More vacation photos are up in the gallery. Also, while Tim and I were waiting for everyone else to show up for laser tag today, we played a few games of Makoto.

Early screenshots of Starcraft - If you're a Starcraft fan like I am, then you may enjoy looking through these screenshots and descriptions from alpha and beta versions of Starcraft.

(via Digg.com)

We drove from Adrian, MO, to Cottleville, MO, today. We're staying with our friends, Tim and Angie. We met their new son, Isaac. He's a cute little guy, and very tiny. I can barely remember when Emma was that small.

Bad Album Covers - More mustaches than you can shake a gospel axe at.

(via Digg.com)

Bush Appoints Bolton as U.N. Envoy, Bypassing Senate - New York Times President Bush invoked the seldom-used recess appointment because he wasn't able to get the Senate to confirm his nominee to the United Nations. Several Senators were requesting files on Bolton's service, but the White House refused to release them. From the article:

The appointment brought to a close a five-month standoff between the White House and Senate Democrats, who had held up Mr. Bolton's confirmation over accusations that the former undersecretary of state for arms control had manipulated intelligence to conform to his hawkish ideology and had bullied subordinates.

Democrats were also angry about the refusal of the White House to turn over documents related to Mr. Bolton's service at the State Department as well as his caustic comments about the United Nations in recent years. At one point, Mr. Bolton said that several floors of its headquarters could be lopped off without being missed.

This is really too bad. Bolton is not the right person for this job. His behavior in the past has been anything but diplomatic. The fact that Bush couldn't get his nominee properly confirmed is just one more indication that his second term is not going so well.

Search giant Yahoo! recently bought Konfabulator and their first order of business was to get rid of the $19.95 charge and start giving it away for free. I've been using the Dashboard for Mac OS X, which is by all accounts copied from Konfabulator, and I think I like Konfabulator better. One reason is that it's available for Windows, too, so I can set up my widgets at work to match my widgets at home and have some sort of continuity. Another reason to prefer Konfabulator is that you can do all sorts of thing with the widget windows. You can make them part of the desktop, you can make them always on top or you can set them so they're only visible when you display the widget layer with Konsposé (press F8 and all the widgets become visible and the background is obscured). I've been trying out widgets, and here are some of my favorites so far:

Radar - Nice, resizable weather maps
systemDashboard - Memory Monitor - Monitor memory and hard drive free space
Multi clock - Who doesn't want an old-timey pocket watch on their desktop?
THCalc - Nothing special, just a calculator

Those, along with the weather forecast and calendar widgets that come pre-installed, are what I'm using now. If you have some other widgets you like, leave a comment and I'll try them out.

NewsForge | Five addictive open source games - I think these look pretty good. Would anybody be interested in trying out jRisk or netPanzer? They might be fun to play online. I submitted this link to digg.com, digg it here.

I finished Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix this morning and I started Watchmen over lunch. I liked the Harry Potter book and I'm looking forward to reading the newest one. I still think book three is my favorite so far. Watchmen will be the first graphic novel I've ever read. Some people say it's the best one ever written, so if I don't like it, then I'll know that I'm probably not going to like any comics. If I do like it, however, then chances are I may not ever find one I like better. So either way, it's downhil from here.

While I was setting up the Brendoman.com Guestmap, I noticed that Google Maps now has Adrian, MO, in high-resolution. Check out the Brendoman.com Guestmap and leave a marker where you live, along with your name, a note and a link to your website if you have one. I think it would be fun to see all of our readers mapped out.

Russia's Biggest Spammer Brutally Murdered in Apartment - I don't know what to say. Murder is not the solution to this problem, but who can honestly say that they haven't ever wanted to whack a spammer in the head with a blunt object?

(via Slashdot)