Seattle gardeners will have to make do without Woodland Park Zoo Doo this fall. The composted animal droppings have been contaminated with the herbicide clopyralid. Zoo officials are blaming straw from Eastern Washington used to line cages. Zoo Doo is so popular that the zoo holds a lottery every spring and fall for appointments to buy it in bulk. They expect the spring crop to be clopyralid-free.

An acrylic chair alongside a mahogany dining table? “It’s a new day in home decorating.” The ’70s aren’t back (in this plastic furniture world anyway), but plastics have evolved their way into the realm of “fine” furnishings. There’s Kartell’s Louis Ghost Armchair by Philippe Starck, priced at $308. And custom furnishings such as lighting fixtures are even being ordered in acrylic. The look of that handy architectural element, the glass block, can now be found in acrylic. The plastic blocks are lighter, lending themselves to more applications, and easier to install. As the article points out, however, plastic still has the drawback of showing fingerprints. Maybe someone’s working on that.

Although I’m not a redhead, I can relate to the difficulty of finding makeup in the mainstream world. Cosmetics catering to the unique redhead complexion have begun to spring up. Black mascara need no longer weigh down reddish or even lighter eyelashes. Warm peach, pumpkin and brown tones are available to color the lips and cheeks of those with naturally auburn tresses or those who’ve had some red-pigmented help. And freckles need not be covered up.

A professor at RPI has created a three-layer reflective coating for LEDs which magnifies their output 20-30%. Hopefully the technology can be commercialized and further hasten the energy reduction brought on by replacing incandescents and flourescents with those efficient light emitting diodes. The coating, known as an omni-directional reflector (ODR), consists of a semiconductor, a dielectric material, and a silver layer. (via Buzzworthy)

It’s nearing the time for that phone book of a magazine called the September issue of Vogue. Rumor columns have it coming in at 850 pages (last year’s was 740), which is a pretty good sign for the economy. The split of ad to editorial is estimated at 620 pages of ads to 230 pages of editorial. Ann Taylor and Lancome are launching expensive ad campaigns in the September fashion mags.

Feta cheese is the Greek cheese; in northern Greece if the recipe just says “cheese” it means feta. This article looks at Bulgarian, French, and Israeli feta too. Originating from the Balkans, it’s impossible and pointless to say if the cheese came first from Bulgaria or Greece. It’s a recent product in France where sheep farmers began producing it to avoid flooding the Roquefort market. Israeli produces a quality product too, but of course the connoisseurs turn their noses up at anything except the Greek barrel-aged versions.

Will the existence of personalized PhotoStamps reduce the sales of “Love” stamps as more couples create a custom wedding stamp for their invitations? Trivia to keep an eye on.

The Queen Mary 2 is one of eight luxury cruise ships docking in Athens for the Olympic Games. Athens’ main port Piraeus will be home to the ships and security is of course very tight around the area.

In looking over John Dvorak’s Top 10 Most Important Software Programs I couldn’t help but think “well what does this mean to me?” So, forthwith, I started my own selfish list of Top 10 Most Important Software Programs…for Me. When I think back to what got me started off in the computer world and then bits further along that kept me interested in it, this is it, in no particular order.

WordPerfect – The first word processor I learned to use properly, and I believe the first software that I actually purchased for myself, at a nice student price.

MS-DOS net send and Unix talk – since they’re not really full-blown software packages, I’ve combined them into one category described as: “Oh my gosh, I was IM-ing on a network before IM-ing even existed.” Good times. What potential.

Lotus 1-2-3 – I was a college intern for two summers at Lotus Development Corp. 1-2-3 was the first PC program I learned in great depth and breadth and I still think “slash file save” when I click on that little “Save” icon in Excel.

TRS-80 BASIC – My first programming language back when I hated programming because all we did was write programs for math functions in math class. I hated math, thus, of course I hated programming. Ha.

Symantec Think C – I have no idea what version I started on but it was my first full programming environment (sorry, I never counted Emacs though many geeks would) and it made the edit, compile, run, debug cycle smooth as silk.

My first graphical web browser – Sadly I can’t remember the name of the first graphical browser I used, but it worked over a slow terminal dial-up connection and soon after I was upgrading my account to get my hands on PPP and Mozilla.

VAX/VMS – The primary system we used for email and programming courses in college. Yeah, unix was mixed in too, but not as much as I’d expect looking back now.

Quicken – The interesting thing about Quicken was that its user experience made something very dreary (money management — blech) actually seem fun. I don’t use it anymore (thus my use of past tense), but I probably should.

DOOM – The original version. Without this I may have never entered the violent world of gaming (I hated shooting the dogs in its predecessor Wolfenstein 3D). Who knew that finding and wielding a chainsaw could actually be fun?

kermit (probably MS-Kermit) – with kermit, a modem, and a phone line I never had to go into the college computer lab. I could stay in my very own room. Except that sometimes it’s more fun to be sitting in lab with everyone else at 2am. And then 6am.

A timeline of Olympic Mascots and torches. Get ready for Phevos and Athena, named after Greek gods (you may know Phevos better as Apollo). This year’s torch took its inspiration from the olive leaf.