William M. Hartnett

Am I the last person in the universe to discover Desktop Tower Defense? Seriously, Internet, you gotta tell me about this stuff sooner. I’m pretty sure this is at least twice as fun as anything currently available for the PS3.

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>BBC to open archive for trial (BBC)
>Newspapers should open archives (Dan Gillmor)
Why do I love the 21st century? Because the day after having a discussion with someone about how most newspapers are squandering an amazing opportunity by putting their archives behind silly pay walls, I find these two articles in my reader. Awesome.
Please feel free [...]

>What kind of haircut did John Edwards get for $400? (Slate)
I’ve sung the praises of Slate’s Explainer column before, and I’ll do it again now. A financial report filed with the Federal Election Commission showed that John Edwards received two $400-a-pop haircuts.
The obvious question is how one manages to spend $400 on a haircut when [...]

(Zillow and the Appraisers: An excellent name for a band, as Dave Barry would say.) Steven D. Levitt, the economist and Steven-with-a-v half of the Freakonomics team, has interesting thoughts on the case of the Arizona Board of Appraisal vs. Zillow, which I mentioned the other day. Am I going to summarize his thoughts here? [...]

Didn’t you read the post title? I said Mozilla Releases Thunderbird 2, so go forth and download. Message tagging, improved search, improved security. All that stuff.

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I was feeling pretty cocky today about the BlackBerry outage because I do my mobile e-mailing via Gmail on my Q. Then I realized how vulnerable my reliance on all that the Google-verse has to offer makes me to a potentially far worse breakdown. Consider the truly vast extent of my addiction:

I publish my work [...]

>Delta’s new fliers’ perk: a tree (AJC)
Delta will offer customers the option of paying a fee — $5.50 for domestic flights, $11 for international — to The Conservation Fund’s carbon offset program. Do carbon offsets live up to their promise? We here in Florida will see, I suppose. Like when our house now two miles [...]

This one comes via the Florida GIS Data blog: The inexplicably fun Place The State game. Clearly, it’s intended for children, but I can’t stop playing until I get a perfect score. So far my best is 94 percent with an 11-mile average error.

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>No Offense Intended With This Year’s Choice of Entertainer, but Still an Outcry (NYT)
Rich Little is headlining the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner this weekend. Awesome. If there’s one thing for which Rich Little is known, it’s exposing the hypocrisy of the government and media using subtle but cutting satirical comedy, just as Stephen Colbert [...]

Why a fourth consecutive Pulitzer-related post when even Bill Keller thinks the contest is over-hyped? Because I somehow failed to notice that my colleague Gary Coronado was a finalist for feature photography. Nothing slips by me, no sir.
The recognition was for his “vivid images of Central Americans who, desperate to enter America illegally, risk their [...]