At the age of 74, Fred Rogers passed away on Thursday from stomach cancer. No matter how cynical, sarcastic or snobbish I might come across in my other posts, I intend none of that when I say that I find his death to be indescribably sad. With the late, great Jim Henson gone as well, losing Mr. Rogers makes childhood seem that much more irretrievable.

There’s not all that much that’s surprising about “Dark Blue,” but there’s enough to recommend it beyond its inevitable, shortcut-to-video fate. To start with, like so many Kurt Russell enterprises, the movie’s star delivers more earnestness and hard work than can rightly be expected from an actor that’s been in the business for forty years and yet still always seems to be only on the verge of a major breakthrough.

The music video for “We Know Something…” from DJ Format is probably one of the most entertaining videos I’ve seen in a long time — it’s both a catchy tune and a visual hoot. Directed and produced by Ruben Fleisher, this furry romp through Los Angeles employs neither flashy camera tricks nor digital-age effects/editing, and yet it’s also remarkably fresh and fun enough to make me want to watch it twice.

While at the dog park this weekend, I took a bad spill on the unkind accumulation of ice and slush lingering from last week’s blizzard, and did something nasty to my ankle. Now, my walk has taken on a charming, hobbling quality and I can barely get from one end of the apartment to the other, much less across town to the office. Luckily the local kennel has a pick-up and drop off service, and Mister President goes wild for the place. In the meantime, I’ve spent most of the past two days re-watching DVDs (with a limp, I can’t even get to the video store to rent new flicks) ordering in food and browsing the Web.

Today I finally mailed out my compilation for Squat, a CD swap club of which I’m a charter member. Way back in the early days, like February 2002, the whole concept of a CD swap club — in which a small group of people each assemble their own compilation of rockin’ tunes, burn it to CD, and mail a copy to each of the other members — was rare and novel. I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure our club’s founder was one of the very first pioneers in the concept.

This definitely falls into the category of minutiae, but I was fascinated by this recent, very subtle refinement to Mac OS X’s Aqua interface. After upgrading the operating system on my PowerMac G4 to version 10.2.3, I noticed that the window controls — the close, minimize and zoom buttons in the upper-left hand corner — have recessed ever so slighly.

I’ve written about Francis Lam’s wonderful little world at db-db.com before, about how it’s an impressive feat of Flash engineering combined with some interesting ideas about online communities. Lam has just rolled out a beta release of db-db version 4, and with it he manages to outdo himself.

Congratulations to Tom Ridge, who now has two items on his list of ‘Things I’ve Done While Serving as Secretary of Homeland Security’: Along with ‘Create a mind-numbingly stupid color-coded warning system,’ he can now add, ‘Launch a Web site.’

  Yesterday I meant to write a little something about the record-breaking snowstorm that dumped about two feet of powder on New York City. Before I did that though, I had to get that Google-Blogger merger blogged for the sake of timeliness, and after that the day ran away with me.

Everybody says it’s a marriage made in heaven: Google has bought Pyra. The Web’s favorite search engine, which by some accounts handles as much as 70% of all searches, will now own the pioneering and still-leading Blogger.com service, the single most visible enabler of blogs anywhere.

This past Wednesday on the Senate floor, Senator Robert Byrd — Democrat of West Virginia, reformed KKK member and self-styled ‘Dean of the Congress’ — made an impassioned, powerful speech against the impending war on Iraq and the generally disastrous policies of the Bush Administration. It’s the speech that I’ve been waiting to hear for months and months, and yet it’s also the speech Democrats have avoided with determined obstinance, like schoolkids afraid of getting ostracized by the cool crowd.

You’ve got a credibility problem when Business Week — which, to paraphrase “The Insider,” is not exactly a bastion of anti-capitalist sentiment — cries foul over the numbers you use to blame your industry’s poor health on digital piracy. The music business, as embodied by the universally loathed Recording Industry of America, has just that kind of problem, as evidenced in Business Week journalist Jane Black’s scathing examination of their claim that the devastating 7.2% drop in CD sales for the first six months of 2002 can be laid squarely at the feet of, well, you and your damn computer.

Some of the brightest animation today is being done out of the Nexus offices in London. Most recently and prominently, they were responsible for the titles for Steven Spielberg’s unexpectedly likable feature film “Catch Me If You Can.” Their Flash 6-based Web site is also a thing of beauty.

Konfabulator is a great example of why it’s worth owning a Macintosh. This Swiss army knife-style software is a JavaScript runtime engine that allows for quick, easy development of beautiful ‘widgets,’ which can do everything from display the time or weather, to rotate your iPhoto pictures, to allow remote control of your iTunes library. The software takes advantage of Mac OS X’s powerful rendering engine to gorgeous effect — the widgets are edgeless and shadowed and often transparent.

This history of ClarisWorks is an engaging foray into the pre-dotcom era, when a software startup might have begun with the development team moving in together to save on rent. Bob Hearn, one of the program’s two original authors, recounts the ups and downs of trying to kick Microsoft’s pants, and working with the legendarily and myopically purist Claris Corporation with sober, touching hindsight.

The silver lining in the impending Gulf War sequel is its tremendous satiric potential. This send-up of the Star Wars Episode II poster is completely on the mark and hilarious. At idelworm.com, you can play the Gulf War as a Flash game, loaded with some pretty cute illustrations. And then there’s this grim visual one-liner for all the Tolkien fans in the house.

Okay, four freaking months later, I’ve decided I have to get back to blogging. Too much time has passed and there’s just been too much minutiae and trivia and inconsequentially esoteric tidbits that I’ve missed out on recording in my private little corner of the Web. This site is a mess though, and I need to sort out lots of design issues, but the posts are going to resume all the same.