May, 23, 2003 archives

the new york times references arthur c. clarke's 2061: odyssey three in an article about the growing number of flat-rate local and long distance phone service plans. if that sounds familiar, it’s because i made the same reference on april 16, 2002 when i first heard about mci’s flat-rate plan. (of course, clarke was talking about flat-rate international calling, and that is probably still at least a decade or so off in the future.)

even local not-so-baby bell sbc has gotten in to the game.

(there’s also a point about the case against micropayments to be made here, but i’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)

according to the last week of data from blo.gs, 76% of the blogs that were updated were powered by blogger, and 58% of them were hosted on blogspot. blo.gs really needs a redesign—the volume of blog updates is just too much to be trying to display a complete list on the front page. (i cut it down to only showing thirty minutes of data, and the front page is still 250KB.) it also really needs an update to handle unicode blog names properly.

this is wonderfully bizarre. japanese cat transformation sets. the frog is pretty inspired, too. (via the boing boing guest blogger, karen marcelo.)

late in the month again.

• international: world wildlife fund
• national: coast guard mutual assistance
• local: los angeles firemen's relief association widows, orphans & disabled firemen's fund

the event put on in downtown los angeles by the los angeles fire department that i wrote about a couple of years ago is coming up. the annual hope for firefighters takes place on thursday, june 5.

apparently there is a patented chicken suit. unfortunately, there's no mention of the patent number or i'd look up the actual patent.