...mobile phone app Dashwire released Dashwire 2.0, a much improved version of their mobile phone backup and sync service. With Dashwire 2.0, you can backup your phone’s content – like photos, videos, text messages, ringtones, bookmarks, speed dials, contacts, and call logs – to Dashwire’s site on the web. This syncing is done automatically, so if you make a change to your phone, that change is reflected on the web, and vice versa. In addition, the app lets you share your content across several social networking sites. You can easily and automatically send photos and video to flickr, Facebook, bebo, and Twitter and you can also update your Twitter and Facebook status from the app.

• Yahoo Mash
• Orgoo
• Combo.com
• Social Thing
• ImInta
• Google SocialStream Project (not in beta yet...)
  

Mash is currently an invitation-only beta service. The odds are good that one of your friends is in here already. Hit them up for an invite! Already Mashing? Sign in.

Islam is an uplifting, ancient religion, rooted in a search for justice on God's Earth. Diversity is both a Muslim's lived reality (Islam is home to everyone from African Americans to Indonesians to Yemenites) and a goal: "O Mankind!" reads the Quran, Sura 49:13, "We created you ... into nations and tribes, that you may know each other, not that you may despise each other.

...I, like the vast majority of my compatriots, find the nihilistic hatred preached by certain Muslims abhorrent and frightening. But as an American, I was raised to believe that we should judge people by the content of their characters, not the acts of others. I was raised to believe that in this country all are equal, everyone is innocent until proved guilty, and differences are to be respected, not despised.

[ Detroit Free Press ]

I truly appreciate my fellow Americans who can look past the vile hate mongering of the like who commented on this story. If Islam was even 1/2 as bad as the "Anti-Islam" crowd would have us believe, wouldn't we have been in a massive world war for over 1,000 years already? Isn't it more likely that the "problem Muslims" are a very small percentage of the Muslims in the world, just as the hate-filled peoples of other religions of the world?

What’s the point of traveling if I only eat what I’m used to?

[ Dessert Comes First ]

Though I certainly don't have the "iron constitution" mentioned in the post, but if you aren't willing to discomfort yourself in some way, you should have just stayed at home.

Props to Kooshmoose for sucking me in...

Applications are coming soon to iPhone and iPod touch.* And they’ll be unlike anything you’ve ever seen on a mobile device. That’s because the world’s best developers are creating applications to leverage the amazing technology in iPhone and iPod touch, such as the Multi-Touch interface, the accelerometer, GPS, real-time 3D graphics, and 3D positional audio. It’s all part of the iPhone 2.0 Software Update — coming soon.

I really love my new iPod touch. I hope this upgrade won't be more than $20, or I should have just waited to get my iPod. I just got all excited at the announcement...

I believe that my wife's cultural lens and mine see "Karma" in extremely different lights, which makes me question: What do people think "Karma" means?

karma: Definition and Much More from Answers.com (excerpt):

1. The explanation of karma can differ per tradition. Usually it is believed to be a sum of all that an individual has done, is currently doing and will do. The results or "fruits" of actions are called karma-phala. Karma is not about retribution, vengeance, punishment or reward; karma simply deals with what is. The effects of all deeds actively create past, present and future experiences, thus making one responsible for one's own life, and the pain and joy it brings to others. In religions that incorporate reincarnation, karma extends through one's present life and all past and future lives as well. It is cumulative.
2. karma is referred to as karmic dirt, as it consists of very subtle and microscopic particles i.e. pudgala that pervade the entire universe. Karmas are attracted to the karmic field of a soul on account of vibrations created by activities of mind, speech and body as well as on account of various mental dispositions. Hence the karmas are the subtle matter surrounding the consciousness of a soul. When these two components i.e. consciousness and karma interact, we experience the life as we know it at present.
3. The idea of karma was popularized in the Western world through the work of the Theosophical Society. Kardecist and Western New Age reinterpretations of karma frequently cast it as a sort of luck associated with virtue: if one does good or spiritually valuable acts, one deserves and can expect good luck; conversely, if one does harmful things, one can expect bad luck or unfortunate happenings. In this conception, karma is affiliated with the Neopagan law of return or Threefold Law, the idea that the beneficial or harmful effects one has on the world will return to oneself. Colloquially this may be summed up as 'what goes around comes around.'

Which is your take? Or do you have all together different one?

Please think about your answer before reading mine...

I think I'm very much in the #3 camp. I think Karma has entered the Western group conciousness as a quick explanation of "what goes around comes around" without placing any emphasis on the force behind that concept: IE: God, Nature, Majik, etc. And that the entire concept of reincarnation is absent in the Western (though possibly just American) basic understanding.

Discuss.

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!