Tuesday news and views

There are days when all I really want to do is post links to interesting things and I'm terrible at coming up with headlines (and I used to have write headlines for a living!). So I've taken a cue from Brad who tends to post things under headings such as "Random" or "Monday Notes" or whatnot. Sure, "Tuesday news and views" doesn't tell you a lot, but then neither do most of my other titles. So, on to the stuff.

I found this at BoingBoing: Kissing seems to help allergy symptoms, specifically hay fever. This time of year, I have hay fever, so maybe I should try this. I'm sure Bob won't object. (The actual article.)

Today's Non Sequitur is hilarious. And a little too true.

A couple of good reads:
Jared at The Thinklings posted an excellent quote of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (from Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prison). It relates to living in this world and, as is usually the case with Bonhoeffer, it is likely to turn your thinking on its head.

Have you been trying to figure out what the emerging church is all about? Jordon Cooper has posted an excellent paper on the topic by Jared Siebert.

Want to waste some time? Here's something fun. Puzzle Bobble 0.9, which is actually a port to a Flash game of one of my favorite Super Nintendo games, Bust-a-Move. It's even got the cheesy calypso music. I used to be pretty good at this game. (This and Tetris were my favorites. I liked Super Mario Bros., but I was terrible at it. I died a lot.)

Here's a techie tidbit, at least if you're a Mac user. I found a productivity-type program (thanks to Macworld) called Quicksilver and it is the coolest thing. It's kind of hard to describe -- it's a launcher, but it's a lot more than that. I have such a huge amount of stuff on this computer that finding individual files involves a lot of scrolling. I get around that by using Hallon to bookmark the current projects I'm working on, but there are lots of times I need to hunt for something. Quicksilver lets me search for the folders and launch them or launch individual files or applications in a very easy, intuitive way. It also gets my right hand off the mouse and without having to learn a ton of keyboard shortcuts. Since I've upgraded to OSX 10.4 I've tried to use Spotlight, but it starts searching with the first letter you type in the box. This slows down the process enormously and returns lots of irrelevant results. Quicksilver gets around this issue and if I want to do a Spotlight search, I can type the term into Quicksilver and then copy and paste it into Spotlight. Another thing I like is that I can easily add tags to huge batches of files all at once. Quicksilver can do a lot more and I'm just beginning to get an idea of what I can do with it. There's a good number of online tutorials available and the links are on the Web site. It's also free, which is very good.