A taste of FlickrFan 

FlickrFan, like all rivers of news, is about flow. In this case it's a flow of pictures, from your contacts on Flickr, from AP and AFP, and from anyone else that you know that provides a feed of high-def pictures.

I like to view the pictures on a big-screen TV that's hooked up to a Mac Mini, but I also use it on my desktop, and various laptops -- no matter where or how you watch, it's an interesting way to view the news.

Then I thought, why not scroll the pictures through a web page, one every few seconds? So last night I put it together, on an experimental basis, and it's pretty interesting! It's just a taste of what you get with FlickrFan, but it doesn't require any software other than a web browser.

http://show.flickrfan.org/

Click on the link and kick back for a few and let the pics scroll by. Today the news is mostly the Olympics and General Musharraf of Pakistan (he resigned). Last week there were lots of Russian tanks. Tomorrow I bet there will be hurricane pics from Florida. Watch out cause sometimes the pics are not work-safe, usually not because of sex, rather because of blood, even death. But that reflects what's actually happening in the world.

Thanks to two very fine organizations for their support: AFP for their fire-hose of wonderful news pictures, and WordPress.com for hosting the pictures and providing bandwidth. I couldn't afford the hosting myself.

Hope you like it!

Update: Interesting to see Boston.Com going in this direction too.

Catholic League wants offensive bloggers nixed by Dems 

This is really ignorant and crude. There's a misunderstanding that bloggers somehow must have the same politics or even standards as the party who's throwing the convention. I think we should have the Catholic League nixed for being ignorant and crude, and offensive.

Thank G-d no one listens to me!

I've got a problem with Firefox 3 

Now that the tool I use to manage S3 is available for Firefox 3, I have been able to switch to it, and I have. But there's a real problem with how search works in this browser. It could be there's a simple solution if so, let me know what it is. But right now, it's broken.

Here's the problem -- I go to the search box in the upper right corner of the window and enter a phrase, and click Return. What I expect to happen is that Google opens with results for that search term. What actually happens is that cuil.com opens with results for that search term. Okay, I figure it's a matter of switching the default, when I go to the popup I expect to see the same choices as in Firefox 2, with Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, Google, etc. But Cuil is the only choice, and there's no way to delete it. Okay, there's a link to Get More Search Engines, but Google is not on the list. Huh? WTF is going on here?

The answer better be realllly good. I'm pissed. I don't want to use cuil.com, sorry.

Update: I got hacked. Re-installed Firefox. Fixed. Better.