So, I’ve been working on getting my web presence back up and running before I leave the country at the end of the month.  I’ve found two tools that have been a big help.  One is Linode–it’s a virtual private server system that’s pretty cheap ($30/mo) and gives me my own server that never goes down, never needs maintenance, and never gets unplugged and put in a trash pile, which was the principle reason artiswrong kept going down.  I’m not a huge fan of paying for a server when I have a server and the ability to keep one up and running, but it’s so nice to not have to deal with the things like network outages or somebody accidentally unplugging your server that come with plugging your server in at a friend’s house or a shared area where a lot of people are running their servers.  I had gone with slicehost, another virtual server service, but for a given price, it gave me more bandwidth than I needed and not enough storage, so I switched over to linode.
The other really handy thing I’ve found is a firefox plugin called scribefire.  It’s a blogging client, which means it’s a program that sits on my computer that lets me write posts and publish to my blog, rather than go through the web interface.  This saves a tons of time, lets me easily write posts when I’m offline, and lets me do other nice things like dragging and dropping images, dealing with tabs properly, letting my edit old posts–it’s really wonderful, and it’s made it way easier for me to blog. 
So–the site is up, and I’m planning to start updating it regularly, so stay tuned!

Philips has a line of organic LEDs called lumiblades up on their site.
It’s a cuttable material that uniformly emits light.  It’s just dying for people to make some amazing jewelry and art installations out of it.  It’s also wicked expensive–about $400 for a piece.  Still, I want to get my hands on some and play with it.  I wonder if it’s laser cuttable.

So, I drive a prius.  One notable thing about it is that it has a completely electronic dash with all the normal stuff–gas gauge, spedometer, odometer, etc, and it also has a screen that keeps track of my mileage, if I’m using the gas or electric motor and other little morsels of information about the state of the car.

A couple days ago, I had this revelation:  turn them off!  By turning down the backlight on the dash, I can completely turn off the spedometer, odometer and gas gauge, and I can manually turn off the touch screen.  Suddenly, my dash is completely devoid of visual clutter, and it’s wonderful!  I’m amazed at how often I caught myself glancing at my fuel gauge, or checking my mileage, when that doesn’t really have anything to do with driving.  It’s such a pleasure to drive without visual distractions inside the car–I encourage everybody to do it.

When I tell people that I’m doing this, they often worry that it’s not safe to turn off your spedometer.  I definitely disagree:  just because you know what speed I’m going doesn’t mean I’m driving more safely.  If worse comes to worst, I can always become a herd animal.  If I’m on the highway, I’ll match speed with people around me.  I get to learn how my car feels at different speeds and get some intuition for how the machine works rather than relying on little sensors to keep me updated and on the road.  Taking my cues for safety from the road and the environment around me rather than from some numbers on the screen is always a better way of driving, in my opinion.

On top of it all, it’s tangibly more relaxing to drive without constantly changing numbers in front of me.  Having less extraneous data around me makes much more relaxed, more given to the act of driving.  When I’m focusing on speeds and mileages, I feel stressed, I try to go faster to get where I’m going quicker, or drive more gingerly to get better mileage.  Without that info, I just focus on the trip–I’ll drive until I’m there.  It’s like riding a bike:  it doesn’t get much simpler, and that very simplicity makes it a beautiful way to get around.