Justin's Journal

Genetically engineered salt-tolerant tomatoes look to be a reasonable response to places where over-irrigation of farmlands have caused otherwise agriculture destroying concentrations of minerals.

I just finished American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I can't recommend the book enough. I also don't know what else I can say without giving things away.

Well, I've always said that drastic problems often require drastic measures to solve. Perhaps the AIDS epidemic is such a drastic problem that we shouldn't roll our eyes when the President of Kenya requests that all citizens refrain from sex for two years.

Well, just about the time that Dan at Flutterby decides to give me a link and some publicity my work load picks up and my cable modem drops out on me. I'm back online and now have my work caught up just in time for my 24th wedding anniversary on Monday. I'll be leaving for a long weekend and I'll be back on Tuesday. Hopefully I can get a few things journaled then.

I'm giving Greymatter a long hard look. I think that it might resolve a few issues I have with Blogger. Don't get me wrong. I love Blogger but there are a couple of things that I'd like to do differently and I think that a cgi driven system running on this server might give me the flexibility that I'm looking for.

Angel passes along this link to a Browser emulator. It's interesting to look at sites through this thing. In my not so humble opinion for a site to be well designed it should still be useful to someone using any of the browsers being emulated. Check some of your favorite sites with the various browsers being emulated and then come back and check out this site with it.

Reason magazine interviews Prof. Bradley Smith and it's a pretty interesting read. Prof. Smith is the Federal Election Commission member who believes that much of the federal election law is unconstitutional. He has some compelling arguments against financial disclosure in political campaigns that I tend to agree with.

For example, during my time in office, I have begun to question if there?s any benefit from disclosure. I?m not seeing that we are getting many benefits out of it, and it?s one of the areas where we are really ending up discouraging grassroots organizing. The disclosure regulations are some of the most burdensome. Disclosure limits free speech because it allows the government to retaliate against people. The Supreme Court has consistently held that people do have a right to anonymous speech. The cases speak for themselves.

I've watched with appall as trademark lawyers take hardnosed stands against fansites and parody sites. It bothers me when people have absolutely no sense of humor. Wendy Liebowitz, someone who use to send out those nastygrams, has some common sense advice to trademark lawyers attempting to zealously protect their clients tradmarks.