I wanted to briefly expand on a few tweets I made during last night's Connecticut Forum. The topic was "The End of Civility?" and the panel featured David Gergen, Stephen Carter, Christopher Buckley, and Gina Barreca. It was a good discussion, and what I'll address was only one aspect of it.
The rise of the political blogs is as much about a shift of power as it is about technology. Having a panel of elites decry the rise of blogs is a bit one-sided.
It's hard to find time to blog or write or do much of anything aside from take care of our new baby, but I've been itching to write this post since we left the hospital last week.
When you're expecting a baby, you can tour the hospital. They show you the rooms in labor and delivery and in maternity and the nursery wing. They tell you about the amenities, the security, and medical technologies they have available.
For so many reasons, Acadia National Park is special to Heidi and me. If you haven't been, you're missing out on one of the treasures of the National Park system and, really, of the east coast. The beauty of the park is remarkable (just look at the photo on the right!). Acadia's real strength, though, is how accessible and easy it is to explore. The park is crisscrossed with miles of easy to ride carriage roads and easily reachable trails.
A while ago, I was looking at (and tweeted about) some dude's travel gear list and noticed a nice pair of binoculars in the pack, a pair of Pentax Papilio 8.5x21 binoculars. I saved it to my Amazon Wish List and this year Heidi bought them for me for my birthday. We've taken them on a short hike near our house and I've been messing with them here and there.
I've been remiss in my blogging responsibilities and, for that, I apologize. It's already January 5th and I haven't mentioned the most unusual of my Christmas gifts this year. It's the Back to Basics Egg and Muffin 2 slice Toaster and Egg Poacher. No, really!
What is this thing? Well, if you've ever had or seen an McDonald's Egg McMuffin, you know exactly what this machine makes. It's a combination toaster and egg maker that has a special cycle that poaches the egg and pops the toasted bread at exactly the same moment.
That's pretty much the review right there in the headline, but as I continue to stall actually finishing my work for, uh, work (I'm suffering from the coder equivalent of writers block on one problem at the moment), here's a quick endorsement for the Logitech Harmony line of universal remotes. While a bit expensive for most casual TV viewers, it's a great device for those of us with more than 3 things attached to the TV.
Another bit of Google fodder, in case others run into this problem. BTW, this applies to a computer running Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), but I'm assuming similar controls exist in Leopard. I'll know in a day or two. :)
So, on my work MacBook Pro, I noticed that the colors were extremely washed out. The gradients in the title bar of my applications almost looked like two color stripes. NetNewsWire lost the nice pinstripes, and on my development application, some of the tints on my background colors were off or not visible.