Listen up (not that you have ears, but more so “listen up” in a metaphorical sense), i’m going to need you to stop being so fickle. One day you want to stay here, the next day you’re bored and ready to go. One day you love what you do, the next day you just want to go away and not deal with anyone or anything. You want to invest in people, you want to stay away.

I need you to be satisfied and to rest and to be calm and to stop beating so fast it feels like you’re going to jump out of my chest bound for destinations unknown. What’s the rush?

Just chill out,
Joshua

Parke has a list of FEMA’s recommended charities and the phone numbers for Hurricane Katrina donations/volunteers. Hook it up. Help some people.

Britain outlined tough new rules for “preachers of hate,” who promote or glorify terrorism. It seems like they should maybe define what they’re talking about a little better. “Fosters hatred that threatens to lead to ethnic violence?” is a bit ambiguous. How do you prove that? (And what sort of impact would this have on Christianity, a religion that is often called intolerant and hateful these days?)

The 1.2 release of SlideShowPro, a nice app for creating dynamic, customizable photo gallaries in Flash, released yesterday.

There’s a new LOST minisite up. Also, I never got around to posting this truly bizarre LOST clip (mpg).

A video blogger loses job and makes it sound like he got Dooced (being fired for blogging on the job), when in fact he was going to quit anyway AND he broke his former employer’s regulations against little things like VIDEOTAPING IN THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART. That’s not a martyr for the vidblog movement… that’s just stupid.

So I’ve been I was cultivating this beard recently.

Searching for an odd gift for a friend, I ended up on this site, a direct marketer of gifts, cards, and household products… essentially like the catalogs I always flip through at my grandmother’s house. So, if you’re the type of person who’s too lazy to hold their own beverage, likes dolphins on their desk, or is just too tired of using scissors to deal with the drama, this is the place for you. (And their personalized stuff is CHEAP.)

Tonight is Tiny Showcase time again

I’ve been listening to the Photoshop Radio podcast lately. The sound quality and overall presentation are horrible, but the content is stellar.

Long Bets is one of the more interesting sites i’ve run across lately. According to the site, they are an arena for competitive, accountable predictions, a forum for focussed discussion and debate about prediction, an attractive tool for philanthropic giving, and a way to foster better long-term thinking. Things like, “By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Western Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.”

Village Voice interview with current “it musician” Sufjan Stevens. To be honest, most of the hype surrounding him is completely warranted and deserved.

All That Malarkey interviews designer Jason Santa Maria who headed up the A List Apart redesign. “We don’t support 800 x 600 anymore, nor do we 640 x 480. Do you?” is ruffling some feathers.

Lee Gilmore points me to InCase, a high-end maker of bags and (mainly) hip iPod covers.

Fun Flickr set of people popping balloons.

Pandora looks to be an interesting app. Type in an artist/song you dig and it creates a radio station based on your supposed tastes. You can refine the search by telling it you do or don’t like certain songs that it recommends. Potential to be big. It’s a pay service now, but i’m betting bundling this functionality into iTunes would be a big hit.

A secondary school is to allow pupils to swear at teachers – as long as they don’t do so more than five times in a lesson. A running tally of how many times the f-word has been used will be kept on the board. Yes, because allowing children to dictate classroom behavior that basically says, “____ you, I prefer to use words meant for idiots instead of actually learning” is completely lucid and much easier than educating them.

Isn’t it odd that we are apparently becoming a nation of attractive people who sit at home alone at night with our pets, watching television shows about relationships and taking medication for our depression brought on by our loneliness? Meanwhile, our neighbors, whom we do not know, are spending their evenings in much the same way?

Mark Driscoll – The Radical Reformission

Neubix’s own Keegan Jones finally got around to launching his new site. Check it out and then hire him to make you a website (poof! you’re a website!).

David Crowder Band is covering the Sufjan Stevens song O God Where Are You Now? (In Pickeral Lake? Pigeon? Marquette? Mackinaw?) on their new album A Collision, and apparently some Sufjan messageboard fans aren’t too happy about it. Or should I say, WEREN’T too happy about it, until David posted a very humble, well-articulated response. Love it.

Scott Hansen, aka ISO50, has some new prints up in his online store.