Deal of the day

There's a great deal at Amazon.com if you've put off upgrading to MS Office 2004: they're selling Microsoft Office Standard Student and Teacher Edition 2004 for Macintosh for $118 (after rebate). That's for a 3-pack of licenses.

That's cheaper than the price you pay if you're an MS employee if you need all three licenses, and so far as I can tell, Amazon doesn't actually check anything to see if you are a student or teacher. If you haven't upgraded, it's well worth it.

Welcome, Howard Dean

We just got back to our hotel room from my nephew's Bar Mitzvah. Someone who shall be nameless (but who reads this blog) assigned us the honor of reading the prayer for our country. While looking it over, I thought about how Howard Dean is the new chair of the Democratic Party (huzzah!) and with his election, we have hopes for turning around not just the party, but the country as a whole.

As the prayer says, our dream for the future is that Dean and all our elected officials, "may administer all affairs of state fairly, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, justice and freedom may forever abide in our midst." It's a good goal.

And to honor Dean's accession, we're putting our money where our mouths are and donating to the DNC (through ActBlue.com), and we think that you should, too. Here's your chance to help make a better world, because prayers alone aren't enough.

  Contribution amount:   $        

And yeah, I was looking at Tom during the service, and thinking that Dean most likely has also had to sit through nephew's Bar Mitzvahs where he didn't have the foggiest idea of what was going on, and I hope he did it with as good grace as Tom (and Sean) did today.

Software worth your while

If you're on Mac OS X (and if you aren't, you should be), some software's been released in the last day worth checking out:

• Mac OS X Update 10.3.8 is out. And I really, really hope that it fixes my Safari constantly crashing problem, although I haven't been able to find it mentioned in any of the docs.
• I've mentioned here before how much I like Saft, a Safari add-on. Without Saft, for instance, I'd lose all my open windows in Safari when it crashes (several times a day), but Saft keeps track of what's opened. Version 7.5.1 just shipped, and it helps detect possible IDN Spoofs.
• And very cool: there's a new version of Saft called Saft Lite, and it's freeware. Currently, all it does is detect possible IDN spoofs, but that alone makes it worth getting, because nothing else does for Safari. Unfortunately, it also gives too many false positives based on my brief testing, but I'm hoping that that will be fixed.

Edwards running already?

Looks like John Edwards has decided to run for President again in 2008. Not that I have a problem with that; after Dean dropped out least year, I preferred Edwards to Kerry. And of course, I was proven right; Kerry ultimately ran a poor campaign. If you can't beat the arguably-worst incumbent President of the past 40 years, you don't deserve another chance, and I don't think Kerry does. Edwards gave a speech in New Hampshire recently that's worth reading: The Flickering Light Of America. It expands on the themes he used in his Presidential campaign, and gives an answer to the question of what the Democratic Party believes in. Check it out.

Damn we're old

Okay, I know we're old, but sometimes people just say things that make it really obvious. This bit from Daring Fireball being one recent example:

The other point I'll mention is that most of us over the age of, say, 25 or so, already own most of the music we're ever going to want... These are people who pretty much blew a big chunk of their income during college on CDs.

And then there's those of us who are over 25 who didn't blow a big chunk of our income during college on CDs, because they hadn't yet been introduced.

Mac Mini's - Not that hard to find

Last week, I mentioned that we had decided to buy a Mac Mini as a new home server. We want the stock low-end configuration. I looked around, and the Apple online store said it was backordered 3 to 4 weeks. Amazon said In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. We weren't in a hurry, and we save sales tax by ordering from Amazon, so I ordered it on February 2. I figured it would be here in a few weeks. Nope; it shipped two days later, and with free ground shipping, it will be here tomorrow, according to the UPS tracking info.

Heck, with Amazon action like that, I may just go ahead and order that 512 MB iPod Shuffle I've been thinking about.

If you're looking for a Mini, you should also look at some of the less-traveled retailers. My nephew-the-anime-actor/director just bought a Mini; he found it at a music store online.

Stylesheet change

Tom's watching the Super Bowl commercials, and I'm sitting on the couch next to him scanning my RSS feeds in NetNewsWire, and Tom says he likes the custom style sheet I use in NNW — so why don't I use that nice blockquote style on the blog?

A few minutes later: done. If you have any problems with the way quotes now appear here, please let me know in the comments.