My girlfriend's team won the Media Mash contest at this year's Italian Fest in Collinsville, Il. Local newspapers form teams to squeeze as much juice as possible within the time limit.

Other good happenings:

• Obama at the Caseyville labor rally
• Bonfire after bonfire
• Biking

Jared Tarbell of Complexification and Levitated has unveiled four new pieces of work:

• Substrate
• Intersection Aggregate
• Node Garden
• Sand Traveler

Music of the mycelium
Couple make music with fungus

Fran and Jacques Soddell of La Trobe University, Bendigo have put their microbiology and computing skills together to produce unique microbe music, building on earlier work by Fran who used a computer "language" called L-systems (Lindenmayer Systems) to model the growth of filamentous microbes.

Disney Meets Darwin uses artificial life to evolve funny motions for animated characters. The Animation Lab starts off with a generation of stumbling characters, from which the parents for the next generation are selected.

fijuu

fijuu is a 3D, audio/visual performance engine. Using a game engine, the player(s) of fijuu dynamically manipulate 3D instruments with PlayStation2-style gamepads to make improvised music. The suite of instruments in fijuu will include a non-linear beat pattern sequencer, granular synthesis tools and a graphical filterbank.

Last week, some friends were watching old security tapes from their nights working together at the local video store, looking for the "phantom pooper incident." Instead, they found a tape from Sept. 11, 2001. Nearly every conversation between themselves and with customers was about the attacks.

Why not construct a documentary from these tapes; thousands must be out there. I can't imagine a more accurate document of the public's reaction to that day.

I'll be upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 this weekend. I need to modernize the architecture with categories, search, and non-popup comments. Not to mention compatibility with MT-Blacklist; I've been getting around ten spam comments a day for the last month.

Another MT Plugin that I'm excited about is KoalaRainbow. It's a visualization engine that can interpret your weblog data into informative graphics. See some examples. This plugin would be a great way to implement Tufte's Sparkline concept.

WordPress is an option, of course. I've installed it on four client websites so far, and I've been impressed with some of its features. My favorite is the access levels for users: I deploy the software for the client with myself as the administrator, configure it, and then can set up low-level accounts for their employees that only let them post and edit articles. The big problem for me is how inflexible the software can be; it seems like I'm always hacking around the way WordPress thinks things should be done.