prod & ponder

One of my photos of the White House is being used as a graphic in the Charlie Rose show. It was a happy surprise, as I’m a long-time fan of the program. It’s been a real pleasure to find all the nice places where media I’ve put under creative commons licenses has shown up.

What to do in the icy, messy slush on Friday? Get a new car that can handle it, obviously. 2007 CRV. It’s my first Honda. I’ve owned some great performance cars (Mazda Miata and VW GTI) and a very capable off-roader (Nissan XTerra), so I’m not about to rave about either the CRV’s off or on-road performance, but it is remarkable how darn decent and capable the CRV seems to be at both.

Because I’m a sucker for good drama, believe that Cinderella Story may be the new black, and am beholden to the University System of Maryland for signing my paycheck, here’s my bracket: an all WMATA final with the Terps shocking everyone. It could happen. Fireproof your couches.

Amazon has partnered with Tivo so that you can “rent” movies from Amazon and have them delivered (downloaded within 15 minutes) directly to your Tivo. They’ll sit put on the Tivo for up to 30 days if untouched, but as soon as you view a film then it only stays put for an additional 24hrs before being deleted.

With that kind of media fuse, Crank seemed a natural first rental. And if it’s going to be like that, then Idiocracy is the natural follow up. (In my defense, they were free.)

So what if GMU shattered its glass slipper in the last minute of CAA championship play and the NCAA powers-that-be licked so much lead paint in their youth that they couldn’t see the obvious choice of inviting FSU to the dance. That’s not going to spoil my march madness fun (after enough beers to numb the pain).

So I’m running a March Madness brackets tournament. If you’re inclined to do the same (someone really ought organize a DC bloggers pool), Yahoo has an easy and free March Madness Tournament feature.

(3/12) Follow up good news: DCist has a March Madness tourney in the works.

In an earlier post I gave word count totals for President Bush’s last two State of the Union speeches. If you found that interesting, you’ll probably enjoy mulling over the NY Times’ infographic breaking down the counts from Bush’s ‘01-’07 SoTU addresses.

As another way of visually representing wordcounts, IBM’s free ManyEyes project just introduced tag/word cloud mapping as a data visualization option. To illustrate, here’s a word cloud for the Declaration of Independence: