Los Angeles at Night, from space.

If you’re building your own threat-condition monitor, the folks in charge of making sure you don’t feel secure in your homeland have provided a couple of handy hooks: http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition returns an XML element with an attribute describing the current level, and http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage provides an image for putting on your page, thus: <img src=”http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage”/> yields

The image defaults to large, but you can ask for it to be smaller, thus http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryImage?size=small:

A lovely analysis and opinion of US jobs ending up overseas, but days late for my snappy comeback to that guy I didn’t really feel like debating. The article also makes the unpopular points that
a. in a healthy economy there will still be unemployed people, usually around 5% and
b. the new jobs created as the labor market shifts will require people able to use and analyze information which requires some education and inclination, quite a lot more than was needed on the ole widget factory line.

As always, unpopular points lose out to shiny promises that can’t be met, especially in an election year.

In that blog-feedback loop that we all thrive on, Ursula’s post has caused me to find this on-line word checker. Sadly, since they make money on SMS interactions with the phone, they’re unlikely to WAP-enable the checker.

When gigantic vehicles are all the rage, I want a tiny car! How about a Vespa? Or a Messerschmitt? I would feel like the girl from the future in this one. And a girl from Italy in this one.

Sick of knitting sweaters and hats? Knit yourself a rock video!

For less than $500, you might soon be able to acquire a peripheral that would allow your correspondents to release scents when you display their messages. Why you would want to pay so much to give others control over your environment (and why the device requires a broadband connection) is somewhat beyond me.

Just in time, the dollar’s at historic lows.

Are you a smelly hippie type who can’t shake the old blood-lust? Check out pasture raised meat in your area, with the added bonus that you can see if you and your pals can eat a whole pig.

Trying to find out who wrote, or who else performed, that song? Try BMI‘s Repertoire search, or ASCAP‘s ACE search. The Cover Songs Database appears to have its heart in the right place, but is very sparsely populated right now. On the other hand, The Covers Project has a mystifying desire to create "cover chains" ("A cover chain is a set of songs in which each song is a cover of a song by the band who covered the preceding song."), but the one spot check I did yielded better results than the Songs Databse, so it looks like a fine resource.