Lee: "Creationism is down, he's in agony! Here comes the count... 1-2-3! And it¹s all over folks! Darwin is the new Champion of the World!" 
I've just had another thought - Spotlight can search text inside documents, but it doesn't search OPML. If there are any Xcode gurus out there, it would be really cool if you wrote an OPML searching plugin for Spotlight. This article has full details of how to do that.
I'm just in the Apple Store using their wifi, and I actually learnt something from the presentation - that you can quit applications from the Alt+Tab interface. Holy moley, that'll make me even more efficient. 
I've also added a Grazr link to opmlpop, so you can see outlines in Grazr - both Grazr and Optimal now are in pop-up windows.
I've put up a logo for opmlpop. There's a reason why I chose the name, and it has something to do with a certain typeface.
Marathon of socialising 
Blergh. That's how my back feels. I've been walking round London and socialising for twelve hours, and I've just crawled in to bed.
But what good fun I've had. The @media social was really enjoyable, and I had great time. Best of all though was talking to Hugh Fraser who runs Storynory, a site that uses podcasting to distribute children's books - he wanted to make his archives more accessible, and I explained to him all about how one can use OPML and services like Grazr and Optimal to provide a live interface to all the material inside one's site. If you go over to his site, you'll see he's added a Grazr box on the right hand side.
Later on, I whizzed over to High Holborn to meet Om Malik, who's in London for a few days. He's really a very cool guy.
I'm frazzled. I've got lots to post though, and I've got to make a nice big irate call to Apple Tech Support sometime, as I'm pretty effing pissed at my Mac.
Annoying
Want to know what annoys me? Airport security, religious zealotry, theocracy, portmanteaus, YouTube, autoplaying videos, TheTrainline, Feedburner's item tracking service, OpenOffice.org and incompatible OPML usages. What annoys you?
I - not we - want an individualist education
You want to know what makes conservatives scary? Look at how they'd want to set up schools - they basically want to turn them in to authoritarian nuthouses. They sound very much like old-fashioned prisons with a bit of a campy "sir and ma'am" aesthetic put on the top. That's a soft porn cliché, not a proposal of serious merit.
If we want to improve education, we need to scrap the concept of the 'class' and 'competition' and even holy cows like 'teachers'. Education is not a zero-sum game. Teaching is a zero-sum game.
Why should the education of one child be dependent on the progression of the rest of the class? We should be inculcating the "teach yourself because nobody else can be relied on to do it for you" ethic in to everybody. If you treat people in classes, you have great prblems - hence, the idea that some teachers have where if one person does something wrong but nobody knows who it is, they punish everybody until someone says who it is.
They'd never do that on a train or in a hospital. Only in a school does this idea of 'class responsibility' have any hold. If someone graffitied a train, you wouldn't punish the whole carriage. The school works by grouping people and then coerces them based on that group. Hence the "class", the "house", the "year" and so on. If one cannot be coerced on an individual basis, one is told that one is being a detriment to the group. If your doctor did the same thing, grouping you irrevocably to your age without any real reason, people would hate the health service even more than they already do.
If education is to be improved, we need to get rid of these artificial groupings and treat learners as individuals, not as groups or communities (shudder).
The conservative education outlined in Althouse's post still lives with the 'community' model of education, albeit it wants to shift the community to something that better fits their values.
Individualised education is, of course, expensive. How about this though? Amazon Marketplace, Wikipedia, some big academic libraries who would expand and provide a Netflix-style service to home learners, plus a teacher-by-email. If you want sports or extra-curricular activities, you join these funny things called "clubs", which are independent and self-organising.
The free market, given wide enough scope over our supposedly sacred education system, combined with some big dreams and the Internet could build something so much bigger and better than the cuddly liberal school vs. authoritarian family values school. The free market solution might avoid the biggest sin in education: compulsion.
AtMedia
Ben is pointing out how little is emerging from the @media conference in London over the last two days. The @media blog (where one might naïvely believe that updates would be posted) hasn't been updated during the event. Perhaps blogging isn't "in" anymore. If so, it's all for the best. We don't need no design wankaaaahs!
Seriously though, Paul Boag has been showing his Web 2.0 scepticism (which was quite clear when he spoke at GeekDinner). There's some more general coverage out there, so go, gander at Technorati.
I'll be there tomorrow for the social, though I have to say that, while it would have been cool to go to @media, it doesn't bother me too much not going, since my leanings are definitely not in the design realm.
