Unfortunately I’ve been informed that it wasn’t actually Ice Cream Day, but it’s hella hot outside, so it might as well be.

I’m not a big Star Wars buff or anything, but there’s a point in one of the movies, I’m not sure which, just after a planet had been destroyed when Obi-Wan senses a disturbance in “the force.” He says it felt as if millions of voices had suddenly cried out and then went silent.

I’m often reminded of that description when confronted with news reports about terrible natural disasters. 12,000 people killed in an earthquake in China. 100,000 killed after a cyclone passed through Burma. 225,000 killed in the Indian Ocean Tsunami.

Hath mother nature no respect for human life?

I don’t know what the planet’s current daily death rate is, but I imagine it’s pretty unfathomable by itself. But still, when so many people of all ages and walks of life die within such a short period of time—I feel like I should feel something, just as it happens. Like a pinch, or a noise, or lightheaded. Because we are all connected. Right? Aren’t we?

This is a proto-meme for people running a GNOME-based OS, like Ubuntu.

Go to Applications > Accessories > Disk Usage Analyzer. Click “Scan Filesystem”. Take a screenshot (Ctrl+Print Screen). Paste it to your blog. Show your friends. It’s fun.

Red is my home dir, with the purple and blue subdirectories all photos. Green is .Trash, 2.7 gigs worth! Brown is my Desktop and .wine. Orange is /usr/share and /usr/lib.

Google has this neat feature called Sitelinks where they’ll decorate a search result with some additional links if they think someone is searching specifically for a given site. I was surprised to see Justinsomnia given the Sitelinks treatment (if you google directly for justinsomnia), and even more surprised to see the five pages they decided to highlight:

• Random Image Plugin for WordPress
• Antisocial Networking
• A camera is only a tool
• my about page
• ironically Yikes, I’ve angered the Google gods (with a slight mangling of the title)

The first and the last make a lot of sense, as they get a lot of traffic. And of course the about page is sensible. But the other two are a surprise to me.

I must have been at the right party last night because at least two people there knew that my funny camera existed. The occasion was Tony Stubblebine’s 30th birthday (hmm, am I allowed to blog that?) which we celebrated with ribs he smoked himself and an amazing strawberry cake that Sarah made.

“So there I was in this hotel room in Vegas…”

After Claudine and Danny introduced us to Maldon sea salt at their last food shindig, we picked up a box at Williams Sonoma. At first I thought the flakes were a little big (compared to the fleur de sel de camargue we had been using), but once I got in the habit of grinding them between my fingers over my food, they’re actually quite nice. “Salty snowflakes” in the words of Sabine.

And the best part: they’re shaped like little hollow pyramids.