I enjoy the roundup of reviews of House in today’s Magazine Monitor on the BBC News site, especially the Paper Monitor’s final comment.

Artist and knitter Hildur Bjarnad

The blood bank called today to get me to schedule an appointment, and I told the woman that I wasn’t going to be giving blood for at least a while. She was disappointed, what with me being one donation short of my three-gallon pin (though somewhere in there I got credit for a donation that didn’t happen for reasons I no longer recall), but I was surprised at how sympathetic she sounded to my reasoning: the pointless discrimination against gay men, highlighted by the recent rule change for sperm donors, does not allow me in good conscience to continue to support the system. She said something to the effect of “They’ll just ignore you; it’s like with stem cells.” And I said, “Well, they can ignore me without my blood, then.” She was perhaps the kindest blood center person I’ve dealt with, though they have by and large been caring and competent.
I’m not even really advocating that people stop giving blood, since we need it; but after you’ve given a gallon or two, why not let them know what you think.

I wish my workplace had slang as cool as this.

I got sick of seeing the 404s for favicon.ico in the web server logs, so I’ve thrown an icon up. Anybody who cares to do better is welcome to provide an alternative.

In their love-fest interview session included as a bonus on the first-season DVD release, the producers of Carnivàle assured us that HBO had committed to letting them finish the story. It now looks like not so much.

The verdict from Consumer Reports is in, and, to no one’s surprise, it’s the same as every other verdict: filtering software has a high false-positive rate, and doesn’t do a very good job blocking anything as subtle as hate speech.
CR’s recommendations are sound (#1: "Talk it over"), and of the resources they cite, the ALA and GetNetWise seem to avoid the hysterical edge that’s all-too-common when talking about the net and our children.
In fact, the more I look at who GetNetWise is, the more impressed I am.

The next version of iTunes will have direct support for podcasting. I know some portion of their desire to keep people using iTunes is so they can enforce their DRM scheme, but if their success rate in keeping users on their app remains high, I can’t help thinking how valuable an audience that creates. I hope Apple knows better than to try to exploit that audience’s value in any way the audience notices.

Not that I likely would have run off to the UK to see them, but I would have thought I would have heard that Queen are touring. I note with some optimism the "USA?" in Sep/Oct.

If any DVD release called for a theme party, this is it: ABC’s After School Specials!