Some non SOTU links:

• George: “Nothing like a little standoff in your apartment complex to add a little excitement to the afternoon.”
• New York Times: “The real question should be, is there such a thing as bad bacon?”
• Thomas Fitzgerald in the NYT rounds up wireless printing options. It’s getting easier to set up than it was three years ago.
• iTunes Music Store RSS Feed Generator. Word.

A quick roundup of SOTU links so that I can finally close this collection of tabs in my browser:

• Scott Rosenberg: “Every single senator, congressmen and dignitary who clapped at that moment was applauding the continued existence of the terrorist threat. ‘Hurray! The terrorists are here to stay!’ Not too bright.”
• The Independent (UK): “0: Number of funerals or memorials that President Bush has attended for soldiers killed in Iraq. 100: Number of fund-raisers attended by Bush or Vice-President Dick Cheney in 2003.”
• Oliver Willis: “That’s a big leap down from those sixteen words last time.”
• Southpaw: “Protecting the religious aspects of marriage is not the job of the president.”
• Molly Ivins: “Last year, Bush predicted a deficit of $262 billion. According of the CBO, the deficit is currently $480 billion. Bush plans to cut biomedical research, health care, job training and veterans funding, and that still leaves a projected deficit of $450 billion. It is unclear to me why anyone would believe anything the president says about our fiscal situation. Keep in mind, this is a man who took three Texas oil companies into bankruptcy.”
• Zogby International: 50% of Americans polled Jan 15–18 disapprove of President Bush’s job performance.
• Jake points to Moby’s deconstruction of the State of the Union: “'no child left behind' is a fairly decent program. too bad bush has actually cut funding to education in the 3 years he's been in office.”
• New York Times editorial board: “It is actually a cruel hoax to pretend that Washington can afford to do anything new, even with the modest grab bag of small new initiatives and familiar retreads suggested by the president. In that context, his decision last night to re-endorse the Social Security overhaul plan from his last campaign was terrifying.”
• Cheryl Jacques of the Human Rights Campaign on the President’s proposed constitutional marriage amendment: “In more than 200 years of American history, it has never been necessary to use the Constitution to deny basic rights.”

I started playing around with a Manila macro that I had had filed away on my to do list for a while, the viewNewsItems macro. It’s a pretty powerful macro, allowing you to take your content and slice and dice it chronologically and by news department (aka category), as well as changing the presentation.

The only problem was I couldn’t figure out how to get the date parameter limits working. Every date string I passed in seemed to be ignored. I finally realized that I needed to let Manila figure out the appropriate date format for itself. So instead of trying to figure out the appropriate date string format, I used the date verb instead:

{viewNewsItems (n:100, department:"Music", maxDate:date("12/31/2001"), minDate:date("1/1/2001"))}

It seems like every programming language I run into has the same issue about how to deal with date formats. Here the safest thing to do seems to be to use the programming environment’s typing capabilities rather than figure out how to format the string properly.

Good crowd out last night at the IAP young alum gathering. True to the title, most of the folks there were young alums—folks who had finished their undergrad degrees in 2002 or 2003. But I had some nice conversations with a few of them.

I also had a chance to talk with Don, Kumar, Peter, and a few other Sloan folks. Don is apparently “living the dream” and working on the startup thing. It was good to see everyone.