A high-ranking Food and Drug Administration official resigned Wednesday in protest of the agency's refusal to allow over-the-counter sales of emergency contraception.

Susan Wood, director of FDA's Office of Women's Health, announced her resignation in an e-mail to colleagues at the agency. The e-mail was released by contraception advocates.

posted by Tim at 12:21 PM

Answer any personal financial question using the Financial Calculators at Dinkytown.net
posted by Tim at 7:31 AM

I've been playing Age of Mythology lately. I visited Ensemble Studios (in Dallas) to see some of my old buddies and I got to try out the latest build of Age of Empires III. It got me a bit nostalgic, but instead of busting out AOK, I decided to get AOM, which I had actually never played.
posted by Tim at 9:46 AM

There's a new game in town: Guess-the-google. Try it out. You're given a series of 20 pictures from Google's images and have to guess what keyword triggered them.
It's not as easy as you might think.
posted by Tim at 9:43 AM

Michelle moved a step closer to The Masters by winning her 2nd round match in the 80th U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship. She beat C D Hockersmith with a score of 6 & 5; she is now in the top 16.
posted by Tim at 9:22 AM

I wonder how this will damage Formula 1 in the USA?

Ferrari win six-car US Grand Prix
Just six cars took the start at Indianapolis this afternoon after the Michelin teams stood by their threat not to race without an additional chicane ahead of the high-speed Turn 13.

Michelin could not guarantee the safety of their tyres through this corner over a race distance, so instructed their teams not to compete if the track layout was not changed to slow the cars.

The FIA refused the request for a chicane, pointing out several other options available to Michelin. The Michelin teams declined these and jointly decided they would race on the tyres they used in qualifying, but only if the chicane was inserted.

It wasn't. As a result, all cars took to the grid, but the Michelin cars all peeled in at the end of the formation lap, leaving only the Ferraris, Minardis and Jordans to start. Jordan and Minardi had been expected to stand by the Michelin teams.

posted by Tim at 2:01 PM

I'm gonna check this stuff out. Home Automation:

mControl can operate and automate items such as lighting, a gas fireplace, sprinkling systems, HVAC systems, security cameras, and a hot tub to name few. mControl has been designed for Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, however, can also be run on Windows XP Pro, and viewed from Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater.

posted by Tim at 8:35 AM

The geeks at Google just continue to impress me. I can't remember the last time I received spam in my Gmail inbox. So I checked the "spam" folder. It was chock full of good juciy pr0n spam, penis enlarging spam, and mortgage pusher spam. So, I am still getting it, I'm just don't have to look at it. And zero false positives as well. Very handy.

And have you seen Google's new personalized homepages? Very nice.

Thank you Google!
posted by Tim at 1:40 PM

So what's the next big one we'll all be playing? (If Wifey let's us?)

Rise & Fall: Civs at War?
Age of Empires III?
Heaven vs Hell?
Star Wars: Empire at War?
Company of Heroes?

or will it be Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends? OMFG!
posted by Tim at 5:18 PM

So I finally got my copy of Anecdotal. I started in on the first chapter last night. I won't give a review yet, but it's clear why he went with Dog-Ear as his publisher. :-)

UPDATE: That sounds off. Here's what I meant.
posted by Tim at 2:03 PM

Jeremy Dann gets published! He wrote this book called Anecdotal or Anecodotal, depending on who's in charge of the marketing materials (and no I'm not getting referrer points here - JD is).

It's about an MBA who lays shirtless in his bed with a laptop on his chest. Or so it appears from the cover. Pretty compelling stuff, I'd say. And I'm not kidding, the publisher actually had this to say:

posted by Tim at 4:25 PM

In this article The author asks a snarky-good question: "When are they going to learn what a blog is? Hint: Free Republic isn't one, doesn't have one, and its commenters are not 'bloggers.'"

While I get the distinction between "blogs" and "discussion forums" at the ends of the spectrum, for me there are clearly grey areas in the middle.

• At one end you have single-author no comment blogs (Instapundit).
• At the other you have anonymous discussion forum postings (MFO).
• In the middle you have comment blogs, group blogs (Volokh), edited group blogs with comments (Slashdot and Fark), and mass group blogs with comments (Kos, FreeRepublic)

Is the distinction merely about the number of potential editors or thread starters or whether those thread starters have some sort of editing process?

As a person who both blogs AND posts to discussion threads, I'm as confused as WaPo evidently is.

posted by Tim at 2:09 PM

Robert Scoble of Microsoft has dinner with the fired Google blogger, Mark Jen. He was the guy fired by Google because of stuff he wrote on his blog. A while back there was a bit of controversy when his blog mysteriously disappeared off the web. People began to suspect he'd been sacked. Or worse! Turns out he had been sacked. And if you had read his blog back then (it's been toned down) you might understand why.

When I first read Mark's blog comments, I thought he was a litle too bold in his commentary. He did appear quite negative. If I had just started at Google, I would have been writing, "Damn, free food!" Not, "There must be an evil consipracy to keep you here 24/7." That's just bad manners. I equate that to visiting a friend's house for dinner and telling him and his wife how bad the food tastes. Not good manners. Not a good thing to do.

So the host asked Mark to leave on account of his bad manners. Was that evil? No.


posted by Tim at 6:51 AM

You can watch all of the Super Bowl Ads you missed over at iFilm. I think my favorites were the AmeriQuest ads: Don't be quick to judge.

The Olympus m:robe commercial was the best new gadget; it looks very cool. I like the iPod, and I like my digital camera. I just never have both at the same time. Hmmm, I just worry about battery life on something like that, though.

The Budweiser parachute ad made me laugh out loud (but not as loud as the AmeriQuest ads), while the thanking the troops ad brought a tear to my eye.

GoDaddy.com was probably the most effective. I have never heard of GoDaddy.com and now I will probably never forget it! BTW, the NFL forced Fox to pull a second GoDaddy.com ad which was supposed to air later in the game. But after they saw the first one, they nixed it. Supposedly.

UPDATE: There's a short discussion of the merits of the Napster subscription program at Scobleizer.

posted by Tim at 6:48 AM

Why not just use this site to manage the QMT?
It's already here, it's flexible, and you can make any kind of changes you need.
And everyone important already has it bookmarked...

posted by Tim at 1:46 PM

My daughter Kaleigh at Monticello last year. 
posted by Tim at 6:48 PM