I’ve never liked Anderson Cooper (sorry, Brad). The squinty CNN anchor thinks he’s hip and oh-so-clever. But this interview with 13-year old surfer Bethany Hamilton, who survived a shark attack, is just inane. I can’t figure out who says “like” more.
Postfix Enabler
Postfix Enabler is a great little app that activates Panther’s built-in mail server. I was reading about this on Meg’s blog at just the right time. I work in consumer marketing for a wine importing agency, and a big part of my job is designing, writing and sending out email newsletters to our customers. Lately, a few ISPs (AOL and Cogeco) have been bouncing all our emails, claiming that our ISP is on a blacklist of spammers or at least of ISPs who allow open relaying (which assists spammers). This has devolved into a nasty political fight among ISPs which calls to tech support have been unable to solve. It’s been immensely frustrating to me since our list is an opt-in list and our messages are definitely not spam.
With this handy little program, I can use my local Mac as an SMTP server, allowing us to bypass our ISP completely. I’m a big hero in the office now!
Otto Is My Name…
Otto is hilarious. Otto writes letters to corporations and sometimes they write back. You should read about one-handed shampoo. (P.S. Otto is also the alter-ego of someone whom I’ve met.)
Winged Migration
Winged Migration (2001) is less a documentary than a visual poem about the beauty of flight. The film follows several species of migratory birds (ducks, geese, cranes, swans) on their flights and the experience is one of actually flying with the birds. It’s quite amazing, but would be more powerful as an IMAX film. If you have a big TV, rent it right away. Otherwise, wait for it to be on a large screen near you.
I also watched the “making-of” documentary (at 53 minutes, it’s almost as long as the 90 minute feature), and it kind of wrecks the illusion to find out that the birds are more akin to actors in a film than subjects in a documentary. That’s all I’ll say.
Rating: 8/10