• Not to get all Andy Rooney or anything, but I am getting damned tired of having a crappy user experience on simple web forms. I was just filling out a form to get a white paper for the day job, entered the requisite amount of bullshit, and then was thrown back to the entry page without any obvious reason. After closely scanning the page I discovered that I had entered my phone number in a format the page couldn't parse. In a throwback to the old days, you are required to enter your phone number as (###) ###-####. Leaving out the parentheses, the hyphen, or the space will return an error. Idiots. Strip the damned non-numerics and store it in your database in whatever format you want, you bunch of twits.
• NPR had a fascinating story this morning about the original video footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It seems that the footage I watched as a wee bairn was a crappy second-generation copy, even as a live broadcast. The camera created for the trip to the moon created images of a much higher resolution than television could display, and no converter existed at that time. So the images that captivated the world came from a TV camera pointed at a video monitor displaying the high-res feed. Fascinating, but not as perplexing as the idea that the original tapes have been misplaced. Perhaps all that additional detail made it more obvious that it was all faked.
• So the president is in Miami tying up traffic, as presidential visits do. I don't particularly care about that, but I did find the opening paragraph from the Herald article unintentionally funny: "President Bush swooped into Miami late Sunday, startling bikini-clad beachgoers along Collins Avenue as his motorcade revved to dinner at Joe's Stone Crab in Miami Beach -- part of a White House strategy to get the commander in chief out of the Beltway bubble and amid regular folks." Because as far as the White House is concerned, "regular folks" eat at Joe's all the time. I mean, don't we all? I think they have dollar beers on NASCAR days, right?
• Reasons to be cheerful, parts four and five?
• Product placement is a plague upon art. How much worse, then, is ideological product placement?
• A hat-tip to Tim for the post title, and for finding this delicious Crossfire censorship debate between Robert "Gargoyle" Novak, some drooling hack, and the inimitable Frank Zappa. Ah, FZ, how we need you now...

My apologies for my vague and ill-defined presence of late. I'm just living in interesting times, I suppose.