Susan's not up for re-election this year; her colleague, Olympia Snowe, is.

If you aren't using script blockers, any page on English Wikipedia will come up and then immediately be replaced by a blacked-out page explaining the protest.

Ubersoft.net is blacked out as well, although theirs isn't actually black.

Incidentally, while Geekculture.com and Joy of Tech are blacked out, the After-Y2K page (some of us still dream) isn't.

Damn... why did it strip my link? Hope Diamond ref: http://postalmuseum.si.edu/museum/1d_Hope_Diamond.html .

That's what Registered Mail is for... it not only generates a paper trail, it also gets special-security handling (as in, they lock it in a safe for the interval between you handing it in at the desk and it needing to be sorted, etc.) Plus, Registered Mail is an international standard so the benefits are supposed to apply when sending to any UPU member state (although I'm not going to venture a guess as to what might have happened to the wad of cash you may have sent to that nice man in Nigeria). If it was good enough to carry the Hope Diamond, it's probably going to get your negotiable bearer bonds there in one piece.

I knew they were no longer pushing (sorry) the iDEN PTT network in their ads, but have they actually turned it off?

IIRC, the early-generation SX-70 films, back in the Garner/Hartley era when they took 10 minutes for the image to fully appear, had the same caveat regarding protecting the image from ambient light. My uncle used to lay them face-down on the table while they developed.

I made a tax payment to my city recently, and found that they are now adding a surcharge for credit card payments, essentially to recoup the discount fee (not sure if they add it for debit card transactions as well, as I didn't use one for that particular payment). There was no similar charge for using checks.

"Weblog"

Remember that word? It was coined to provide a generic noun for this sort of site that appeared where people linked to, and wrote about and commented on, things they browsed on the web. One of the sites that it was used to describe, of course, was Slashdot, back in those early days of no logins and The Glorious MEEPT! and Ogg the Open-Source Caveman and TacoHell if you knew how to find it and hot grits (Natalie Portman, naked and petrified, came along slightly later). Of course, the word was quickly shortened to "blog" and now everyone knows what it is, but slashdot was here first! For better or worse, CmdrTaco, in this space and using your own widely-criticized software, you were --and will always be-- one of the inventors of the blog. As Felix Unger used to say, "Let it be on your head!"

Good luck, Rob. May you always be the person your dog believes you to be.

Not to mention that Judas Priest appeared on American Idol.