Slashdot has an offensive write-up on a decent NYT article on the surgeon general's report on m ental health. Public perception of mental illness is still several paradigm shifts behind modern understanding, and this kind of thing is only counterproductive. I don't mean to be hypersensitive, but given the current knowledge gap (in psychology, phil osophy), hypersensitivity is far more appropriate than flippantly promoting archaic attitudes. (Here's the full report.)

I've been wondering what the deal is--or rather, deals are--with Yahoo! these days. Now in addition to what looks like lots of ABC related media (ABC news streams and whatnot), there's a KMart shopping deal in the works. (Thanks Davenetics.)

Lots of shopping sites seem to have done lots of revamping for the holidays. While Yahoo!'s front page is still simple enough to be worthy of Yahoo!, that shopping portal stuff is right up there at the top. Shopping-related search results are also hi ghly touted. And I'm pleased to see Amazon.com has finally integrated their multi-step shopping pages with the rest of their (yet another) new design. (Still could use a few rearrang ements, but much nicer than the old pages that looked like raw HTML circa 1993...)

For my birthday-present-to-self for the year 2000 (Jan 11 if you care), I thought I'd order myself an XCam Anywhere. I cancelled the order a few hours later once I read up on the thing, though. The "wireless camera" actually has a 12-foot cable to a "sending station" that's the size of the receiving station and has to plug into the wall for power. (This is relatively obvious from the web site, I was just hasty.) I only wanted it for playing ar ound with in my studio apartment (cheezy video acquisition for multimedia, maybe a webcam), so it just doesn't make any sense in my case.

(FWIW, a Deja search for XCam brings up decent reviews of the thing in comp.home.automation. It sounds like if I had a use for the XCam Anywhere [surveillance/security seems a popular use], it might be a decent cheapo solution...)

I'm falling in love with Macromedia Flash via its demo version, so that'll probably be my birthday-present-to-self after all. ($99 academic price, can't be beat!) So why don't other programs (li ke Illustrator) use the Flash method of editing curves (with the arrow tool)? So much easier than splines (or whatever the hell those things are in Illustrator)...