??National Public Radio??: “Television in the Wake of Katrina”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4829779&ft=1&f=1092

“This journal has become the Survival of New Orleans blog”:http://mgno.com/. I’ve become a news junkie again since Tuesday. This link comes via the “BuzzCast”:http://buzz.cnet.com (my favorite podcast). NPR also has a “Katrina Weblog”:http://www.npr.org/news/specials/hurricane/katrina/, updated every couple of hours. “Ryan”:http://www.ryanabrams.net, will you be blogging the refugee response in Texas?

??New York Times??: “News Analysis: Hard New Test for President”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/national/nationalspecial/01bush.html?ex=1283227200&en=8723f22a22fde0f9&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Here’s a use case for happiness: download and install the “Google Maps Plugin for the Mac Address Book”:http://www.briantoth.com/addressbook/.^*^ Then, right-click on someplace you want to find directions to. Click Google Directions and watch as the plugin figures out that you want directions from your home to that address, but gives you the option to select any address for any contact as a starting point, and lets you enter your own custom address. Only explitives can describe how cool this plugin is.

^*^Sorry, Windows users.

If you’ve got clock cycles and, perhaps, screen real estate to burn, you may want to check out “Konfabulator”:http://www.konfabulator.com and “Google Desktop 2.0″:http://desktop.google.com/ (which might be subtitled _Google does RSS now_). Both are free (Konfabulator was bought up by Yahoo, hardly a year after Apple “supposedly snubbed”:http://daringfireball.net/2004/06/dashboard_vs_konfabulator them), and each has its own interesting approach to sending microcontent from the web to your desktop–think stock quotes, news feeds, weather, etc. If you have a Mac, of course, you’re using “Dashboard”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/ already. But for those trapped in Windows-land, these aren’t bad alternatives. My current favorite is the Google Desktop sidebar. Konfabulator widgets are cool, but the Google Desktop sidebar feels more dashboard-like, especially with “this plugin”:http://desktop.google.com/plugins/i/sysmonitor.html.

“Use Smart Playlists to filter other playlists.”:http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2005/08/itunes_smart_playlists/index.php Clever.

“Apparently, I always spell it wrong.”:http://www.googlefight.com/cgi-bin/compare.pl?q1=woah&q2=whoa&B1=Make+a+fight%21&compare=1&langue=us (“yup, definitely”:http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=whoa).

“Real Artists Ship”:http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Real_Artists_Ship.txt. In case anyone in software tries to tell you that it needs to be perfect before it goes to market, just tell them: real artists ship.

“My Best Friend is a Pit Bull”:http://www.cafepress.com/badrapstore.17028358. *Love* this t-shirt.

“An Unofficial Enhanced Version of Textile 2.0b”:http://www.solarorange.com/projects/textile/. I’ve been using this on TVC WP migration project. The Textile plugin that comes with WP doesn’t play nice with HTML definition lists (which I use extensively on the site–just “view source here”:http://www.villagechurchnyc.com/worship/sermons). This plugin fixes that by making the @==@ escaping work properly.