This is just too cool for words.

All we need now is some decent nanites (for analyzing blood pH levels inside the body, etc.) and you've got a solid needle-less system for monitoring and injecting patients. No cutting required!

Talk about fast:

The students were able to control the jet velocity of the MicroJet from 33 meters per second up to 140 meters per second. The amount of liquid they were able to eject ranged from 45 nanoliters to 140 nanoliters. They tested the MicroJet on agarose gel to mimic human skin and found that they could vary the penetration depth of the liquid from 1 to 8 millimeters.

Damn. Sign me up. Maybe I can now get that UV tat I've always wanted...

I accomplished a great deal over this weekend including, in no particular order:

1. enjoying the best day dc has had, weather-wise, this saturday
2. finishing the ninth hornblower book
3. lunching outside in the sun on some delicious chipotle food in my new GR shirt
4. seeing the 3 hour long "Judgement at Nuremberg" with more classic a-list actors than any film save it's a mad mad mad mad world
5. acquiring a pair of powder-coated iron benches for outside
6. starting and finishing the second season of angel
7. grilling salmon and eating it next to the firepit on a perfect evening
8. acquiring a new shiny stainless steel trash-bin for the kitchen
9. cleaning the house up
10. visiting tyson's corner and picking up some new cds in the process
11. learning a few facts about maoist rebels in nepal
12. acquiring a mandoline
13. finishing the latest giant robot
14. receiving an incorrect cd from san francisco which means i'll get a new one shortly
15. getting promotional materials to move my office to asterisk.
16. snapping a few blurry pix
17. finally completing seymour hersh book purchased months ago

Now if only the clouds clear up in the next hour, I'll be as happy as I was on Saturday...

You know that feeling when you've saved tons of money? By getting a great deal on something?

Well, this weekend I saved hundreds of dollars. On a variety of items. The small chink in the armor is that in order to do so, I had to spend vast sums of said money, on credit. So at the end of Sunday evening, I found myself with several new objects, of all sorts, but red as far as I can see financially. Weekend recap later.

For a long time, I resisted putting any images on the site. I felt that they were simply fluff, and not necessary. Little by little, my position changed. I remember at the time thinking that if most sites were text-only, the internet itself wouldn't have to increase in speed much to offer a rapidly better user experience.

As you may have noticed today, the background image has now changed, from a super-small ruscha-esque gradient to a much larger GRIN image. I expect I"ll rotate the image a bit, but not as often as I do the header image.

Why the super-large image? Well, simply put, on a large screen with a high resolution, it looks really amazing. So there.

If you're rich enough to own a computer with a high enough resolution and a large enough screen to see the entire image, you win a cookie. I'm not even halfway there....

So, last night, which I might explain more later, I remember having a very brief snippet of a conversation in which I said I disliked computer people. It's true: I cannot stand to talk about computers for very long. Why? Because most computer people will never write something like this.

I'd blockquote some of the post, but that would detract from reading the entire thing. If more computer people were like Dan Benjamin, I suspect I still wouldn't enjoy talking about technology all that much, but the world would at least be a better place.

Today, coincidentally, is a near-perfect day. Great temps, almost clear skies. In a few minutes I'll be at lunch, outside, enjoying it. I cannot wait.

This is pretty cool.

Of course, in my mind I have an image of Heath and Helena, chilling on the West Coast, suddenly deciding to go crazy, Godzilla & Mothra style, pulverizing the White House and the Capitol in the process...

Man, that'd be fun.

In the aftermath of the horrible ANWR vote might I suggest something to lift your mood?

Here's how to destroy the earth. Not so easy, right?

This Fox News Piece is simply too funny not to notice. Here's the quicktime movie itself.

It's amazing, but somehow in the first 30 seconds, the producers of a brief segment managed to evoke September 11th, not once, but twice! First the Fox reporter in a Freudian slip says the woman dialed "nine-eleven" for help instead of "nine-one-one". Then the woman herself starts mumbling about "the terror" as if she was a victim of a terrorist attack. Only on Fox, indeed.

Bizarrely, she later claims she couldn't remember flicking the guy off. Riiiight.

I just want to know if other Fox reporters refer to dialing 9-1-1 as 9-11. Because that's just downright creepy.

Sometimes a picture says a thousand words. This one describes my morning:

Yeah. Sip Responsibly. And pray the Senate votes go our way today.

That's right. The veritable Shamrock Shake, once relegated to a non-entity within the district has at long last returned to our nation's capital.

You heard me. I just walked two blocks to pick up my first one. I'm enjoying it as I type this. Mmmm.

The coolest cellphone of all time is back in a big way.

Yeah, see, Brad once gave me this phone which I loved. Except for, of course, the fact that it was an analog-only phone, and had shoddy reception, basically everywhere. But style-wise, Nokia still hasn't equaled it.

Flash-forward to today, to the new phone:

Man, that's one sweet looking phone. Now I can only dream that

1. it comes with bluetooth
2. in the new series, they throw in a 1 megapixel camera
3. it supports a better memory standard than mmc, and comes with tons of it

Be sure to check out the entire story.

Nicole pointed out this article in the NYT to me. Very amusing...

After checking with a postal clerk about the legality of stepping up his efforts, he began cutting up magazines, heavy bond paper, and small strips of sheet metal and stuffing them into the business reply envelopes that came with the junk packages.

"You wouldn't believe how heavy I got some of these envelopes to weigh," said Mr. Williams, who added that he saw an immediate drop in the amount of arriving junk mail. A spokesman for the United States Postal Service, Gerald McKiernan, said that Mr. Williams's actions sounded legal, as long as the envelope was properly sealed.

Maybe I should try this with the people who keep sending me porn through the mail...

TiVo, on their deathbed, managed to pull the proverbial cable rabbit out of the hat.

Wow. Yes, I know all you mac-people wanted TiVo to survive with Apple's help, but realistically, TiVo needed at least one cable operator to come on board to survive, now that they have begun to get screwed by DirecTV.

I love my TiVo, but there's no way I'm going back to Comcast...so my TiVo probably will only last another year or so before I upgrade to the DirecTV HDTV one.

Apparently South by Southwest has given the "best politics blog" to Wonkette, along with the "best tech weblog" to Gizmodo and the "best new weblog" to Defamer.

Huh.

Okay, I admit, when Wonkette launched, I liked to read it. Snarky political commentary was in short supply then, and Wonkette aimed to be cooler than the Note, more pedestrian than Talking Points Memo, and more fun than TAPPED.

But the political fun swiftly devolved into a bunch of dirty jokes. By the time the Washingtonienne scandal hit, increasing her traffic significantly, the fun political stuff was mostly sidelined. I think it was the day I saw the 17th "John Kerry Is Hung Like a Horse" joke that I decided Wonkette was no longer amusing me. She's still on the rss feed, but I mostly just click "mark as read" without perusing.

And yet, oddly, just as I was tuning out, the MSM was tuning in. Soon the ex-suck editor was making all the rounds on talk-shows. She was a "celebrity blogger" despite having never said anything of substance, or of having broken any major story. I'm not dismissing her abilities: I just think she's been coasting a while.

And that brings me to the larger point, namely, about the "gawker media empire". Why the MSM would focus on gawker is simple: they are very self-promotional. Why I would dislike them is the same deal: they aren't really blogs, so much as actual regular websites. Click on any gawker page and you'll be overwhelmed with

1. advertisements
2. bad design
3. more ads
4. large quantities of small chunks of ripped off content
5. still more ads

Now for personal reasons, items #1 and #2 make me hate all of the gawker sites. But if we focus on substance, it's clear that gawker tends to link to other articles, and that's it. Rather than, Prof. DeLong-style, rip huge sections, most gawker sites rip off a sentence or two with a link. But they rarely provide context...even the best Wonkette posts often imply a point, rather than make it, and they are frequently simply jokes. Gizmodo shows off a new vacuum, and says "it looks like something you'd strap to the underside of your x-wing fighter". Funny? Sure. But useful? Not really. Does the thing work? Who knows? Who cares? All the gawker sites are basically gossip rags...which is exactly what they aspire to be.

This is what is so infuriating about awards that clearly aren't based on reality: there are tons of tech sites that are better than gizmodo, from all perspectives. And from a political perspective, there are tons better than Wonkette. Do these sites have the latest gossip? Do they have snarky commentary about celebrities? Perhaps not. But they are better tech sites, and better political sites.

Imagine if a person were to go through the major newspapers of the world and judge them on who had the best gossip columnist. That wouldn't be rating "the best newspaper"...it would be rating, "the best gossip newspaper". Likewise, rating blogs by the amount of gossip in them isn't rating "the best blogs".

So I was all psyched to see Steamboy when it opened on the 18th. Only problem? It's not showing in our nation's capital.

Now, I can see why some movies have limited premiers. Just last week I discovered the new Kevin Costner flick was opening in L.A. and NYC in three theaters. (It was for a friend, okay?? I'm not going to see it!) That makes some sense. But peruse the list linked above of Steamboy theaters and that's clearly not the case. Some listed cities?

Des Moines, Iowa? Check. Tulsa, Oklahoma? Check.

For god's sake, even Dayton Ohio gets it! But no DC. As Mr. Bat would say, "Grr.."