Pachyderm Parade (flash)

Elephant Walk from the circus train to the place they perform in the Ringling Brothers & Barnum and Bailey Circus in Washington DC (rated PG).

Hubble Detects Organic Molecule on an Extrasolar Planet

The Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the first organic molecule on a planet that's not in our solar system. According to NASA, this breakthrough could be a major step toward discovering life on other planets. Scientists believe that the organic compound detected, methane, can be an integral part in the chemical reactions considered necessary to form life as we know it

(from News.com). Methane is the simplest organic molecule known, and finding it on a planet other than Earth, and outside our solar system, is likely a step closer to being able to find life on a planet very far away, if there is any.

David Mamet on Politics

...we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances-that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired-in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it

(from Village Voice).

Green Chicago River (flash)

For St. Patrick's Day, the City of Chicago dyes the Chicago River green (rated PG-13).

Absolut Quartet (flash)

Impressive machine made musical quartet (rated PG).

Food Court Musical

16 Agents stage a spontaneous musical in a shopping mall food court in Los Angeles (rated PG).

The Whisper Lounge

The Whisper Lounge at The Grove in Los Angeles, CA.

Bates Motel

The Bates Motel in Universal City, CA.

Microsoft Office Alternative

In order to create word processing documents and spreadsheets you can buy office for something like $150 (unless one gets the student version which is usually less) and you'll be able to create and receive documents from most other people and read and write them with no compatibility issues (or realistically minimal ones).

There is also the option of using something like Google Docs to do your word processing and spreadsheets. Advantages include:

• it's free
• online and accessible from any computer connected to the internet
• documents can be imported and exported in any format likely needed (like Microsoft Word and Excel)

The disadvantage is that it works a little differently than Office does so it may take a little time to learn if you are used to using Office. There is a tour of Google Docs online.

The Ivy

The Ivy on Robertson in Beverly Hills, CA.

Find mp3s with Google

There are several ways to to find mp3 files with Google. One way I've found useful to find songs is to put in a song name, and the follwoing string after it, in the google search bar:

-inurl:htm -inurl:html intitle:"index of" "Last modified" mp3

For example the star spangled banner can be found searching for star spangled banner or national anthem, though the first gives slightly better results.

Sitemap Ping Submission

When your sitemap is updated, these are the URLs to ping the search engines (replace [your sitemap web address] with your URL):

Google

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=[your sitemap web address]

Yahoo

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=[your sitemap web address]

MSN Live Search

http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address]

Ask

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=[your sitemap web address]

moreover

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=[your sitemap web address]

According to the sitemaps protocol, the URL to submit a sitemap to a search engine is supposed to be:

<searchengine_URL>/ping?sitemap=sitemap_url

but many search engines don't seem to actually accept ping submissions this way.

Iron Man Trailer #2 (flash)

A slightly longer trailer for Iron Man (rated PG).

Lotus Exige S

Lotus at Lotus Beverly Hills.