Republicans for the legalization of Marijuana OK, so I made that title up, but they really should consider it. Pandagon talks about how the RNC is trying to avoid violent protests in NYC by offer[ing] "peaceful political activists" discounts at select hotels, museums, stores and restaurants around town during convention week, which begins Aug. 29.

Are the Republicans really this out of touch with reality? Their attempt to placate protesters with double talk won't work this time.

Right now would have been a great time for marijuana to be legal. The RNC could then sell the marijuana at a considerable discount during the convention to the protesters. Do you think that a bunch of high protesters are going to cause any problems? I think not. I bet you the pizza parlors around NY would get a huge spike in business.

American Dad Seth McFarlane, the creator of The Family Guy, has a new show called American Dad that looks promising. Check out the six minute pilot.

Gush 1.1 RC 1 & Linux support
In celebration of Bastile Day tomorrow ( July 14th ), Wes and I have worked day and night for the past 2 weeks straight to finish the Gush release candidate in time.

Lots of performance improvements, bug fixes, and general last minute features. Two things standout in this release. First, the enhanced blog picture viewer which is a must for people who like viewing photoblogs. With the image viewer built into the newsreader, it's easy to view all the photos in a page one after another. The second notable thing about RC 1 is that we finally have support for Linux.

Gush now spans three platforms! Inspired by George Bush's Leave No Child Behind educational policy, we've adopted the Leave No OS Behind policy. The policy is mostly fluff but we're confident that it's going to get us a boost in the polls that we've been looking for in these past couple of weeks.

FavIcons From Pics
I just found the "FavIcons from Pics" utility on Del.icio.us. FavIcons From Pics does a remarkably good job generating a FavIcon from an image. There's absolutely no reason why a website shouldn't have a favicon with a utility like this lying around.

Del.icio.us continues to be a source for lots of random goodies.

Printer lingerie
The The Distributor vs. the Innovator NYTimes article seems to be getting a lot of attention around the web because it highlights the fundamentally differences between HP and Dell's business models.

However, after reading the following paragraph, I just couldn't stop thinking that printers are actually really sexy machines:

Every day, physicists, chemists and fluid-mechanics engineers puzzle over ways to make the symphony of nanoscale ink explosions more efficient and precise. They speak of co-solvents, surfactants, polymers, humectants, friction coefficients and tailhooking (when the trailing tail of a misfired droplet splats wildly).

Granato goes all Flash Granato has boldly gone where few succeed, and has achieved a very intuitive feel all in Flash. There is good attention to detail including tooltips for images, input field focusing, some nice rollover sounds that aren't annoying, and a few very subtle alpha blends to give some texture to the site.

Just a few observations:

• Clicking on a post's text turns it blue. Not sure if that is a convenient way to mark items as read or not, but that's what I use it for.
• Links to different sections of the site load new pages. I'm guessing this is to play nice with browser history and give users the option to open links in new windows.
• I notice a bunch of links goto various sections of the DENG website, not sure what that's all about.
• I can use my scroll wheel for the TxFL news which is lovely, but not for the main posts.
• I'm not seeing any trackback or permalink integration.

Again, it's very well done, so check it out.

Standards Roadmap Mezzoblue has a great article on how to teach yourself to be standards compliant. Full of great advice on design strategies, plenty of books and sites to get you started, and already a slurry of comment additions. This blog has some ways to go before it's compliant. I better get started.

Ten most overpaid jobs in the U.S. I guess this is old news, but maybe you're someone lucky enough to be on this list of most overpaid jobs in the States.. Interestingly, software basement dweller isn't one of them.

Long Shadows Some bleak, wintry NY pictures taken late February. A little California sunshine finds its way into the last picture.

Flash games Damn JWZ for pointing to this wonderfully time consuming and frustrating game called Bubbles. Damn my fingers for being too darn slow to get even a respectable score in this typing game. These games are just another way that Flash taunts us on a daily basis.

(via HotLinks)

Night Scenes Andy Gray is up to his usual photo-magic with a new set of Tokyo night scenes.