I posted some more political-coverage links earlier today on http://election2000.editthispage.com/. If you're a U.S. citizen of voting age, you might be interested.

Thanks to rc3 for the pointer to Who Owns What, a directory of major corporations and which outlets for expression they control. Lots of connections that you wouldn't otherwise guess.

Things I had no idea were true:

• Disney owns 6 different radio stations in the Twin Cities area. Who needs 6 radio stations in one city?
• The company that owns the Discovery Channel and the Learning Channel also owns 15 newspapers and the Excite@Home cable modem service, and 4 or more radio stations in each of 9 cities. (Cox Enterprises)
• Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. (CNHI) owns 197 newspapers.
• The Wall Street Journal and CNBC are owned by the same company. Oh, and they own 20 other newspapers too. (Dow-Jones & Company)
• GE not only owns NBC and MSNBC but also A&E and The History Channel. Hey, I thought CNBC was related to NBC...guess not.

Due to ABC's insistence on using its time slot for several months to launch another show, it feels like NYPD Blue (9:00pm Central) was canceled last year and has been brought back. Finally there are new Blue episodes, tonight and every Tuesday for a while.

Also, Sports Night (8:30pm Central, also on ABC) sounds like it'll be extra-good tonight.

Thanks to Laurel's TV Picks for the reminders...

I've been feeling constrained by the size of the hard drive in my blue G3 Mac (6GB), but haven't wanted to buy a second internal drive for it when I could theoretically buy an external USB or (better yet) FireWire-based drive that would be trivial to move from Mac to Mac in the future. Unfortunately, external FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE 1394) hard drives have been over-the-top expensive since they've been introduced.

Thanks to a report on Macintouch, I've found a more-reasonably-priced drive: the BellStor Eclipse drive, 10 GB for $280. I don't need extreme portability, so it's fine with me that it's full-height and requires external power. I also don't need high-end SCSI-level performance; roughly 9MB/second is plenty fast for me. Once I get some more cash on hand, I think the Eclipse will be next on my list.

Also according to Macintouch, the distributed.net folks have released an RC5 client that takes advantage of the PowerPC G4's Altivec ("Velocity Engine") unit. Quoth the press release: "...a single G4 can outperform not one but two of the latest Pentium IIIs, all without breaking a sweat."

Cool. Now I just need a PowerMac G4...I'll probably wait till the fall, when MacOS X and the 500+ MHz models are out.

Might not post here again for a few days; got lots of work to fit in. I will try to keep election2000 updated, but no promises...