] I'm calling in from the highly-guarded border of Iran and
] Kurdistan. A truck is waiting for us to transport CNN
] staff, our personal belongings, and our television gear
] into kurd-controlled northern Iraq. We're crossing into
] this region to cover the northern front of a potential
] war with Iraq, in an area dense with oil-rich fields
] along the northern no-fly-zone.

Kevin Sites Blog

] Blogs are novelists' notebooks (too)
] Today in Gibson's blog, a rumination on what it feels
] like to be a novelist between novels:

Gibson:
] LIKE A MAGPIE WITHOUT A NEST
]
] That's how Rudy Rucker, in an email yesterday, described
] how it feels to be a novelist between books. No place to
] take the shiny things we constantly find. He's treating
] his own condition, he said, by writing a horror sorry
] about having belonged to a country club in Lynchburg,
] Virginia, in the early Eighties (man, that *is* scary).
]
] No place for the magpie mind to take the trinkets and
] bits of tinfoil, currently. If I bring them here, for
] instance, I'm just leaving them on your window-ledge,
] something no magpie would ever be satisfied with doing.

Doctorow:
] I've been using this blog to keep track of stuff that
] needs to work its way into my novels for years now.
] Rucker's blog is nothing but notes on his books. Sterling
] says you can extrapolate his next book from this links on
] his blog. I betcha that's true of Warren Ellis, too.
] Blogs are the new novelist's commonplace book. I've been
] saying this for a while, but I thought I might be the
] only one.

Links contained within..

Boing Boing: Blogs and novelists

] While I'm on the topic of mediated personae, something
] that came up during that CBC taping, last night (for me,
] anyway) was the idea that blogging (or even posting to
] fora) represents the democratization of the mediated
] persona. Literally anyone can have one, now, or several.
] I am an exception to this, because I have mine via the
] printed word, the oldest mass medium on the planet, and
] this website is maintained by a publishing company that
] belongs to an even larger corporation owned in turn by
] shapeshifting reptiles from Beta Reticuli, but the rest
] of you, today, are free to mass-mediate your own
] personae. Which was formerly, hugely, not the case.
] Choose a handle, post: you're mediating a persona.

William Gibson - SOMEONE WONDERS... - Media perception and blogs

Banal pop music is better when it comes from Mexico...

Las Ketchup

"Do you need a break from the daily mobile soap? Surround yourself with soothing space. Simply press your pocket-size BuBL device. Release a bubble of silence. You'll feel pleasantly isolated inside, even in a crowded place. Evaporate all phone signals up to three meters around.
Enjoy the silence.
Create your Personal BuBL Space."

Read carefully... Great idea.

BuBL Space

I gotta read this later.

Reason: Creation Myths: Does innovation require intellectual property rights?

The iGesture Pad is an ultra-thin, large-area, superduper touchpad that is both mouse and powerful multi-finger gesture input interface.

FingerWorks -iGesture Pad

Good info on hacking TiVo using OSX, something that hasn't had a lot of play yet.

TiVo video extraction with Mac OS X

GoogleSynth uses the Google Image Search thingy to randomly grab two images as the "input" and "target" images for the algorithm. In order to do this GoogleSynth uses a large word list (about 62,000 words) and randomly selects two words from it. It then does a search with each of these words and randomly selects an image from the first page of results. If there is an error it will simply select a new word and try again.

Once it has two images it applies the algorithm with the parameters set by the user and produces a new image based on them. The results vary wildly, often the output is a total mess, but it creates some cool looking stuff now and then (depending on your definition of 'cool').

//art.gen.nz/ :: Algorithmic and Generative Art :: GoogleSynth

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The State Department is sending a cable to embassies around the world telling Americans abroad to be ready to leave their resident country quickly in an emergency, State Department officials said on Friday.

Yahoo! News - US Tells Citizens Abroad: Be Ready to Move