onfocus

Mt. Shasta (I think) from above...

I know most of the country was probably glued to their TV sets last night, watching the 30-hour Senate marathon on C-SPAN. It's no surprise then that states are clamoring to roll out their own riveting versions of C-SPAN for their own state governments. Luckily Oregonians can already watch the daily political grind on OPAN. I'm sure it is televised representative government at its finest! (Channel 27 in Corvallis.) [via OSU Barometer]

Stewart put together two quotes from two Presidents about war.

Update 11/9/2007: Since Stewart's site is no longer available, you can find the quotes in the archive: sylloge: Remembrance Day 2003.

If you haven't seen American Splendor yet, you should. It is the best movie I've seen this year by far. Sad, touching, artful, human, beautiful.

Mary's Peak

Goodbye BlogFodder, we hardly knew ye. The site/mailing list that was meant to inspire weblog posts across the web won't be adding anything new to the blogosphere. I thought I would be able to send out a single post idea every day for a year, but life and work conspired against me. Rather than sending out one or two more before December 31st, I'm stopping the site/mailing list now. There's no lack of inspiration out there for weblog authors, and now I'll focus my post ideas solely on this site. Thanks to everyone who participated!

Beyond the creative exercise of coming up with fodders, and the fun of reading people's reactions to them, the site was a great way for me to learn about Movable Type. I built a custom Trackback form, integrated MT with an external mailing list, and learned more about scripting MySQL.

There are currently 486 people subscribed to the list. There were 183 Fodders total. And strangely there were 138 Trackbacks. The most popular BlogFodder was 11 Objects.

Note to self: look into adding RDF photo descriptions to snapGallery.

This George Lakoff interview about how conservatives have been successful by framing debates with language is brilliant:

The phrase "Tax relief" began coming out of the White House starting on the very day of Bush's inauguration. It got picked up by the newspapers as if it were a neutral term, which it is not. First, you have the frame for "relief." For there to be relief, there has to be an affliction, an afflicted party, somebody who administers the relief, and an act in which you are relieved of the affliction. The reliever is the hero, and anybody who tries to stop them is the bad guy intent on keeping the affliction going. So, add "tax" to "relief" and you get a metaphor that taxation is an affliction, and anybody against relieving this affliction is a villain.

I've been meaning to pick up Lakoff's book about categorization called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things for a long time. And now I have another of his to add to my list: Moral Politics. [via boing²]

Aaron Johnson took the algorithm for checking the existence of Amazon images that I described in Fail-Safe Amazon Images, and showed how you can use it in Java, C#, and Cold Fusion. Very cool, thanks Aaron! Beyond its use for Amazon development, I think this is an interesting exercise in translation between development environments.