It’s been almost 4 months since my Dish went wonky. At first I panicked, worried that some new reality show would pass me by unwatched. Oh wait, I hate reality shows. No big deal then.

It turns out that there’s nothing on or about television that I miss.

• World Events: CNN, NYT and about 400 weblogs do a pretty good job

• Local News: Nothing happens here and what does happen is reported by people I seriously dislike listening to.

• Sports: Not interested. Except for the Olympics. The Olympics page on Wikipedia is keeping up-to-date on that.

• Entertainment: Well, between my reading list, Netflix queue and the afore-mentioned 400 weblogs I think I’ve got that covered.

• Culture: You’re kidding, right?

The best thing about television is that it allows you to feel like you’re doing something, while actually doing nothing. Since I’m openly lazy, I don’t need that.

Schwinn re-introduces the Sting-Ray. We all had one; most wish we still did.

The folks at Flickr have released a Flash app called Organizr. It’s basically a nice interface for creating photo “sets”, searching, browsing and whatnot. Interesting that they worked pretty hard to make the Flash app look like an HTML app.

The notable thing here is that Organizr is built easily on top of the existing Flickr API, which is documented here for everyone to use.

Thomas Pynchon for newbies says…

“So, at first it appears that the book is chock full of sudden and arbitrary jumps in chronology and location interlarded with strange song and dance numbers or bouts of weird sex or whatever.”

A year or two ago, many bloggers would list the books they were reading somewhere on their blogs, usually near a blogroll or other typical weblog whathaveyou. This practice seems to have fallen out of favor. It’s a shame, because that was a great way of discovering new things to read. In an effort to revive the practice, I’ve decided to list recently, currently or about to be read books. You’ll find the list over there on the left somewhere.

And please, if you know of something that should be there but isn’t post a comment or email me and let me know.

Apparently, you can be barred from the Olympic games for drinking the wrong brand of bottled water. It’s true, but it’s bullshit.

“Strict regulations published by Athens 2004 last week dictate that spectators may be refused admission to events if they are carrying food or drinks made by companies that did not see fit to sponsor the games.”

Soul Caliber fans should love this: Voldo gets his thang on to Nelly’s Hot in Herre. Supposedly everything is from actual game play. Stay with it, it gets pretty funny toward the end.

Here’s a pretty thorough Web standards checklist

Grab the PDF version from the site, print it and hang it in your cube.

Finally, Bryan picks up his blogging stick and starts pounding away at it. Calling it slice of life, he is posting tiny slivers of photos all stacked together in a sort of cross-section of specific events.

Neat concept, but I’ve gotta learn to stop frantically clicking on each slice, cursing and hoping to see more of what look to be interesting shots.

This is the first example I’ve seen of taking the Netflix concept and applying to other goods. In this case handbags.

Someday we might just rent everything that way.

“What are you wearing to the show Saturday night?”

“Dunno, I’ll have to check my queue.”