Today's Shared Google Reader Items, 11/18

I'm back in Austin. Well, I technically have been for over 24 hours now, but now I'm back and nearly settled back in. I still have 103 105 107 unread items in my Google Reader (which gives me an idea what those of you who are on my shared list go through), but I'm catching up. I think. Anyhoo, here are the shared items from the last few days:

• I haven't had a chance to use Lifehacker's Complete Guide to Speeding Up Your PC's Startup yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so. Mmmm, fast boots.
• Barack released his first YouTube weekly address. Just about everything about that sentence makes me smile.
• According to a study linked on Slashdot, unhappy people watch more TV. I've been happier overlapping with the time that I've watched less TV, but I can't figure out which came first.
• I can't wait to try my hand at making gummy candies. If that turns out well, I might cut out TV entirely.
• I grabbed this guide to liberating yourself from old email addresses mostly for McCarron (Yahoo mail as a primary? Seriously?? Do you like spam??), but I think I'll also use it to get rid of my own extras.
• This story about antimatter creation made me smile a lot. In a science fiction novel I just finished, a major plot point involved production of anti-matter. I'm pretty sure this discovery puts us ahead of where the author saw us in 2020.
• This video of the development of sand dollars linked at Pharyngula is amazing.
• Lieberman is still a "Democrat." Dammit. I almost would have prefered us having no chance at a filibuster-proof Senate. Now Lieberman gets to continue being more important than he should be.
• Speaking of filibuster-proof Senate chances, Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens has lost. Alaska didn't quite elect a convicted felon to the Senate. They just came very close. Of course, some of the outrage of that is silly. John Ashcroft lost a Senate race to a dead man, which I'm pretty sure makes you even more clearly inelligible for the Senate than being a convicted felon. I'm hoping at least some of the people voting for Stevens in Alaska were really voting for "whoever Caribou Barbie appoints to replace Stevens." Hmm, wait. I guess voting for the felon on purpose might be better.
• Microsoft is going to offer free anti-virus software starting late next year. This should be interesting. I agree with the idea in principle; having antivirus software on all PCs would cut down drastically on the spread of viruses. On the other hand, this pretty much spells the end of other antivirus program makers, and I can't imagine MS's free system will be very good without competition. My solution: people should start programming more viruses for Mac, to keep those other companies active.
• Firefox 3.1 is going to have tab tearing, a feature that I love on Google Chrome. I never noticed that it was missing in Firefox until I got in the habit of tearing off tabs in Chrome whenever I need to see things side-by-side, such as when I'm copying links from my shared items to my blog. If they can make 3.1 run for a whole afternoon without crashing, I might finally switch back.

That'll do it for today. Now off to work on some more of those unread items. As always, comment below so I know you're there!