From ps260 originally, but Andy Baio's Waxy Links (and Daring Fireball spotting) discovery of the new trailer for Shining looks to be the next great Jack Nicholson film we'll all enjoy.

Curiously, this time he's starring opposite Shelley Duvall rather than Keaton. Duvall looks to be reprising her earlier stylings - almost as from around the time she made Popeye...

Unshelved takes on GTD and the Hipster PDA.

I hadn't seen Unshelved before. Think of it as a User Friendly for the librarian set (only with full-text RSS feeds....).

And while I'm on a web comic kick, thanks to random(foo) I came across IndieTits. Way more Indie than you!

Technorati Tags: 43folders, gtd

Two semi-related posts about Palm.

First, Jeremy Wagstaff has a nice rumination and eulogy regarding the upcoming Treo on Windows Mobile for the new year. Yes, I'll probably poke and prod one (but not switch to Verizon most likely), but I've still yet to feel comfortable with the Windows LnF in a small device when I pick them up. I liked the HP 360LX, but that was a palmtop, not a phone or real handheld, thanks very much... I've said it before, and I'll say it again - I still love the Newton OS, despite its age; the formfactor is a bit... clunky for today (and certainly for a phone), but the OS is the Shiznit.

Maybe I should go to WWNC 2006 after all... Where's my conference request form!?

Secondly, I meant to post about it when it came out, but Will Shipley is Really Angry at Palm and - having just gone through the upgrade myself, I can feel his pain. And really, the general pain of PalmOS on OSX - the conduits are OK but not rock solid, the GUI for the Palm Desktop is oh-so-9.x, and I point a shared finger at Palm and Apple for the deficiencies (and yes, the elegances!) of iSync's Palm Conduit (is it too much to ask for category support? C'mon! Pleeeeeeease!)

Unfortunately, Will's final bit

... somebody at Palm needs to start thinking like Steve Jobs. Someone needs to make it her job to say, "This detail sucks, and if the details suck the whole thing sucks, and if our product sucks we suck, so we're going to stay here and we're going to fix this and we're not going to ship until the phone doesn't suck."

is clearly not going to come through now... instead, the rough edges and details will be that deep blue I associate with heavy menus, confusing windowing and, well, more Treo-like crashes from faulty memory management.

The quest for the Onit and allied devices continues.

Technorati Tags: Newton, Onit, PalmOne, WWNC, Treo

Curious to see this, where Brian Wilson is exchanging his time for hurricane fundraising.

Less charitably, what came to mind is "From 'In My Room' to 'Telephone Operator'"

It's nice to see that Andy Ihnakto is writing for Tidbits, since I keep missing his work in the Sun-Times, much to my chagrin...

Make a note on your calendar to pop on over to The Adventures of Action Item when you have a spare cycle. Missing element: Sharepoint...

A graphics link about the national debt, and which administration was in hand when it was accrued.

Based on this, of course, as expected nobody is innocent. Not the President, the Party, or the controllers of the purse - the Congress and the people they represent.

Source for this graphic is Jeff Miller of Whittier College, but found via the surfing of Matt Haughey. The ur-Source may be Tobias again, as his column today cites both it and the amount of money spent servicing this debt.

A tip of the chapeau to David Weinberger for his pointer to the delightful Begin with the Screen by Susan Crawford. Combine your online hat, your Python-era Gilliam, and some big band Beguine, and you've got a fine bit of entertainment...

Two things have slipped into my online-related media consumption over the past couple weeks....

One is 75 Minutes, an online 'CDs worth' radio show out of NYC (but produced by ex-Chicagoans). It's very Indie oriented, some punky influences. Very WLUW, if you will (and I think one of the producers did some time at that community station). It's available as a podcast, in particular one of the cool chapter-headed M4B variety.

The second new item into my consumption was from this weekend, in the form of The Scene, an online serial about file trading (AZ: "sounds boring. 'hey dude, check out these files!'"), but instead of large amounts of live action, much of the activity takes place across IRC and chat. But it's oddly engaging, if somewhat clumsily plotted (this is the criticism of one who's never plotted...). Available via all your favorite file distribution formats...

And in an offline world, AZ and I cracked open The Adventures of Pete & Pete - Season 1 this weekend. What a great show that was, both in capturing childhood and indie rock. Add in the creator's commentary, and you've got a great set to own and cherish.

From Andrew Tobias:

At $8 trillion now, our National Debt – accumulated since 1776 – will have reached $10 trillion or so by the time President Bush leaves office. Of this, roughly $8 trillion will have been racked up under just three presidents: Ronald Reagan, George Bush, and George Bush.

Oy Vey.

Tobias, however, provides no citation for this set of facts, nor a breakdown of under which presidents the bulk of this debt accrued, nor a breakdown of how much of it is due to servicing previous debt and how much is due simply to deficit spending.

Not that it isn't a staggering sum of money.

Shelley at Burningbird has some good background on the rebuilding effort to come.

One of the things that Bush, faux-southerner even more than I, seems to have forgotten, is the curious will of the South, and its will to reconstruct and rebuild I think. It's been done before, and it will no doubt be done this time. Hastert's backtracking or not (thanks to AZ for the pointer on that).

As a letter writer (coincidentally from Chicago) to the Times aptly pointed out this morning

William Faulkner, who lived and depicted the spirit of Mississippi and the South better than any other writer, and whose first novel was penned in rooms behind St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, closed "The Sound and the Fury," his epic novel, with these simple words: "They endured."

Technorati Tags: Katrina

AZ and I have, like so many humans everywhere, been quite overwhelmed by the recent Hurricane and aftermath in the American SE. We're pleased to find out that so many of our friends are well, considering. Email, blogs and news, when it gets out, is passed around, sharing the news good and bad.

Stan, caretaker of the Southern Annex, has some heartening pieces recently. Apparently an effort to assist displaced students (and more assistance) from Tulane (and elsewhere?) is taking root at IU. It's the little things we can all do to help - money donated, hospital aid provided by those who can, and floors and couches in the region, that can get us through this.

Our government has a lot of lifting to do, but the collective shoulder does the heaviest social work most easily.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, Katrina