Michelle that is. The FFL (future first lady) fine, maybe, will be posting regularly on Blogher about her experiences working on her husband's campaign. What can say, I mean genius obviously, on the part of Michelle in terms of strategic political spouses and on the part of those insanely effective ladies over at Blogher.

What if you lived by the largest body of fresh water in the world but could no longer afford to use it?

In Liz Miller’s video documentary “The Waterfront” residents of Highland Park, a struggling community on the shores of Lake Michigan are shown looking with distress at water bills in amounts between 3 and 9000 dollars.

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Years ago, Ned made me watch "It's a Wonderful Life" with him. As a Jew I have to say my taste in Christmas movies ran more to the comedic than the sentimentalm, but I watched it to please him.

Well, turned out that "It's a Wonderful Life" isn't about Christianity at all, it's about the (Eisenhower era) American Dream. A struggling everyday kind of guy, makes good despite hardship. In the style of the era he doesn't just make himself a success. He improves the lives of his townsfolk, his family and the world in general. More to the point, the struggle in It's Wonderful Life, is not spiritual, it's economic.

The hero of the film, George Bailey makes the biggest contributions to his hometown by keeping a building and loan society afloat during the depression, and starting Bailey Park, an affordable housing projects for the towns residents that opposes his arch-nemesis Potter's plans to exploit the town. Baileys crisis of faith comes when he loses the Building society's principle and becomes suicidal. His redemption - excepting the presence of the angel Clarence, arrives in the form of an economic reprieve. The townspeople, still overwhelmed with gratitude for Bailey's communitarian efforts raise enough money to keep his building society and his housing project afloat.

So the banks are failing stateside and unlike "It's a Wonderful Life" it looks like no-one is going to pull together and help each other through this one. Well, unless one counts government and insurance agency bail-outs, which is not exactly what "It's A Wonderful Life" suggests is the way that communities grow and prosper.

This being the last Wednesday before the iPhone’s (so insanely over-hyped) release in Canada I thought I’d cover the issues that surround the sleek little 3g hockey puck.

Okay now I have to go do a radio show about feminists and technology, who the fuck decided to become a pundit while she has a thesis to finish and some websites to design. Oh right me, I am a fyucking idjut.

I just fried both my external hard drives, at a time when there is about 5 gb of space left on my compy.

I think I fried both of them because I either; a/ used the wrong power source, or b/ plugged into an ungrounded socket or c/ both.

One hd holds all my archived data of about 5 years so if I were to get audited tomorrow the auditor would have a short job of it. The other holds all the videos I did this year for school.

I tried plugging in the second one, a second time, just to see if I could somehow coax it back to life and not only did I smell the burning, I saw a little plume of smoke curling up from it's silver casing.

Anyone know how to rescue data from hds that have suffered some vague electrical damage?