Ory Okolloh, the Kenyan Pundit is now at www.KenyanPundit.com. Think you can remember that URL ;) ? [Tags: KenyanPundit africa kenya]

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This evening as we were trying to TiVo The Simpsons while watching The West Wing live by using the second cable input, which goes straight into the TV, an operation requiring the use of all twelve remotes, two of them simultaneously, I lost track of the Grand Unified Theory behind our TV/TiVo/DVD/VCR/cable box/PS2/amplifier configuration and had to be guided step by step by our 14 year old son.

My time has passed. Today and tomorrow belongs to him.

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Poking around the BBC site, I found some free online language courses that may have been there forever. I spent a few minutes learning Italian, and now I’m ready to go to Firenze. (Of course, I’m always ready to go to Firenze.) [Tags: bbc italy]

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You know those 3D pictures you have to go cross-eyed to see? Here are some short 3D movie clips of the same sort. To get the illusion, start off with a still from the AVI and get it to go all 3D on you. Then hit the play button. (If you can’t get them to pop into 3D, poke around on the Web for instructions. I don’t know what to tell you.)

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Reader2 lets you list books you’re reading or plan on reading, tag them, search by tags, etc. Here’s its explanation of why you would use the site:

* You can easily find new and interesting books through user-defined categories, searches, and popularity among users.

* You can find users with similar book taste and see what they read (if you want this thing to work, you’ll need to add 10-20 books first).

* You can keep track of your friend’s books through RSS feeds.

* You can export books list to your site / blog.

Class assignment: Compare and contrast with LibraryThing and Berkman’s H20 .

(Thanks to Ian Forrester for the link.)

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Joshua “del.icio.us” Schachter is going to be my guest at Tuesday night’s “Web of Ideas” at the BerkmanCenter — which, by the way, is open to the public. I’m going to interview him and then we’ll have open discussion.

So, what do you think I should ask him?

And, do you wanna come? If so, here’s a map. It’s 6:00-7:30 on Tuesday. And, yes, we’ll try to get it up as a podcast, but then you’ll miss out on the free pizza. [Tags: JoshuaSchachter tagging berkman delicious]

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I’ve been off the air for four days. Four! I believe that’s four times the maximum interval since I started blogging for real in 2001.

I’ve been through the upgrade from hell, trying to move from Movable Type 3.11 to 3.2. In fact, it’s not quite done yet: The existing comments are not yet back online, although any comments you leave now will stay; the old ones should be back in a day or two. Sorry!

Six Apart (the Movable Type folks) has been incredibly helpful; they’ve been through more hell than me on this one. The main issue was that I’ve been using BerkeleyDB as my database instead of mySQL, and the Berkeley database dump apparently was corrupted. So, this isn’t your typical upgrade. Apparently I’m taking the cake for the hardest upgrade ever. Whoopee?

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The best thing we have going for us is our American belief that no one is above the law. That’s why this report by Human Rights First, covered by Reuters, is so disturbing. It reads like a script for a particularly grim episode of The Sopranos.

Deaths of prisoners in our care are troubling, even if inevitable. A failure to take responsibility is a worse betrayal of what we say we stand for.

Every time we act like we’re above the law and above common decency, we make our country less safe. [Tags: iraq terrorism]

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Well, they were at the next table. Diana’s back — after two hours of staring, I feel we’re now on a first-name basis — was to me, but I had a full view of Elvis about five feet away.

I am happy to report that he seems to be a well-mannered young man.

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Anyone else having trouble with Gmail today? Mail delivery has been extremely slow all morning, and I’ve gotten the Gmail “problems” page a couple of times. [Tags: gmail]

[LATER;] It’s me. My ISP, RCN, has a router down. Weirdly, I seem to be able to get everywhere except RCN and mail.google.com. Actually, I occasionally do get to mail.google.com, too, but it’s spotty and intermittent. A friend tells me that he suspects RCN uses a proxy it doesn’t tell me about, but I don’t really understand that and don’t actually care so long as the invisible proxy remains working and invisible.

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