDaily had the headline "Ford Backs Homosexual Polygamy" when, in fact, Ford advertised in a gay magazine which also contained an article about polygamy. Perhaps if they advertised in K9 Magazine, these nutters will start claiming that Ford endorse human-dog marriage. I don't even want to think of their interpretations of the ads in Badger Nation.
David Galbraith on the Left Behind video game: "kill kill kill, die fuckers, praise the lord: for ages 6 and above". Now we can see 'Focus on the Family' so-called ethics applied to violent Christian video games - I'm guessing this will have a stunning review by the morality police (though Jack Thompson has come out against it) - of course, I welcome the Left Behind game since it actually invalidates the very theory which the morality police types claim is true - the hypodermic needle model of media consumption which says that just the mere hint of violence or sex will turn people in to immoral lunatics by injecting that immorality directly in to one's veins. Of course, the fact that they excuse violence when it's a Christian game or movie (Gibson's Passion of the Christ comes to mind) proves that they do believe in a contextualist approach, even if they won't say so.
Glenn Reynolds loves the new hand dryer in his gym. It's got a really cool name: the Sloan XLerator! Think of Sloan Square and King's Road. Now think of Sloan Square dosed up on coke - XLerated, if you will. Oh, wait a second... I'm not sure whether that was intended.
loquacious: "Circuit traces reach right up into the brightest and darkest wrinkles and furrows of our souls, letting us know we are not alone. They give us the voice of God, the ability to shout across the crowded room of this planet Earth, to see and hear those so far away, yet so near."
Evil Catullus: "I wanted the car, the walk, the talk and the long cigarette holder of Cruella De Vil. Sure, she was mean, she was nasty, deceitful, diabolical and just plain wicked, but she did it all for fashion."
Drug testing comes to Kent - what a great chance! 
The county next to mine, Kent, is planning to introduce random drug testing in schools. If you don't like the fact, here's what you do. First off, you buy yourself a copy of "The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education" by Grace Llewellyn. Next, drop out. Either stop attending or maybe pop in and see the principal. Tell him that you've decided that school is a waste of time and you are going to teach yourself at home. Phone up the exam boards and organise to take your exams as an outside student. Download and print out the specifications, teachers guides and all that crap from the relevant websites (AQA, OCR or Edexcel).
Now you need to get yourself some textbooks. Your local library will have some, but it might be easier to grab yourself some copies from Amazon's Marketplace - or new in a push. Next, find yourself some forums where you can ask questions. If you decide to go to university, you can register as an individual on the UCAS website. You may wish to consult a book called the Heap Guide to Degree Course Offers written by Brian Heap. Don't bother buying this, it changes every year - consult your local library's copy. If you want a good place to get help with your university application, go to The Student Room. If you decide to go in to higher education, you need to get student finance - try this government website for details.
Alternatively, you can take evening courses. They're just like taking ordinary courses, only you aren't surrounded by annoying people who don't want to be there. These sometimes cost a bit of money, but it's worth it - you have so much less pointless shit to deal with from idiotic asshole bureaucrats.
Most of all, do not worry. Any university worth it's salt will realise that your decision was the right one for you, and not having formal schooling can be a great positive benefit. It is something I so wish I had done. I mean, fuck it, Theodore Roosevelt got in to Harvard and then became President without darkening the door of a school (he later went on to oppose "In God We Trust" being put on the money). You have the major advantage in being able to get things done - what takes three hours in a school takes one hour at home. With the spare time, why not use it to learn about something real rather than the hoop jumping you have to do for school?
Do this, and smoke all the weed you like. And perhaps meditate upon Jefferson: "Nobody can conceive that nature ever intended to throw away a Newton upon the occupations of a crown." There's a reason why JFK said that when Jefferson dined alone, there was more wisdom than a roomful of Nobel Laureates. If you want to know my thoughts on school, look at Paine's thoughts on religion.
P.S. If you follow this advice, you owe me at least a couple of grams of the green stuff.
Important OPML Notice
I've just read a message on opml-newbies from mcdtracy which would suggest that there's a problem with the update mechanism in dotOpml.root, a problem I've just experienced.
Kosso was having this problem last week when we were in Boston, and it has the ability to completely fark up your install.
First of all, until there's a solution to this (and I don't want to presume soem kind of maintainer role here), please don't use the "Get Latest Code" option in the Community menu!
What I think the problem is that Dave has two update methods in dotOpml.root - and triggering the wrong one (which might happen with fresh installs - I triggered it manually by executing dotOpmlSuite.codeFreshener.refreshCode) can leave your install without the updateTool that is needed to get the newer code. (Or in laymans terms - up shit creek without a paddle).
Dave says he knows what's wrong and will get around to it.
Dan McTough has made his copy of the dotOpml.root file available in case yours doesn't work.
If you install Dan's copy, you will probably need to do the following:
1. Press Apple + ; (semi-colon)
2. Copy and paste the following command in:
dotOpmlSuite.mdiWindow.images.newsRiver = @newsRiverData.images
3. Hit run.
4. Quit the OPML Editor and restart.
If you don't do this, NewsRiver may quite possibly not run. There's more explanation of this issue in my post to the OPML Newbies list.
