A cool website for you to check out: The Awesome Highlighter. Highlight a portion of a website and send a new URL to your friends or colleagues with the highlighted portion. How cool is that?

I would say one of those ruberized cases -- I have an incase one for my iphone.

Doug2

[ davidkearns.com - iPhone 3G ]

I must have spent a half hour touching and testing and probing and weighing all of the choices at the Apple Store at Westfield Shopping Metropolis Montgomery before settling on exactly what Doug has, though mine is black and his is yellow (they were out of yellow). I like how the Incase case doesn't cover up any part of the front, it just comes around enough to keep the device in place. The grippy back feels much better to me than the shiny silver back and as a bonus keeps the device firmly on my dashboard when driving around (which will be important when my iTrip Auto arrives).

The emphasis is mine:

Alinoor Ahmed Sheikh, a Somali based in an asylum hostel in Tralee, was to have been honoured for his work raising funds for Amnesty International at a ceremony last Thursday organised by the Africa Centre in Dublin. The event was designed to highlight the positive work done by refugees and asylum seekers in Irish communities.

Five minutes before Benedicta Attoh, a member of the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism, was due to present the award she was told not to call out Sheikh’s name. "The judges had decided that someone else should get the award," said Attoh, chairwoman of the Africa Centre's board.

«snip»

"I don't think I would have presented his prize if he wouldn’t shake my hand because I’m a woman," she said.

[ Islamophobia Watch ]

How can you be on a committee who is clearly against racism and for interculturalism and then somehow be offended by someone else's culture? Perhaps the NCCRI is for racism and against interculturalism? Irregardless of whether the gentleman is correct or not about his particular flavor of his professed religion, if he believes that it is forbidden or even impolite to shake hands with the opposite gender, we should vilify him and take the award away? Something is really wrong here, and the message it sends is don't seek asylum in Ireland unless you plan on leaving your own beliefs and culture where you have been forced out of...

Action #3, originally uploaded by Yaty Yasir Kearns.

Take that talking baby!

With fast 3G wireless technology, GPS mapping, support for enterprise features like Microsoft Exchange, and the new App Store, iPhone 3G puts even more features at your fingertips.

Wow! Great! Super! But wait... I really like my T-Mobile service. Good prices, decent coverage, good international support and not to mention my contract doesn't expire for quite a while. But these new v2.0 apps, and the coming app store and Mobile Me are so exciting...

I bought an iPod Touch. I am now among the Pod People, and I'm craving for brains (ok, that's zombies, don't remember what the pod people wanted...) My first issue, and I knew it would be one, why no speaker? That just seems crazy. Even the iPhone has a bit of a speaker. How can you show off You Tube videos to your friends, one at a time? A bit weak, I think. Now I have to fully contemplate accessories. Already snagged a screen protector, because you can never be too careful, even with glass. I am hoping there is some sort of "mini speaker" attachment that I can get, but somehow I think I'll be disappointed. And perhaps I need a case? Though I already have a few spares around.

Well, sound off, what do my loyal readers think are no-brainers in the iPod/iTouch/iPhone realm?

The mission of this $400 device is to eliminate trips to the grocery store. The hardware component is a bulbous bar code scanner, dressed up in Any-Décor White and mounted on a countertop stand, an undercabinet bracket or a wall mount. It offers a color screen on the front, a laser scanner underneath and a Wi-Fi antenna inside that connects to your home wireless network.

Each time you’re about to throw away an empty container — for ketchup, cereal, pickles, milk, macaroni, paper towels, dog food or whatever — you just pass its bar code under the scanner. With amazing speed and accuracy, the Ikan beeps, consults its online database of one million products, and displays the full name and description.

[ State of the Art - Grocery Shopping Made Easy - NYTimes.com ]

Apparently I am the only one who enjoys grocery shopping? So $400 for the device ($99 if you act quickly and get it through a delivery company like Pea Pod) and then Pea Pod is charging around $10 for delivery, plus you are allowed to tip the delivery guy (thus you should tip) and we're closer to $20 just to avoid doing something that I enjoy?

And for my Indonesian friends, isn't it ironic that you can't scan a fish and buy it with this "Ikan"?

The Day of the Triffids is a post-apocalyptic novel written in 1951 by the English science fiction author John Wyndham. Although Wyndham had already written other novels, this was the first that he had written under this name and it appeared to be by a new author. It was this novel which established him as an important writer, and remains his best known.

Deepest Sender is a client that will allow you to post to blogs from directly within Firefox. It is primarily a LiveJournal client, although it supports Blogger (GData) and WordPress (metaWeblog) too.

This is the fourth add-on I am trying. Deepest Sender has one thing on it's toolbar that I kind of thought was important, the "increase indent" and "decrease indent" buttons. ScribeFire only had a "quote" button which is essentially the "increase indent", to take something out of a "quote block" you have to edit the source. Weak. Deepest Sender also supports categories, so here's hoping that the "Post" button actually does something.

Update: Not only did the post button work, but the above portion of the post remains unchanged from what Deepest Sender posted. I think we have a winner!

As I mentioned, I previously used an IE extension to select text and "blog it". It would pull me right up into a new entry (though only if I logged in first) but it certainly helps me get entries up quickly that relate to a webpage. Now that I'm of the FireFox 3 set, I need a replacement for my old quick-blog system, and the third add-on I am trying is ScribeFire:

ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

[ Getting started with ScribeFire - ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging ]

Third? Yes, third. First I tried "DashBlog", I think it was called but that appeared to not do much of anything. Then I tried "ClipMarks", got much further but it doesn't appear to like the dasBlog Publishing API.

Why, oh why, Netflix?

We will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account.

When? Profiles will be eliminated on September 1, 2008.

Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.

[ Netflix FAQ ]

Granted, I haven't used this function in a while. With Iman at her mother's during the week, Yaty focused on the baby, and us down to just 2 movies at one time there isn't much need for multiple queues, but when we did use it, it was awesome. Unless this is followed by something amazing, I'm afraid that Netflix is making a bad move.

Update: They're here to stay! Props to Bull for the URL.

• Integration with my IE right-click extension to make blogging a tiny bit easier (I use FireFox 3 now anyway)
• BBCode for comments (new code allows some HTML)
• My "Power Toys" page (no developers use IE anymore)
• My "What I'm playing" page (no one ever looked at it anyway)
• My "redirect my comment in response to other comment code", you want an answer to your comment? Subscribe to have all comments emailed to you.
• My theme. Now you can select a theme if you want, and I'm only using themes I remotely like
  

• Amazon.com "link up a bunch of crap" code
• Google stats code
• MyBlogLog code

Tomatoes tainted with salmonella have sickened dozens of people in nine states, the CDC and FDA warn.

[ Web MD ]

Update: The menace grows:

Now, the CDC reports that at least 167 people in 17 states have been infected with Salmonella Saintpaul, the salmonella strain involved in the current outbreak. Those 17 states are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin.

[ Web MD ]

New Stove and Hood Installed!, originally uploaded by Colonel Kearns.

You remember that fire we had? Most all traces are gone now. For over a month we had no stove, it just takes a while to communicate and order and install, etc. Today, we are able to cook a full range of items once again. No longer are we stuck with just deep fryer, rice cooker, crock pot, microwave, indoor grill, outdoor gril, toaster, and bread machine. Oddly only the crock pot was purchased during the "stove outage" and even during the stove outage the bread machine didn't surface.

What does this mean? we're back where we were a month ago, and moving forward from this point to get the house ready for "company". Now that we have the space we hope to eventually get some entertaining done, but we're still lacking a bit of furniture in order to finish off the unpacking.

What does this mean more immediately? Fried foods are back! Fried rice, fried eggs, sauteed anything, etc. And we sure did miss it.

Also the new hood is much nicer than the old one. Quieter, safer, better all around. If I had known that this particular "economy" model was so cheap I probably would have just bought it anyway, it's that much better.

If you click through to Flickr I'll make some more specific comments like the placement of the replacement salt cellar that was purchased, and perhaps some other bits that I'm sure people are curious about.

This is apparently the month for games announcements made just for me. Not only is Ubi delivering the goods, but look what Konami has in store:

I do love portable Castlevania games

So you just read that Ubi is coming out with Beyond Good and Evil two and said to yourself, what is that? I'm guessing you are one of the many who never played the first game. If you like Zelda or Okami type games, you'll love this one.

Apparently the GameCube version is super rare, there isn't even a listing on Amazon for it. If you haven't played this one, do yourself a treat and pick up a copy of what could possibly be my favorite game of all time (or at least until the sequel arrives).

Ubisoft's Ubidays 2008 just rapped up and they have some eye candy for us:

Prince of Persia

Beyond Good & Evil 2

Props to Kooshmoose