onfocus

• NYT: Money Won’t Buy You Health Insurance
  "The truth is that individual health insurance is not easy to get." I second this. When I was a young, single, childless freelance developer I also found that insurance was difficult to get. I can't imagine what it would be like now that I'm older with a family. I'm lucky to have an awesome employer who provides insurance but we should fix this problem. [via rafe]

• Ryan Carver Photography
  Zen medium format photos by Ryan Carver. Nice to see his photos outside of Flickr. [via mathowie]
• How The Mainstream Media Stole Our News Story Without Credit
  Danny Sullivan on the unhappy relationship/different norms between blogs and the mainstream media. [via mneznanski]
• County Sin Rankings
  This site uses open health and crime data to rank your county on the seven deadly sins. [via anil]
• Chris Faust: Night Scenes
  Love these long exposure night landscapes--uniquely Midwestern.

• swissmiss at W+K studio this friday | Oct.9th
  It'd be great to hear her speak and the W+K space is cool.
• NYT: Bloggers Must Disclose Payments for Reviews
  "The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products." I wonder how many people they have dedicated to this. Because they're going to need more.

• Unicode table for you
  All Unicode characters in a handy table. Includes snowman. [via waxy]
• Cities that Think Like the Web
  "On May 21st, 2009 the City of Vancouver passed a motion that directed City Staff to begin sharing the data and information the city collects, to share this data in open standards and to place open source on an equal footing with proprietary software." [via cshirky]
• truthout: The Policy-Speak Disaster for Health Care
  Lakoff is brilliant. A move from calling health care reform the "public option" to "The American Plan" would help build support. We've been comparing our options with what Canada, UK, France, and other countries have, but we like things invented here.

• Performance tuning for ColdFusion applications
  Some good ways to improve ColdFusion application performance. Doing a lot of these already, but picked up a few new coding practices I should follow.
• Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
  Umberto Eco on the features of Eternal Fascism. "In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism." [via MeFi]

• Flickr: The Official White House Photostream
  The White House is on Flickr with great photos.

• kottke: The country's new robots.txt file
  The new whitehouse.gov robots.txt file lets search engines and other bots roam free. This is a fantastic change, but I can't help wondering what they're hiding in the /includes/ directory. I want an open government with no disallows!
• Ask Metafilter: Does the president need to take the oath of office?
  Fun discussion overthinking the timing of the President's oath of office with some nice historic trivia thrown in for good measure.

• National Park Service Interpretive Development Program
  internal documents from the National Park Service that detail how to develop National Park activities, interpretive media, and "informal" dialogue. [via sterling via IDEA]
  filed under: design, education, government

Update: Removed! I knew I should have mirrored it as soon as I saw it. I guess the National Park system doesn't want to share their methods with other competing park systems? I'd love to know more about how our National Parks are put together, and their methods could probably influence other fields. This decision is disappointing.

Update 2: huh, maybe it's just me. MojoMark was able to grab a copy of the site for me.

• Craigslist: An ideal model for Internet Governance
  paper suggesting "decentralized governance and user accountability as a means of governing the Internet." [via craigblog]
  filed under: academy, government, internet, psychology, community

• NASA - Strange Moonlight
  "The Harvest Moon of 2006 rises on October 6th, and if you pay attention, you may notice a few puzzling things."
  filed under: astronomy
• Schneier on Security: Faulty Data and the Arar Case
  Judicial oversight is a security mechanism. It prevents the police from incarcerating the wrong person. The point of habeas corpus is that the police need to present their evidence in front of a neutral third party, and not indefinitely detain or torture
  filed under: government

• Glenn Greenwald: The legalization of torture and permanent detention
  "...we are now about to vest in the President the power to order anyone -- U.S. citizen, resident alien or foreign national -- detained indefinitely in a military prison regardless of where they are -- U.S. soil or outside of the country." [via MeFi]
  filed under: government, history, law, life
• This Old Network: Ze Frank is manipulating our lizard brains
  how new media stars like Ze Frank might be using media theory to connect with (manipulate?) audiences [via kottke]
  filed under: academy, media
• HoboCopy
  looks like an interesting backup program that doesn't require you to shut down apps
  filed under: software, productivity
• The Bulletin: Media have retreated from political coverage
  the Bend Bulletin reports that local political coverage is all but dead in Oregon. [via OMI]
  filed under: media, politics, oregon