I don't like paying for web services, but I really hate advertising on the web. I found a potentially interesting site today, the 
Big Cartoon Database, but the ads are really overpowering: flickering and jiggling at a manic pace. I don't know what focus group could have possibly have thought these ads would ever get anyone to buy anything -- whenever I see an ad like that, my goal is to get off that page as quickly as possible. Even if through some whim of fate, I noticed that the ad featured something really, really interesting, I would be sure to never click on the ad -- I would find some other way of getting to whatever was advertised to make sure that the unpleasant ad was not rewarded. In Mozilla, I can turn off animated gifs (or simply not allow them to loop). I wish I could turn off Flash as easily -- to turn that off, you have to turn off all Plugins. (It's probably possible -- I'd just have to hack the prefs.js manually.) I hope Safari implements those features quickly.
Phil was expressing mixed feelings about his nostalgia over Clarion yesterday, partly in response to Karina saying she didn't want to go again anymore. I found that constrasted with my experience revisiting BioQUEST. Each time I go, I renew connections with friends, meet new people, and have a chance to recover that sense of flow that comes from working hard on interesting things. I suggested to Phil that he start a Return of the Clarion workshop, where people could come for 9 days to attend workshops, critique writing, and revisit the Clarion experience. It wouldn't be all of Clarion, but it wouldn't need to be. I think it could give a boost to people who need a little extra encouragement and support to really work on their writing. It would be a lot of work to set it up and run it the first year, but once you had the model, you could run it subsequent years pretty easily.
Yesterday walking home, I used Wifinder, oops!, Netchaser to look for wireless basestations. I saw 11 basestations (not including vespertokavo or bierfaristejo). About half had WEP encryption and one was not open (ie, had no ssid). I didn't try to connect to any of them. Driving to lunch today, I was able to pick up the terrapene basestation while inside the car driving by the Brainerd lab. (Alisa and I had a tasty lunch at the pizza buffet.)
Howard Dean now has a blog. Of the candidates I've seen so far, Dean seems like far and away the best, to me. I saw a number of rumors this morning that seemed to imply Hillary was going to run, based primarily on how much media coverage they've seen of her lately. I think the excessive coverage can be simply explained by her trying to get her new book out there. I doubt very much that she would get into the race at this point. I look forward to her running, however, and I believe that in Hillary we have our best chance of a generation for having a woman president.