onfocus

I use the Merriam-Webster online dictionary just about every day. (Thanks largely to a m-w context menu entry I whipped up for IE—and my bad spelling skillz.) Anyway, the site has undergone a nice facelift, and they have some nifty tools you can download that I haven't noticed before.

Last night I went to a gathering at the library in Corvallis celebrating the success of a community-wide effort to adopt-a-minefield in Afghanistan. Several churches and community groups worked together to raise $28,000 for clearing landmines. There were two speakers that gave emotional talks about their personal experience with these devices. One woman lost her son to a landmine—he was clearing them in Iraq. Now she's trying to raise money to clear landmines in his name.

I found out today that around the same time just down the street at Oregon State University, Portland photographer Joel Preston Smith was talking about his photographic work in Iraq: Images of Iraq haunt photographer. You can see a gallery of his photos at his Picture Iraq gallery.

Who is watching the watchers? Well, the Columbia Journalism Review has a weblog that is covering the campaign coverage called The Campaign Desk.

I posted a thread at Blogroots about weblog-related predictions for 2004. Here's my prediction for 2004: A prominent blogger with a large audience will be sued for publishing libelous comments and loose. (Not for republishing libelous statements, but for original content that is not true and defamatory.)

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, and today I've been reading his words. They're always moving and inspiring. King advocated nonviolence in the civil rights movement, so it seems to follow that he would speak out against war in general. But speaking out against war was something new for him in 1967, and this speech he gave shows his need to explain his position to his fellow civil rights workers: Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence. (This site also has an MP3 of the audio of the speech—you can hear the weight of the subject in his voice.) He gave this speech exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated. And some other quotes that stood out to me today:

"Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it."

"When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life."

"It is not enough to say, 'We must not wage war.' It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the eradication of war but on the affirmation of peace. So we must see that peace represents a sweeter music, a cosmic melody that is far superior to the discords of war."

"We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

More quotes about peace. Many television summaries of King's life focus on the "I have a dream" speech. It's worth reading his other inspiring speeches as well.

Speaking of local, I'm scraping together RSS feeds for the Corvallis Gazette Times (website), and the OSU Barometer (website) for my own use. If you're local and read news via RSS, feel free to subscribe to these. They're updated once/day at 9am.

Just to add to that last post, I met Michael for the first time at SXSW last year. I had just moved to Oregon a few months earlier and found out that he only lived about 45 minutes away. I couldn't believe that I hadn't read his weblog before, and I was disappointed that there wasn't a good way to find weblog authors in my geographic area. (This was pre-geourl, or in its early days anyway.) And I left SXSW wanting to put together a directory for Oregon weblogs. ORblogs was an IU from SXSW 2003 because it has been great getting to know local bloggers as the site has progressed. I have to agree that the intangible inspiration I leave with (maybe it's a creativity contact high) is an important part of SXSW to me.

It'd be interesting to see how many domain names owned by SXSW-attendees were registered in mid to late March.

Michael Buffington breaks down the costs and benefits (Total Important Units) of attending South by Southwest Interactive.

Linux Journal: Hacking Reality. It's a review of the Hacks series.

I wanted that last post to not be the first post anymore. And I made it so. I thought about deleting it. Some posts are better than others. Where's my camera?

There's a quick overview and review of Amazon Hacks at a site called The Celebrity Cafe. Book reviews must be something new for the site, because you can rate the movie (?) Amazon Hacks yourself. I can picture the trailer with booming voice-over now: In a world where products are sold online... Wherever an API exists to retrieve information about those products... Where scripters dare to script scripts... You can discover for yourself... Amazon Hacks. This summer from O'Reilly Cinema.