New feature today: there’s now a little page icon (  ) in the header bar of each day’s entry that contains the permanent link to that day’s page. Each day’s page has always had its own URL (as that’s just part of Manila), but if you didn’t use Manila, you would have had to know this and know the format of the URLs. Now you don’t; you can just copy the link in the header bar. I also wrote a quick little how-to for those Manila users interested. NOTE: thanks to Jim Roepke’s notice, a problem has been fixed. You may want to look at the how-to again.

Good morning to Tracy, who found me yesterday and made me smile. (Actually, made me smile twice — she likes this site, and she also turned me onto RealAudio broadcasts of big-city police scanners. Cooooool.)

If you’ve got a fast connection and half an hour on your hands, My Mother’s Dreams The Satan’s Disciples In New York is a great watch. (It’s one of the short films nominated for an Oscar.)

This past week, I started writing Perl apps for the first time, and I have to say I’m impressed with it. I have come into the object-oriented programming world through all of the backdoors, it seems (Frontier, VB, and now Perl, to name a few); however I got to these languages, though, I like them because they allow me to rapidly prototype things, and more often than not, run the apps permanently in them.

I’m currently reading Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush, and the first chapter has an unsettling observation (culled from Myra McPherson’s Long Time Passing): 234 sons of senators came of age during the Vietnam conflict. Out of that 234, only 28 went to Vietnam, and only one was wounded. Now, I don’t support what we were doing in Vietnam, but for the class lines to be so distinctly drawn is very offensive to me. (Mind you, I also find it interesting that Gore is one of the 28 who did go.)

How did I miss the fact that Sears has pulled all Benetton clothes out of its stores in response to the death row inmate ads? I got the entire ad campaign in a supplement to Talk magazine when I was on a train last month, and I actually found it very disturbing. Apparently, people on both sides of the issue are reacting similarly. (And, of course, there’s blatant overreaction, but when isn’t there…)

Freebie of the day, for the old-school techie in your life: ShellYeah, which provides free shell accounts on a dual 300 MHz Sun UltraSPARC Enterprise 2. Email, IRC, Usenet, ICQ, and shell scripting; no outbound telnet, compilers, customer-supplied binaries, or servers. Actually, pretty neat, and you can upgrade to any of the banned things.

Patrick Naughton, former exec at Infoseek, has plead guilty to crossing state lines for the purpose of having sex with a minor; he did so to avoid being charged with possession of actual child pornography and using the Internet to entice a minor into sex. This was an interesting case; he was originally found guilty of only the possession charge, but when the law that was used to convict him (but not the portion that applied to the case) was struck down, he was released and a new trial was scheduled. Now, they got him on the most serious charge.

Do you think his lawyers anticipated this when they ardently pushed for his release after the law was struck down? In retrospect, he would have been better off had he just accepted the initial conviction and sentence of up to 10 years; now, he faces 15 years.