Urban Puddle

I swear after all the Obama news on Digg and Reddit I'm starting to see things. At first I thought this Opera announcement said "Obama the first browser to pass the Acid3 test"*. Time to turn off the laptop and enjoy the day..

Back in 2006, I wrote a post on Net Neutrality that I still encourage people to read. In it, I talk about how the Internet has become somewhat of an equalizer.. allowing equal share of time to ideas from every corner of the country and from every ideal. At no time has that been more evident than during this presidential nomination cycle.

I hate the fact that the political campaign for President is already underway. I'm tired of all the rhetoric already and the media does no one any favors by starting the circus early. Worse is that they've got a habit of creating drama and following stories rather than allowing candidates to address issues. If it were up to the media the Yankees and Red Sox would play for the pennant every year and then the Red Sox and Cubs would play each other in the World Series and both lose. Let the circle of drama continue! Today, I found a website that allows you to answer some simple questions and then matches a candidates views to your own. It seems to represent all the candidates equally so perhaps you should check it out and see what comes up. In case you were wondering -- I have nothing to do with this website at all.

I've talked about it before. If you live in DC you can go die in a war but you can't vote or expect any representation in Congress. It's a sham and more than a little hypocritical that the US invaded Iraq to bring Democracy (i.e. the right to vote) while in the nation's capital, its very citizens suffer from that same inequality. Perhaps the army should invade DC? Here's a write-up by DCist on the topic.

Perhaps you've seen that map of the Internet (not, not that map) where there are several countries without free access to information. Perhaps you're concerned about your own privacy. If you've ever used Tor you know that it can provide some semblance of protection.

Quick, you're running for President and need to show that you're still in touch with the real America. Where do you go for the photo-op? Well, it turns out that Clinton goes to Dairy Queen and Edwards goes to Wendy's. Is it just a sad statement that fast food restaurants have come to symbolize what our country is about? Click through for the entire Jon Stewart video and find out what Obama and Brownback did..

Hope everyone, everywhere, has a great 4th of July!

This weekend I finally got around to integrating basic Paypal e-commerce with Buyindie. At this stage I don't do enough in sales online to justify using Authorize.net or any comparable online credit card processing systems. But Paypal let's you buy with a credit card so hopefully nobody hates this. If you do, you can always send me a check and I'll post you a shirt. Email buyindie at gmail dot net if you're interested otherwise, just head over and buy a shirt online!

After a lot of sweat, I'm pleased to announce Buyindie version 4. I'm using Google's API to geocode all the locations (via geokit) so there's now a Buyindie for just about every place on the planet. That means there's no excuse for you not to log in and participate! I seriously need help maintaining the list of indie stores, so if any intrepid readers are passionate about keeping neighborhoods unique and vibrant, drop me a line and we can talk about giving you access to adding stores directly.

Buyindie is a work in progress. Before this version even got out of beta along came Restful rails and changed everything. The re-write is *almost* done (maybe a few weeks away) but in the meantime, the podcast just launched. You can grab it directly from our host, libsyn, here. In a few days you'll probably also be able to find it in iTunes. The RSS feed is at http://buyindie.libsyn.com/rss in case you don't want to use iTunes.