+ I have a countertop dishwasher, cause otherwise I let dishes lead an unsupervised life of their own. I was feeling pangs of guilt till reading the following pro-dishwasher article:Dishwashers Use Less Energy, Water and Soap than Hand Washing
Dishwashers are the way to go if you comply with two simple criteria. “Run a dishwasher only when it’s full, and don’t rinse your dishes before putting them in the dishwasher.”

+ The freeware Flash Image Gallery looks good. Check out the demo, and it’s features:

* Simple, intuitive interface and design.
* Works on any webhost without the need of a server-side language such as PHP, ASP, or Coldfusion.
* No need to know Flash. Don’t let the name fool you. Flash is not needed. It was only used to provide the interface.
* Supports multiple galleries and simple image descriptions.
* The color styles of the gallery can be changed to match your existing site. The borders, background, and navigation colors can all be changed.
* Supports up to 224 images in each gallery.
* When there is only one gallery, the interface changes. The gallery name is displayed at the top, the home button is removed, and the thumbnails load immediately.
* It’s FREE.

+ Not a wine drinker myself, but can appreciate the difficulty here. How do you maintain the integrity of a traditional wine product, and open markets up for industrial production? -Strict labelling.

Plans to allow the use of wood chips to flavour Swiss wines have uncorked a furious response from the country’s winemakers.

They claim the arrival of “New World” practices will dilute the authenticity of the country’s centuries-old winemaking tradition and will also lead to confusion among consumers.

In March this year the European Union agreed to allow the addition of wood chips to wine after signing a landmark deal with the United States.

The Swiss, who are closely tied to Brussels via a series of bilateral accords, are now set to follow suit early next year.

Winemakers in the US, South America, South Africa and Australia have been adding wood chips to wines for a number of years to give them an oak flavour. The money-saving measure speeds the ageing process and cuts out the need for long and expensive storage in oak barrels.

But opponents in Switzerland fear the move will not only leave customers in a spin – an issue that has been seized upon by the Swiss Consumers Association – but also undermine the quality of native wines.

“Switzerland is a small winemaking region, only 15,000 hectares, and we need to remain a niche market with wines of a certain character. We don’t need to start producing wine on an industrial basis – we will lose quality,” Michel Duboux, president of the Association of Swiss Winemakers and Cellarmen, told swissinfo.

“What I fear most is that once we start allowing wood chips, the next step will be to allow flavouring. It’s like opening the floodgates and we are going to lose the authenticity of our wines.”

Hospitals are struggling with ways to diagnose a growing number of obese patients who are too overweight to fit in X-ray scanners.

+ Last week we were down road tripping along the Oregon Coast. We didn’t see any dead fish on the beaches, but one night we came upon a bird that looked near dead. or something. It hardly moved as we walked up to it. Strange for a wild animal. It looked a lot like a penguin-a Common Murre most likely-laying defenslessly in the open on a huuuuuuge sandy beach. I gently inspected it for injury or oil contaminants, and found no sign of either. It seemed stunned, so I ventured it may have bonked it’s head. Or, I unrealistically hoped, it may have been disoriented from the light of our gas lantern.-a cliff dweller should not be laying in the middle of a beach. Feeling useless, we hoped for the best and left it alone.

Scientists deduce that global warming is triggering a ‘dead zone’ along the coast of Oregon.

GRANTS PASS, Ore. –Bottom fish and crabs washing up dead on Oregon beaches are being killed by a recurring “dead zone” of low-oxygen water that appears to be triggered by global warming, scientists say.

The area is larger and more deadly than in past years, and there are signs it is spreading north to Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

+An interview that popped into my head through-out the day. I skimmed half the article and watched most of the video linked at the end of this post. The video is probably more digestable. In it they enthuse about the effectiveness of a film Thomas Edison made to promote DC current. An elephant is shown being fried to death to prove how AC current was dangerous compared to DC current. I have some moral and ethical differences with the use of that as an example. And am dismayed by their enthusiasm for “cannibalizing” the art world for advertising fodder.

Dream. Create. Share. Thoughts on Passion, Creativity and Design with Mike Goedecke of Belief
Dream. Create. Share. This is the mantra for Belief Inc, a motion graphics and digital design firm in Santa Monica, California led by Founder and Executive Creative Director, Mike Goedecke, whose energy, vision and creative spirit are the embodiment of Belief’s “passion to create”. Goedecke earned his honours MFA at USC’s Graduate Cinema and Television Program, winning numerous national awards and grants as a filmmaker before launching Belief in 1994. It wasn’t long before networks such as NBC, ABC, ESPN, The Discovery Channel and MTV learned of this little design team creating innovative digital motion graphics for broadcast. The lineup outside Belief’s door has only lengthened in the years since, adding corporate clients such as Activision, JC Penny, Chevron, Lexus, Honda and Acura to their roster.

Now in its thirteenth year and with thirteen employees, Belief continues to grow thanks to Mike’s focused energy and passion, while his mission remains unchanged: to create an inspirational space in the vein of a traditional artist’s studio where creatively gifted and passionate people with different talents, strengths and visions can come together with clients to collaborate on projects. Mike Goedecke’s passion and drive to constantly push at the boundaries where technology meets art led to the formation of Belief Experimental, a digital workshop for the benefit of the studio’s clients. Producing short films, like the award-winning, high-definition film Embryo, Mike infuses the studio with a progressive process that stretches the talents, yields innovative techniques and delivers extraordinary results for all of Belief clients and has won the firm the highest industry awards.

There’s also a fairly long video produced by his design firm to inspire designers and artists, Pollinate: Nourish The Seeds Of Creativity

+ from the New York Times

Renovation, according to the National Association of Home Builders, is at an all time high. And with the warm weather, which marks the peak of renovation season, come the contractors in their tool belts, which, for many a client, carry a romantic charge. (Men who don’t get it might want to consider the garter belt.) They invade still-occupied houses, taking charge of renovation projects and spending several weeks in close proximity with their owners. Often, even today, it is the woman of the house who is home all day long; in summer resort areas like the Hamptons, she is sometimes there alone with the children from Monday to Friday. Who can blame her for harboring dreams of the contractor?

“They’ve been totally sexualized, like the U.P.S. man,” said Stephen Drucker, the editor in chief of House Beautiful. “I can’t tell you how many times when I hear somebody give a recommendation for a contractor it inevitably ends with the four words, ‘And he’s really cute.’ ”

+
How to completely rebuild, repair, or refresh an existing XP installation without losing data, and without having to reinstall user software, reformat, or otherwise destructively alter the setup. by Fred Lang of Information Week.

-this I haven’t tried. I usually reformat and reinstall.
-question: can a slipstream include non-microsoft software? (I think a few years ago I noticed copies of XP customized to include other software, but I don’t recollect the software being pre-installed..rather, I think they were simply included in a sub-directory. You install them yourself. Saving a considerable amount of time searching for and downloading them.

Mini Slippery Shelf by Cambium Studio from Vivavi contemporary sustainable furniture and design - $295 (okay, it’s made with BAMBOO, so it’s well worth the money)

Wired News: Stop Paying for Ring Tones
Record labels love it when fans buy a ring tone of a song they already own — the industry claims $4 billion in ring-tone sales to date. But in fairness, you shouldn’t have to pay separately just to hear your CD tracks or legally acquired MP3s as ring tones.

In most cases, you don’t have to. Putting a snippet of a CD track or MP3 file on your phone is actually very straightforward — not to mention free, if you already own the song. Following is a step-by-step guide.
What you need

* Cell phone with MP3 ring-tone support
* CD or MP3 of the song
* Any method of transferring the ring tone from computer to phone (USB, Bluetooth, e-mail, instant message, etc.)
* Audio-editing software that allows export to MP3. If you don’t already have this, Audacity is a good open-source program you can download for free, and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. You’ll also need the LAME library for Windows, Mac or Linux. (LAME is a free downloadable MP3 codec that enables Audacity to encode to MP3.)
* About 20 minutes

Detailed instructions in the rest of the Wired article.