• The “Blogger Code of Conduct”
• Don Imus’ racial slurs
• Anna Nicole’s baby-daddy

You’re welcome.

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The Been There Clearing House is “an informal clearinghouse in which individuals offering in-kind donations and individuals in need can connect.” You can read the stories of those affected by the recent storms, donate or request goods, or adopt a family.

These stories are starting to get less media coverage now (except for some of the finger-pointing), but there are still many, many people who need help. Please spread the word about the clearinghouse. And be sure to visit the site and see if there’s something you can send to someone in need.

When Emily (one of the clearinghouse founders) contacted me about converting their site to WordPress, I really wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure how. I forwarded her request to the wordpress-hackers mailing list, and she quickly had a couple of volunteers helping with the move. I’ve been able to help with a couple of minor details since then. It’s good to know that the WordPress community has a part in getting help to people who need it.

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After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn’t quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. [...] And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon, so you can get a head start now.

I’m guessing that it won’t be long before we start seeing user stylesheets and GreaseMonkey hacks for customized Slashdot viewing.

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After almost 8 years, Slashdot’s HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS…

I can’t bring up the Slashcode site right now (they slashdotted themselves!), but I’m betting that they’ll see a pretty substantial bandwidth savings when all is said and done.

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But I also have some second cousins and such who live(d?) in Mississippi, mainly around Biloxi and Gulfport. The last we heard, one of my great aunts was heading up towards Jackson. We haven’t heard from her or any of our other relations in that area since last weekend. We’re hoping that they just don’t have a way to get in touch yet, and that they’re all safe.

A gentleman at our office is collecting supplies for victims of Katrina. He, in turn, will be passing them to another person, who has a box trailer which she is going to fill up with supplies and drive down to the Gulf Coast area. Susan and I packed up two boxes and a baby bag full of baby clothes, diapers, formula, bottled water, bottles, nipples, and other baby necessities. We can only hope that these things can help in some small way. We’re also going to make a cash donation to relief efforts, probably through a local television station that’s doing a joint Red Cross/Salvation Army collection. And as soon as I can, I’m going to donate blood.

Here in Metro Atlanta, the worst we’ve seen are short-term gasoline shortages, skyrocketing gasoline prices, and reports of people trying to steal gasoline from cars in parking lots. My mom says that there’s no gasoline to be found in the Gulf Shores area right now, and that grocery stores are starting to run low on a lot of staple items. In New Orleans, the Mississippi coast, and the surrounding areas, things are much, much, worse.

The last time that this country suffered a major disaster, people pulled together, unified. But in this emergency, we’re horrified to hear reports of looting, car-jackings, shots fired at rescue helicopters (!?!), and worse. How is it that some people in the midst of such a situation become nothing more than animals? No, worse than animals. I don’t know what to say. I try not to think about that aspect of things, and concentrate instead on the efforts of those who are trying to make things better. If you haven’t already done something to help, do so. Even a small donation to relief efforts will do some good.

• Give.org’s list of Katrina Relief Organizations
• KatrinaHelp Wiki

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• Confirmed: Water on Mars! (that image is my new desktop background)
• Space Shuttle Discovery returns safely
• Google News offers feeds
• IE 7 really will fix lots of CSS bugs (I’m curious to see what’s going to happen on pages that currently use lots of hacks to work around bugs in other versions of IE)
• Firefox Tip: pasting multi-line URLs

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House and Senate negotiators on an energy bill agreed to begin daylight-saving time three weeks earlier, on the second Sunday in March, and extend it by one week to the first Sunday in November.

I. Hate. Daylight. Savings. Time.

First of all, it’s an outmoded idea. Second of all, am I the only one that’s annoyed by the idea of it still being light outside at 9:00 p.m.? Or by it being dark outside at 7:00 a.m.? (at least, that’s how it is here on the western edge of the Eastern timezone).

On the bright side (no pun intended), I suppose it could fuel another surge of programming work, a la Y2K, whereby corporations are forced to spend billions of dollars in order to update all their software to accomodate the new schedule for time changes. Hurray for job security. I think.

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One of the world’s most famous fables faces a serious financial test in two weeks’ time when 100 international athletes plunge into Loch Ness - each insured for £1m against monster bites.

[...]Not everyone welcomes the insurance deal, though. The official Loch Ness Monster Fan Club took exception to the suggestion that Nessie would attack anyone - however much they splashed.

The club’s chairman, Gary Campbell, said: “Everyone knows she is friendly; she has been present in the loch for centuries and never hurt a soul in all that time.

(via: BoingBoing)

Auto insurance get up to 5 free quotes

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