Ballad of the Cantaloupe

This being my first blog post as a fully-employed college grad, I wrung my hands for a couple months trying to figure out the perfect ramble.

And then, I found it. It was perfect.

I left work at the butt-crack of dawn a couple weeks ago and found a cantaloupe sitting forlornly on the bench at the front of my apartment complex.

I am the melon. The melon is me. Teeheehee. Yeah, not very sharp stuff popping into my head, but it was 6 in the morning. I snapped a few shots and then drove off to work.

When I came back for lunch, the cantaloupe was gone. Ah, woe is me.

Look twice

CNN posted an interesting story about the recording industry's plummeting sales. In the last decade, sales dropped by over $7 billion. The RIAA laments that free, unauthorized digital copies of songs are to blame. Ah, so the blame game continues. Yet, there's not solid proof that the music industry is indeed losing revenue because of illegal downloading and piracy. Something to think about...

Anyway, what really got me is the graph that accompanies the report. The scale starts at $6 billion and goes up by increments of $3 billion. That's a cut scale that doesn't accurately show the data. Instead, it makes it look as though sales have plunged to near zero. It hasn't! Step up, CNN, and don't be lazy.

Koreans win world-wide texting contest

According to an article from the Seoul Journal, the champions of the last two international texting competitions hail from Korea. These crazy kids text while they walk, eat, study... In fact, they'd rather text than talk. And I thought I was anti-social.Interesting article. While it does include insight from the champs' parents, it wryly points out that those "old folks" are just as busy texting.

Keeping information "private" on Facebook

The New York Times put out a great article outlining the new settings Facebook users should pay attention to. Now users can control who sees their status updates and even how individual people see their profiles. It not only tells readers what the new settings are, but how to find them, change them and what each option means. The article even has step-by-step directions. So check out your settings and make sure those steamy photos of you on your 21st won't make it on someone's blog.

And yes, "everyone" means, like, the entire world... even the FBI or some random stalker pervert out in bufu.

Illinois updates Freedom of Information Act

It's quite lovely. The updated Illinois Freedom of Information Act went into law this month. Here are some significant differences:

• Public bodies or officials must respond within 5 business days (instead of seven)


• Time limits on their responses can be extended by no more than 5 business days (instead of seven)


• Section on redaction (the blocking out of information) was repealed

Those aren't all the updates. I just happened to notice them when I was reading through it while working on a project for friend. Go see it for yourself.

Those Fuzzy Numbers...

CNN came up with an interesting way to track how stimulus money was spent. It looks like a clean, simple and interactive approach. Guess the auto industry bailout was smaller than I realized...