Flock) has released its first public beta. I really like the del.icio.us integration, and I’m writing this post right from the browser.

I’m planning to marry Sarah Silverman. My guess is it will last about three days - two of which will be fantastic.

I’d love to credit this photo. Anyone know the source?

If you’re gonna rant, you should be pretty good at it. Like this guy). Here’s one on Salmonella Hysteria

There are a million and one ways to die, and eating poultry isn’t exactly at the top of the list. There are a billion and one ways to live your life, and I choose not to live mine worrying about some mythical bug that may or may not be present in under-cooked meat. If cross-contamination through inadequate hand washing were as dangerous as the Salmonella alarmists want us to believe, every restaurant patron in the world would be dead by now. If you’re old, worry about cancer and heart disease. If you’re young, worry about car accidents and suicide. If you’re smart, don’t worry about any of this crap.

Or this on bicycle helmets…

When I was a kid learning to ride a bike, I fell off a lot. But guess what? No helmet, no elbow pads, and not a single case of brain damage. None of us wore helmets back then, and none of us ever hurt ourselves. And we were 10 billion times more reckless on our bikes than kids are today. I saw a guy ride off the roof of a church in 5th grade. I’d like to see the Nintendo generation try that. Nowadays you see helmets everywhere: on roads and trails, on adults and kids, on bicycles and tricycles. How the hell do you fall off a tricycle? If your kid needs a helmet on a tricycle, I hate to say it, but your kid needs a helmet 24 hours a day. A total stranger pulled up beside me the other day and told me I should be wearing a helmet. I asked him why he wore his, and he said it was to protect his head. So I punched him in the neck.

Oh lordy. How about a site that lists every over-priced exclusively wonderful thing in the world. Infinite Plastic)

For the past 6 months or so I’ve been shaving with as many retro-snooty-geek-hip products as I could find. Merkur safety razor (and blades), badger hair brush and Taylor of Old Bond Street creme. I love them all, especially the creme. I still can’t shave daily or my neck looks like a close-range shotgun wound, but when I do shave, it’s almost enjoyable. You can keep your silly 4-bladed Fusion nonsense at what, a buck a shave? The Merkur gets just as close, and once you get the hang of it, it’s just as easy. If nothing else, get yourself a nice brush and some Taylor of Old Bond Street. I’ve used the almond and the sandlewood. Both are great. I’d go into more details, but Merlin just posted a long and very commented post) on this very subject. He claims to like the Fusion better, but he didn’t give it long enough. Fun read if you’re even remotely interested in a good shave.

As a fan of Mind Mapping, I had always heard great things about Mindmanager) but with no Mac version available I had no good way to find out for myself. Turns out Mindjet has just released version 6 and it includes a Mac version. It’s not just a port, but a complete rewrite as a native, universal binary Cocoa app. I of course grabbed the trial. It’s expensive, so it will need to be significantly better than NovaMind for me to consider switching. Nice to see a Mac version, though.

[Update 2006-07-08] - I bought a Mindmanager license this week. $229 is a lot of money, but when my trial ran out I sort of panicked, which to me meant the software was useful enough to justify the price.

PXN8) is new to me. Upload an image, then edit it with all of the basic

editing tools and save it or upload it to Flickr or AllYouCanUpload. There’s a little magic in there.

I ran across the Blogging bundle for TextMate. Now I can write a blog post without leaving my favorite editor. You’ll need the

latest bundles from the Subversion repository. Start here)

Disk Image (DMG) files on OS X are handy. They can be compressed, password-protected, read/write, you name it. Spotlight and Quicksilver skip their contents, which can be good or bad depending on your needs. I was archiving a bunch of files and thought using .dmg files would be nice. But how? I looked for some free/shareware and found a number of solutions that seemed reasonable. Then I ran across a MacOSXHints) article. It seems you can simply drag a folder onto Disk Utility and it will prompt you to create a .dmg. Like so…

When I first installed Parallels) on my MacBook Pro I wasn’t sure what I’d do with it. Neat, but useless? Nope. Since installing it I’ve found all sorts of reasons…

• Microsoft Office. I’m reusing and old Office license from a PC I no longer use. This is especially handy since I don’t use Office enough to justify a new OS X license and NeoOffice doesn’t yet run on Intel Macs.

• Testing web sites in Internet Explorer.

• Device upgrades. Today I wanted to update the firmware on my router. The only way to do this was to download somefirmware403.exe and run it from Windows. Done.

• Phone support. I still have family and friends who refuse to listen to reason and continue to run Windows. Troubleshooting over the phone is tough, and without being able to follow along is nearly impossible.