Lots ‘o fun playing with Adobe’s new free web services today; I particularly like the banner maker. And the photo frame tool at Creative Pro is something I will have to play more with; I always see beautiful framing on online pictures and get jealous.

Hee hee hee, I bet this won’t make eToys’ stock do any better.

Today, I was sitting in class at med school, listening to a lecture on medical economics, and I realized that drug companies have been doing for decades what people are really upset about Internet companies doing now — using patents to leverage an advantage over competition. And while, as an almost-doctor, I don’t like the fact that certain medications cost a lot more than they should merely because they’re on-patent, I have grown to accept that that’s the price we pay for biomed companies working hard to come out with newer and better medications or stents or whatever. I think that I feel the same way about Amazon and the 1-Click shopping patent — they worked hard to implement something that hadn’t ever been done before (despite Richard Stallman’s arguments otherwise), and maybe they’re entitled to protection of their intellectual and technological work, for a while at least.

Chuck Taggart has an excellent quote on Looka today, as a reaction to a California GOP “prayer breakfast” in which gay marriage was equated to Nazi Germany:

Let’s see … gay marriage = a long-term, committed same-sex couple wanting to legally formalize their monogamous relationship for the rest of their lives, also entitling them to (among other things) insurance benefits, inheritance rights, and the right to visit one another in the hospital. Nazi Germany = a fascist regime that triggered World War II in Europe, caused the death of tens of millions of people, including the systematic slaughter of six million Jews and another five million Slavs, Gypsies and … homosexuals. Um, right.

(As an aside, I have no idea why the issue of discrimination based on sexual orientation gets to me; I think that it’s because, given that I grew up in relatively intolerant San Antonio, Texas, my first real exposure to anyone that I knew was gay was in college, and specifically, was in a class on civil rights taught by Jack Greenberg, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Many parallels were drawn during that class, and whenever I read about gatherings like the above-mentioned prayer meeting, I get vivid mental flashes of the images from the civil rights movement, of adults and children being attacked, gassed, hosed, and killed, and realize that even today, we’re not as far removed from that atmosphere as we’d like to think we are.)

CNN changed fonts and sizes on their home page two days ago, and it is now totally unreadable. I sent them a message about it via their Feedback page, and posted a message to their technical message board (as have other people), but they seem pretty unresponsive. Oh, well — there’s always MSNBC, which looks better and generally has more news.

The full text of a story that just came across our AP News Wire: “Cowhide heavy Native Spot is .76 3/4.” What on Earth does that mean?