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Jim Lehrer: “And if any of you audience people yak during the debate, I am going to come down there and whip your ass.” Or something like that. {{ double-space-with-newline }}

On CNN, they’re citing unnamed conservative blogs as feeling Bush had a mixed performance. It’s amusing to watch blogs get co-opted into the spin. General feeling of positive for Kerry from the CNN talking heads. Maybe the Corner; they’re pretty dubious about how Bush did. CNN thinks Bush looks annoyed. Fox is not calling either man the winner. Fox picked up on how tired Bush looked and how much he sighed. Not to mention annoyed. They don’t know if it was effective or not, but Ceci Connelly is calling the expression sour. They’re admitting that Bush looked shorter due to the framing. Spin is fun.

SpaceShipOne has successfully completed its first qualifying flight. Piloted by Mike Melvill, it reached altitudes of over 63 miles. SpaceShipOne now has two weeks to reach that altitude again; if it succeeds, Scaled Composites will win the X Prize. Words fail me; my delight is manifest. Space!

Sometimes the technology is so damned close, but it’s not quite there. Ulysses is like that; now that I’ve tasted it, I want the perfect version, but I don’t think I can quite use it as it is. OK, so: as a writer, I don’t use most of Microsoft Word. Mostly I want is something I can type into. It needs to do spell checking. It needs to be able to save style information with the document, because I want to be able to mark headers and bold text and so on. It needs to be able to export the style information in a format which InDesign can handle, since that’s what I use for layout these days. It needs to be able to do smart quotes and hyphens. ...

One reason I’m fairly confident Kerry will win: he has the best ground game (original). I’ve been assuming that get out the vote efforts were a major component of the DNC’s strategy this election for a few reasons; most obviously, I’ve just seen a lot of activity oriented towards getting people to the polls this year. More importantly, though, I watched John Kerry win in Iowa because of an absolutely perfect get out the vote operation run by Michael Whouley (original). Any campaign with Whouley at the center is going to be one that has a good ground game, regardless of anything else. ...

It occurred to me this weekend, while I was contemplating buying a dozen Powers graphic novels, that we’re probably not more than five years away from solving the comics life span conundrum. (Namely, the vast mass of the history of comics is not available for reading; you can’t go back and check out Grant Morrison’s early Marvel Universe work, for example.) But let’s say we live in a world in which all comic book pages exist in digital form, which is a world we may well live in already if that’s a useful step in the printing process. So DC puts up a web page, which allows you to select a comic book title and a range of issues within that title. Click “Buy” and the pages of those issues are assembled into a single file and sent off to the print on demand printer. ...

The extended edition Return of the King DVDs will include (original): 2 disc 250 minute movie cut Commentary by the director and writers Commentary by the design team Commentary by the production team Commentary by the cast (with split personality dialogue between Gollum and Smeagol) Tolkien documentary From Book to Script documentary Designing Middle-Earth documentary Big-atures documentary (?) 2 WETA documentaries Costume design documentary Horse Lords documentary Cameras in Middle-Earth documentary Documentary on completing the trilogy Music documentary Soundscapes documentary 2 documentaries about the end of it all Cameron Duncan documentary Two Cameron Duncan short films, “DFK6498” and “ Strike Zone” Mumakil battle multi-angle feature Abandoned concept: Aragorn battles Sauron feature Photo galleries (2,123+ images) Tracing the Journeys of the Fellowship map feature New Zealand as Middle-Earth map feature That’s a hunka hunka burning DVD. Via Twitch (original).

The Men of Action game, invented by Rob MacDougall: Pick a historical figure; let’s say Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman’s Men of Action! Describe the ensuing campaign. Go.

For the record, Vernor Vinge was right (original). I want that slogan on a T-shirt. Last February, it was .bmp files that carried the hack. This time, viewing a JPG on a Windows XP computer that is not running Service Pack 2 can cause your computer to execute arbitrary commands. This is horrible. Imagine what would happen if I stuck an worm image in a bunch of Flickr photostreams. Imagine what would happen if I used one for an LJ icon. Do you read a bulletin board that allows people to upload their own avatars? ...

Ranchero Software released the beta of MarsEdit (original) the other day. My preliminary feeling is that it’s nice and slim and practical. As Ginger has noted more than once, ecto is kind of getting increasingly bloated. The latest version, 2.0, has a WYSIWYG editor that isn’t quite there yet, and it’s all about autoformatting for you, and so forth — and I don’t really want my weblog editor to be a RTF editor. Sure, I can switch into a simpler mode, but why should I buy into all the overhead? ...