Just making my way through NetNewsWire and thought I’d take some notes.

• Dave Winer is working on Trackback still. He’s got autodiscovery stuff working. I’m wondering if they’re also going to include a place to put in trackback urls by hand if the users want. I’ve been starting to do that when I have more than a few articles I’m tracking back to in a single post. Since the more things you have to autodiscover at post time means longer times for the post to go through.
• Dave also points to more comments about problems with CSS. This hits on my frustration point, but in a slightly different way. I’m pissed at MS about most of this, not CSS. How long has IE 6 been around? When was the last time there was a patch to fix how things were rendered. In contrast I watch Apple’s work with Safari, where they are making every effort to make sure things work right. They even have a button on the browser to report pages that don’t display right (I hope this stays there in the release version).
• BoingBoing made me laugh out loud this morning with a post about Senator Rick Santorum’s Guide to Appropriate Sex.
• Population: One has a link to the 25 All-Time Greatest Covers of American Comic Books. Also included is the 25 worst (I thought the one for The Rifleman was pretty damn funny).
• Here’s some cool OS X freeware.

Robert Frost: “Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.” [Quotes of the Day]

I want something sweet, like brownies. But I forgot to get eggs when at the store today.

Billboard has an article about Apple’s soon to be announced music service. I’d heard some of these details on TechTV last night, but this gives a little more detail.

Label sources tell Bulletin that the service is an a la carte download store — not unlike that of rival Liquid Audio — that is built into Apple’s iTunes player. No subscription is required for the service, and tracks are expected to retail for an average of 99 cents. Once purchased, tracks are transferred to the consumer’s iTunes music library and are automatically synched to the user’s iPod portable player.

Content can also be burned to CD. Credit-card information is stored on file in the store’s shopping-cart system so the consumer does not have to re-enter the information for each purchase. The offering is expected to be made available initially only to users of Apple computers.

As part of its announcement, Apple is expected to unveil content-licensing deals with all five major labels. The Apple service is also expected to feature music from high-profile acts whose repertoire has not previously been available for digital distribution. [Billboard]

If this all proves to be accurate it could be pretty damn cool. And pretty dangerous for me. I’ll have to stay away. I’m curious as to how much of each individual label’s catalog will be online. This could be a great way to find older songs without having to buy full CDs. It would also be very cool if they offered various remixes of songs. Now, if they’ll also release the rendezvous playlist sharing stuff too I’d be in heaven.

Heath (see, I got it right this time) posted about a bookstore in Ohio that was going out of business.

A bookstore in Ohio has come under fire for throwing away hundreds of unsold books when it went out of business. A local TV news reporter came across the overflowing dumpster and got upset that the books weren’t donated to area nonprofits. The reporter became even more upset when she learned that taking the books out of the trash was illegal. [Heath Row’s Media Diet]

He goes on to day that it’s only selling books without covers that is illegal (and even then, not necessarily all books from the sound of it). I remember my grandmother used to always have lots of books with the covers ripped off. I wonder where she got them all. Maybe she was a black market paperback book seller!

I’ve had BBC America on this morning and I’d seen every single episode of Changing Rooms, Ground Force, and House Invaders that was on. At least twice. Help!

Looks like Michigan is having second thoughts on their Ultra-DMCA. Let’s hope they do a good job fixing things up. [via jenett.radio].

The other day I was asking about plaintext email addresses in FOAF. Someone left a comment on that post about it, so I thought I’d pull that up to the top level here. There is a way to have your email address encoded. The FoaF vocabulary includes a foaf:mbox_sha1sum, which can be used as an alternative to foaf:mbox. Thanks to Morten, who left the comment.

A few years ago, when I was starting out spinning, I had this record that had wax dripped onto it by mistake. It had been sitting in the sleeve ever since then as I tried to figure out what to do with it. This morning I decided that I wanted to do something about it. After trying a few different things I discovered warm water was actually pretty good for removing it. Not so hot as to cause any warping, but warm enough to make the wax come right off. So, to celebrate I of course had to play it, which led to me mixing for a while, which led to me just having a great time playing songs for an hour or so. Mmmm, I need to do that more often. Maybe a nice netcast is in order sometime soon.

The only thing that made it better was that my friend Selma suddenly showed up at my window to say hi (since I thought she was out on the other coast).

John Robb asks if there is a TiVo-like device for radio. I’ve mentioned this to a few friends as something I would love to have as a standard feature in radios. So often in the car I’ll half hear something that sounds kind of interesting and I’d love to be able to just hit a button and pause the radio, then back up a few seconds to start listening. Now that I think about it, I’d love to tell it to record certain shows when I’m not in the car. I’d love to be able to always have the latest Car Talk, Wait Wait Don’t Tell me, or Says You waiting for me to listen to. That would be so cool. On the plus side, I just discovered that you can listen to Wait Wait and Car Talk online.