My friend karmabreeze is offering a selection of her award-winning (and Times Square-displaying¹) photography in an effort to raise money for a yoga retreat.  Go check out her wares and help her out if you can.

http://www.highdesertarts.com/yogasale/

¹ Some of her photos were selected as the Kodak "Picture of the Day" and appeared on their display in Times Square.

A perfect metaphor for our government schools: useless knowledge, piled into a warehouse, abandoned and forgotten.  Photo set of the Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, Roosevelt Warehouse.  Link courtesy of Radley Balko.

Fun education fact of the day: Detroit's literacy rate is barely over 50%, worse than many Third World countries.

Photos of Tokyo taken by an American GI, Clifford McCarthy, who stayed in Japan for six weeks in the fall of 1945.  Looking at them you'd never realize that this is a country that had just lost one of the most devastating wars in history.  Link courtesy of Mari at Watashi to Tokyo.

English article from The Japan Times Online here.

P-bear hangs wit da dogz.



More can be found at Norbert Rosing's site; he published The World of the Polar Bear in 2006.

I can make my first recommendation for those of you considering Windows Vista when it's finally released:  1 GB of RAM.  That's the bare minimum.  2 GB would probably be better.

Upon startup, Vista is utilizing over 500 MB of my system memory.  I have 512 MB installed, which is a reasonable amount for XP Pro.  Now, with just Semagic open and Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger running in the background along with Trend Micro's PC-Cillin Internet Security beta, I'm up to 625 MB.  According to Task Manager, memory usage has already peaked at nearly 2 GB.  So I'm hitting my pagefile hard after just a few minutes of running Vista.  And I haven't even installed Visual Studio Express or the Office 2007 beta.

I would like to think that this is simply the result of unoptimized memory management typical of beta software, but it still seems excessive.  Yet the amazing thing is that the system doesn't feel slow given the apparent lack of resources.  I'm not waiting for page swaps, and disk activity seems no more frequent than in XP.  That's a purely subjective observation for now, but I've used Windows systems long enough to know that excessive virtual memory usage usually brings them to their knees.  Vista doesn't seem to be breaking a sweat at the moment.

Aesthetic observation: the status icons in the system tray that display the audio volume, network connection and battery charge are fugly.  I hope those aren't their final versions.

Completely off-topic, but if you want to know how Jong-Il Kim's glorious revolution is faring, check out this fascinating photo tour of North Korea taken by a Russian tourist.  Juche me, baby!  (Link courtesy of Q and O.)