I was glad to find the site HappyNews.com, which publishes "up-to-the-minute news, geared to lift spirits and inspire lives." While I'm always a fan of balancing the good and the bad (or, in this case, the happy and the unhappy) and everything in between, there are plenty of sources out there for news stories framed in the context of all the things wrong with the world. This site appears to be making a good go at an alternate approach that focuses on the positive, and they even encourage paid citizen journalism.
Tag: news
I recently wrote in the Summersault weblog about how website content syndication is changing the way we use the web. Of course, if the sites you care about aren't syndicating their content, the phenomenon is a little less exciting. For me, the only ones I cared about that were in this category were local news sources. For a few years I'd been running hacked up Perl scripts that tried to retrieve headlines from the sites of local papers, but it tended to be hit and miss and I never really took the time to take a more structured approach until now. Using the Template::Extract Perl module and a handy article from Simon Cozens about spidering hacks, I was able to formalize and simplify the creation of custom RSS feeds scraped from sites without them built-in. So, here are the first few, to which you are welcome to point your own newsreader:
Please avoid refreshing these more than once an hour. If there are other feeds you'd like to see, let me know. I'll add new ones on my feeds page as they come. Enjoy!
It looks like the War on Terror is over. That is, it's now become a Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, according to the Bush administration's shift in language being used to describe that particular set of economic, military, domestic law enforcement, and foreign policy initiatives. I suppose we've come along way from the national security policy known as "Smoke 'Em Out" or "Bring 'Em On", but this new phrasing doesn't really warm the heart either. As someone who has come to appreciate the value of framing - and how good the current administration has been at it in the political sense - I'd like to suggest a few bits of analysis of what this new frame means.
Continue reading "The War on Terror is Over"
I always get excited when a new NASA mission comes around, and 3:51 PM EDT tomorrow is the scheduled launch of STS-114, Space Shuttle Discovery. It is of course a milestone for NASA to be launching its first shuttle since Columbia, but I find each launch to be pretty amazing in its own right. As a geek, I can appreciate (read: drool over) the incredible technological complexities that go into making it happen. As a science fiction fan and observer of human evolution, I can appreciate the role that space exploration plays in inspiring and pushing our strange existence on this puny little planet to new heights. I have fond memories of a family vacation when we toured the Kennedy Space Center, and just the physical enormity of the undertaking left an impression, not to mention the impacts of its successes and failures.
Continue reading "Good luck, Discovery"
Hayden L. Sheaffer, the pilot who is being raked over the coals for his role in flying a Cessna 150 into restricted airspace over Washington D.C. earlier this month, which prompted the scrambling of jets and the evacuation of thousands, noted today that he did in fact try to contact the military on the radio channel they instructed him to use, but that he couldn't get through. In today's issues, the New York Times reports that the Department of Homeland Security acknowledged that Sheaffer was instructed to use a frequency that was not available at the time. What? Huh? Okay, the guy shouldn't have gotten lost in the first place, but the whole incident was fairly ridiculous, and the thought that they might have been blown out of the sky because they were given instructions they couldn't follow is a pretty scary one. When I was flying Cessnas with minimal avionics (far from restricted airspace, mind you), I don't think would've had much of a "plan B" in that case either.
Over the holiday weekend, Comair had to cancel over 1,000 flights because of software problems. It turns out that, as I read in the F-Secure Weblog, the flight planning software they were using was using a 16-bit counter to keep track of flight staff changes...so after 32768 changes it would simply stop working. Details are available from an article in Cincinnati Post. This is the kind of madness I was expecting for Y2K, not four years later when we're supposed to have learned that lesson by now.
The Drudge Report had a subtle series of links Monday about the apparently "misspoken" remark that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld made in Iraq this weekend, where he mentioned that the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11 was shot down. Of course, the Pentagon has now quickly corrected that, and I'm sure if the administration has anything to do with it, that'll be the last we hear of it in mainstream media.
I have no interest in perpetuating conspiracy theories (which is obviously why I read the Drudge Report...er...), but it sure does seem like Mr. Rumsfeld is finding quite creative ways to draw negative attention to himself these days.
Something fun to distract one on a rainy Wednesday: if I won the lottery, would I take the lump sump payment, or the installments over X years? The answer, of course, is "it depends". How old are you when you win, what's the annuity percentage on the installment plan, how much debt do you have, is there a "Best Buy" on the way home from the lottery claim center, etc. Oh, and I guess I'd have to play the lottery in the first place for this to matter much anyway. What would you do?
From the "you can't make this stuff up" department: A Delaware college student ate a bag of hallucinogenic mushrooms and drove around in a pair of stolen cars before arriving, confused, on a mountain in northwest Connecticut, police said.
Oh how I long for those crazy college days where one might wake up and say "I think I stole a car."
Umm, no.
It's "you can't make this stuff up" day here on the Internet. Today's highlights include Woman tries to pass fake $1 million dollar bill at a Wal-Mart and It's every other state that's confused about time changes, not Indiana. And we wonder why people on the U.S. East and West coasts consider everything in between to be a vast wasteland...