What on earth? This story from the Washington Post and courtesy of the American Street referring over to the Center for American Progress. Seems that a Bushie administration employee who is/was part of the team that attends and/or briefs/used to brief administration members about spin tactics and dealing with media - well, he left his papers at a local Starbucks. Quel horror! But wait - yeah! Someone found them. But wait - there's more! This person passed them on to the Center for American Progress in the spirit of public interest, you might say. And the Center has made these available on .pdf. You don't have to "download" to your computer, just click on the link supplied below and it will show up for you using your Acrobat Reader. verrrrrrrry interesting.

"As most of America slept early last Sunday morning, the Bush administration hustled and bustled to prepare for the Sunday morning talk shows – among others Colin Powell was appearing on "Face the Nation" and Donald Rumsfeld was booked on "Fox News Sunday." Condoleezza Rice was not scheduled to appear until prime time, when she would make a star appearance on CBS' "60 Minutes" – the last in a long line of media appearances that caused 9/11 Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste to quip that "Condi Rice has appeared everywhere but at my local Starbucks."

Well, others in the Bush administration did, apparently, make an appearance at the local Starbucks. And as the Washington Post reports today, one of them – obviously readying himself to prep Defense Secretary Rumsfeld – left his notes on the table. Talking points, hand-written notes on spin tactics that reveal the White House was worried about former Bush adviser Richard Clarke's charges, and a hand-drawn map to the Secretary's house were found by a resident of DuPont Circle, who made them available to the Center for American Progress. The name of said resident is being withheld at his request, as he fears that he may be accused on national television of being "disgruntled."

See this site featuring advocacy for eldercare, disability care and dependent care:
Eldercare and Disability Forum
Mother Bears gotta do what Mother Bears do best!

Sand
Oh yeah, another distraction for this ADD webauthor, ha ha! Try out the variations of the eyecandy/game to enjoy a bit of fun with a simple java application. No need to install anything. Also see the Shared Painter link: when you draw on the text area, you may see other "users" also working on the same image as you.

Text-Image Tool
Use this online generator to transform images into a text version in 1's and 0's. Change the background to colors and also the image itself. Pretty samples too. Now I've got to find the best method to save my creations to printable format.

SharpReader
My vote for the easiest and delightful news aggregator around! You have to make sure you have the .NET framework from Windows, but the site will give you a download link for it. Easy to do that, and then download the program. Once I was done with these steps (ten minutes, tops) I opened up the RSS Reader and suscribed to RSS feeds of my fav sites and blogs. Does not have to be blogs-only: will open up any site with an RSS or Atom feed. For example I've got this blog suscribed, two on blogger, numerous IT and Tech blogs, and the essential Shifted Librarian. Imagine reading Gary Price's Resourceshelf quickly and knowing when he's got quick updates for his site and weekly newsletter.

To use the SharpReader, you will be able to connect to the Net right through the icon on your desktop, or do what I did and copy the icon to the Quick Launch toolbar. Even when I am not online I can open it up and read away. Choose to read the new posts in a plain text in the split panel of the reader, or double-click on the post title for the RSS feed and you will go directly to the full webpage in all it's graphic glory.

Last but not least:
Laughed my butt off today when I found these links to photoblogs about "handwritten notes". Kudos to Laura Holder for posting the link in her photoblog at http://www.fotolog.net. There are at least 5 gallery's in the links for the handwritten blogs. Look for the U-Haul truck, too. The Museum of Handwritten Sign