Anecdotal Leads for News Stories Reporting the End of the World.

If you enjoy making fun of "journalese," you'll find these fake news lleads hilarious. Ouch. Funny, but ouch.

Google Earth Hacks

Nice little forum with add-ons for Google Earth, including real-time weather maps, traffic and 3-D models of cities Google hasn't gotten around to doing yet. This is what's so great about APIs and a network of millions of people.

You might want to look at getting that bridge fixed

Tempe's Mill Avenue bridge, as depicted by Google Maps.

Download of the day

If you don't like/can't afford FrontPage or DreamWeaver and need something a little more full-featured than the Web authoring tool in Mozilla Composer, then Nvu might be just what you're looking for. Features of this free, open-source page design software include: WYSIWYG editing, tabbed editing, advanced CSS support, FTP publishing and more. Screenshots and a complete feature list here.

I love the Internets

Four cool things to write about, two from Google and two from Yahoo:

Google Earth: A free and improved version of Keyhole, a cool satellite mapping system that until now was available only by subscription (the service still sell premium subscriptions). Basically, this is an interactive mapping service that uses satellite imagery and 3-D perspective in a really cool way. If you've ever wanted to see what it would look like to fall to Earth from space, here's your chance. Recent improvements include 3-D terrain and buildings for major cities (rather than a perspective view of 2-D pictures) and fly-through driving directions, which actually might come in handy.

Personalized Google search: Now Google can (optionally) keep track of your searches to get a better idea of what you're looking for in future searches. I haven't actually seen the filter in action yet -- Google says it may take awhile to get a good search history. The results page will indicate whether the search has been personalized, for times when you want a standard search. And you can always turn off the feature permanently.

Yahoo Music Unlimited: I don't quite like the standalone player, but $7 per month, a nice selection of tunes and and 192-kbps encoding add up to the best subscription music service on the market. Yahoo has published the players APIs, which could lead to all sorts of cool add-ons. Someone has already created a taskbar mode that works a lot like the one for Windows Media Player. I hope this isn't a bug, but I can transfer protected files just fine to my iPaq, even though it's not listed as a compatible device.

Yahoo mail: I haven't seen the actual beta yet, but the company has announced a faster, easier-to-use e-mail service that makes better use of Web scripting and XML (for you techies, a set of technologies collective known as AJAX -- Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). If you use Google's Gmail or Google Maps, you already know why this is a big deal. Yahoo bought Web e-mail firm Oddpost last year, but this is the first confirmation they'll be using the technology for its free e-mail service. I still pay for Yahoo Mail Plus because of the excellent spam filter, disposable addresses and because it serves as my "permanent" address.

Andrea roars back from vacation

mercpage
Originally uploaded by Ken Spencer Brown.

This is her third front-page graphic this week for the Merc. This one is about people who commute by private plane to their Silicon Valley jobs.

The force is with us

This is the line for the midnight showing of Star Wars III - at the least popular theater in town!

OK, I'm officially a geek

I just bought my tickets for the midnight showing of Revenge of the Sith.

But most of the reviews show that this one is much better than the last two prequels. The New York Times reviewer says it's even better than the original Star Wars. So that justifies the midnight showing on a workday, right?

MSN desktop search final

Microsoft has released the final version this excellent desktop search tool, which in my experience is the best of the three big file search tools (the other two are Google's and Yahoo's. All three are very useful, but MSN is the only one of them that indexes OneNote files, which I use extensively. It has tangibly improved the way I work, eliminating the file- and email-hunting that used to take up so much of my day.

Why are these tools any different from the regular Windows search function? For one, they're faster than the standard Windows search, even othose aided by Windows' annoying indexing service, which many power users turn off. Second, the new tools search the contents of files, not just the names. So it's easier to find that Coxinha recipe, even if you don't remember whether you found it on a Web site, saved it as a Word file or got it in an e-mail. And all three tools set themselves in your Windows taskbar, so they're always ready to use.

If you haven't tried out the services, you should. They're free.

Lavarific

My lava lamp at work came back to life!

We're No. 1!

L.A., S.F. Lead Nation in Rush-Hour Delays

Test from cell

Did it work?

By popular demand

Seattle's famous Perpetually Vomiting Bear.

One more time, with a better size.

I saw this at the Computer History Museum (it's here,not in Seattle). My favorite feature, as listed on the box: "Displays all words." As a writer, I can certainly see why this would be helpful.

Mostly fixed

Well, I found an old version of my page, so I won't have to re-do everything. This whole mess stemmed from some new photos-on-the-go functionality I'm trying to add to the site so I can post text and photos from my phone and Pocket PC.

Yes, as you can tell from all this free computer time I have, Andrea is in Brazil. I'll be joining her in two weeks. Maybe someday I'll find a job that offers real vacation time.

Ooops!

Looks like I really screwed up my blog. I guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

I'm in Seattle!

Testing.

Hold off on that memory upgrade

From Infoworld (via Yahoo News): Need DRAM? Best Prices Still to Come

Who says you need a pricey laplop to surf the Web at Starbucks?

This guy doesn't.

Longhorn peeks

This blogger talks about his dinner with Microsoft's Jim Allchin and gives some cool details about the upcoming version of Windows.