Lance Bass: making a

Lance Bass: making a complete mockery of international space exploration.

The singer also set a space program record for the most frequent use of the word "amazing" - 41 times during Thursday's hourlong press conference, by NASA's count. According to Bass, it's been an amazing week at NASA with an amazing space crew and an amazing international mission. "It's going to be amazing," he added.

Is it too much to ask for some IQ requirements for anyone wanting to leave the earth?

The BBC is running

The BBC is running an incredible photo essay on what happens to old electronic equipment. Much of it has ended up in Chinese recycling shops where children work all day sorting computer chips and where the toxic metals are dumped in drainage ditches at the side of the road.

The sad thing is, many people in first world countries have grown used to upgrading their electronics every few years even though their old equipment is just fine. How many cell phones will an average person go through in a lifetime? How often does a single bad chip cause people to go out and buy an entirely new computer? Probably more often than you'll ever know. I've seen people buy new computers simply because the old system had a virus that they didn't know how to get rid of.

Worst of all, hardware and software vendors have us believing that we must keep up with Moore's law. As the industry continues to produce faster chips and flashier software to keep itself in business, we consume more and more electronics to keep up with the Joneses.

The worst offenders are some of the operating system vendors. Microsoft's Windows 98 was a minimal upgrade to Win95. And WinMe was similarly weak. Yet each successive system required more resources to keep it running smoothly. The truth is that you don't need a 1GHz processor and the latest version of an operating system to check your email and surf the Web. I just spent the past week reviving an old Pentium 200MHz computer that I had put away in the closet two years ago. With Linux now on it, it runs fine--and fast.

I shouldn't be pointing fingers, though. I've owned close to 10 computers in my lifetime. Fortunately, many of them have been passed around between family members or stripped for parts until they no longer had anything left in them. But I couldn't tell you where all of them ended up. One of them, thanks to my father, went to two young boys in a low-income family. Many of the other systems are probably now in junkyards or landfills or somewhere else where they take up space and will eventually leak their chemicals into the environment.

The point? Don't dump your old electronics. Install Linux on your computers, put your cell phones up for sale on eBay, and consider donating to charities that are often happy to have a computer (as opposed to the fastest computer). Technology doesn't always do good. Sometimes it ends up ruining places you can't see.

When photojournalists fall into

When photojournalists fall into traps: this photo of Bush could not have been more planned by his PR people.

What the hell? While

What the hell? While researching a new mobile phone at Half.com, I received the following "recommendation":

If you like Sanyo SCP-6200 you may also enjoy: Memoirs of a Geisha, Corelli's Mandolin, and The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood.

Gee, it's like they're right there in my mind...

We chose a photographer

We chose a photographer today. For the wedding. We were in the middle of negotiating the price of the negatives when I realized that I have begun to see things through my children’s eyes. They’re not born yet—far from it. But it’s clear that this search for the perfect photographer, the perfect mix of color and black-and-whites, the perfect tradeoff between photojournalistic candids and posed formals: these things aren't for myself.

The last time I fought so hard over negatives was in 1998 in Mumbai. It was the first time my brother and I had seen our mother’s photos and maybe it was the heat or or the claustrophobia of the ten-by-ten apartment that had reduced us to haggling over the few remaining records of her life like tourists in a street market. Take the reception prints if you want them, but the wedding negatives are mine. Years later, in San Francisco, I would work for hours in the four-by-six closet that I had converted into a darkroom, slowly suffocating as print after print turned up grainy and scratched.

If I repeated the cycle and died just years after my kids were born, what would they have? What tangible things would their forensics uncover? There’s the heartfelt note that only a high school boy could write in his girlfriend’s yearbook. It still makes me blush to think of it. There are the articles I’ve published. And all the stories I didn’t publish. A shoebox full of vacation photos. And the wedding album. And the negatives that we almost couldn't afford because they were $200 too much.

These days I often find myself wondering what, if one of my kids should one day became a writer, would she have to work from? How would she end the sentence that begins "My father was…"? My father was always searching for something.

It’s morbid, but so is life insurance, and we still need to figure that out, too.