Cooler (and more creative!) Compact Discs
I love burning my own CDs -- but that ugly, shiny silver surface "look" gets kinda old after awhile...
Suffer no longer my friends!
This creative company has put their special spin on burning your favorite tunes.
"Wood" you like to learn more?
Check 'em out!
Sunday Funnies
Sunday seems like an appropriate day to tell you about my favorite new cartoon
Some of you know that I'm basically a frustrated cartoonist. My comic strip (drawn by art school chum Mike Nicholson) never made it past some minor local acclaim into the beast that is "Syndication" ~ but at least the "powers that be" at United Media saw the potential in GET FUZZY, a new strip by Darby Conley.
Get Fuzzy is about an ad exec who lives with two animals: Bucky (a siamese cat) and Satchel (a bizarre mix between a shar pei and a golden lab.) Even under normal circumstances I would have found this strip to be pretty darn funny, but add to the fact I'm a single-guy living with a house full of dogs and cats, and the strip gets exponentially funnier.
You can check out Get Fuzzy on the official Comics.com webpage by clicking here.
Or, save yourself the effort of clicking through every archived episode by just buying the books on Amazon.com -- there are two books:
The Dog is Not a Toy: House Rule #4
Fuzzy Logic: Get Fuzzy 2
Hope you enjoy the comic as much as I do -- see ya in the funny papers!
Ideas That Matter
A symbol which serves as a bridge uniting people to fight HIV/AIDS, The Bracelet is designed to increase awareness and to help people recognize that anyone—man, woman, or child— can be infected and that it is up to each of us to be compassionate, understanding, and responsible.
Until There's A Cure® is a national organization dedicated to eradicating HIV/AIDS by raising awareness and funds to combat this pandemic. Until's basic idea is to create a unifying symbol (in this case a bracelet) that will hopefully spread as an Idea Virus to help raise awareness of the continuing AIDS epidemic in the world. We've lived with the threat of AIDS for so long, we tend to forget just how startling the statistics of this disease are -- so here are a few courtesy of Until's website:
Every minute, 11 people worldwide are infected with HIV.
Newsweek, January 10, 2000
In 1999, the United Nations found that 2.6 million people worldwide will die of HIV/AIDS, the most of any year since the epidemic began.
San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 1999
It was estimated that during 1999, 5.6 million adults and children, worldwide, were infected with HIV.
San Francisco Chronicle, November 24, 1999
Nine out of ten HIV positive individuals DO NOT KNOW they are infected.
World AIDS Day Resource 1998
HIV has become so prevalent that most of us know someone who either has the virus, or has died from it. You can find out more about this organization (and buy a bracelet) on their website Until.org.
I bought the silver one.
The Rise of the Creative Class
The world has moved away from the old "organizational" era of corporations and homogeneity and into the "creative" era, which is spearheaded by 38 million workers -- from scientists to IT workers to artists and writers -- with a variety of lifestyles and needs.
In his new book The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life Richard Florida, the H. John Heinz III professor of regional economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, says the world has moved into the "Creative Era."
"My argument is that in order to harness creativity for economic ends, you need to harness creativity in all its forms. You can't just generate a tech economy or information economy or knowledge economy; you have to harness the multidimensional aspects of creativity. So the book says that there are three types of creativity: technological creativity, which is innovation, new products and ideas and technologies; economic creativity, which includes entrepreneurship, turning those things into new businesses and new industries; and cultural and artistic creativity, the ability to invent new ways of thinking about things, new art forms, new designs, new photos, new concepts. Those three things have to come together to spur economic growth."
Read the full article here.
Copycats Get Neutered
Unanimous Supreme Court Ruling Could Alleviate Some Inventor Worries
Patent holders now have ability to use a legal theory called the "doctrine of equivalents" to defend their patents against would-be imitators. Essentially it allows rights beyond an original infringement claim if the alleged copycat product performs a similar function.
The example given in the New York Times article is if a patent owner had rights to a product that contained a copper wire, another company would not be allowed to market a product with an aluminum wire that performed the same function.
Get the full scoop on the NY Times webpage.
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