I've ignored talking about most of the football offseason since it's been largely uneventful. Okay, that's not really true -- with Gibbs coming back to coach, and with the huge Bailey/Portis deal, and the movements by the Eagles to get Kearse and TO. The only notable Pats info was Ty Law's Hungry Man Tour, and even that's now a wash.

But here we go into training camp, bodies will fall, rosters shuffle, and we'll get to see what depth means. And the biggest offseason story of all can't go without notice here, even if only for schadenfreude for the Phins, is seeing Ricky Williams walk away. Lots of coverage everywhere, and great coverage by the usually unbearable Dan Le Batard (actually, unbearable is unfair -- in recent years, with the Dolphins out of the playoffs, he's been a fun read for me) with the scoop of Ricky finding himself in Jamaica and the reason he failed to pass the NFL pee test, and continued standout coverage by Mike Florio. Mike will be the Matt Drudge of football journalism. Not in the smarmy way that Drudge is Drudge -- just that he will be the one to break the big story before too long.

Training camp starts tomorrow for the Pats. And the worst offseason ever for the Dolphins comes to a close -- reminds me of the post Super Bowl '86 Pats implosion, or heck, most of the Pats years prior to the Kraft salvation. Or that horrible pre-season game when the Pats lost stars Garin Veris, Andre Tippet, and Ronnie Lippet. One of those "I'll always remember where I was..." moments, sadly enough. I was actually standing right about where this picture was taken.

The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art provides a nice tutorial about the basics of creating images from an isometric perspective -- perfect fodder for game development with J2ME and the MIDP 2 game API. Also with links to the crazycool eBoy -- with works that look like someone just started off adding buildings to SimCity 2000, and never stopped.

From boing-boing, a site that manages to be intelligent, charming and funny, without even a breath of pretensiousness: A Softer World. Honesty seems very natural for those Canadians.

A stunning toolkit found over at the reBlog for text mining that has some really lovely visual output.

Requires Mac OS X 10.3....

Holy cow. Microsoft gives up $20 million for Lindows to stop using their all-too-Windows-like name. I really had to look at it twice -- must be a misprint?

"It's all over. The Microsoft vs. Lindows saga reached a stunning conclusion with the joint announcement of a worldwide settlement Monday. The agreement involves the Lindows name itself as well as the usage of copyrighted Windows Media files that are currently shipping with their Linux distribution." (link)

Actually, it's $15M upfront. They can only get the other $5M if they can actually get Network Solutions to manage to transfer the rights. I guess it's chump change for Microsoft -- it's not like Peyton Manning money, anyway.

Despite my composerly grousing to follow, it sure seems that Chicago has got it going on with some striking investments in public space for the arts. While New York has been figuring out ways to cannonize Marsalis as the saviour of Jazz, or annoint Jazz as the savior of our cultural selves (or at least toss American Modernism down the memory hole), Chicago has moved the dirt and welded the metal.

What a beautiful site -- the garden entrance to the opera house in Chicago, by Kathyrn Gustafson, covered in today's NY Times. Gotta love the wild Gehry design of the open air pavilion. Granted, Chicago has done it's part to build an American concert music -- and yet what fills the halls of their Opera house? The same old repeat-toire. And the music festival goes it one better -- celebrate a touch of Copland, then Corigliano.

I've linked to him a lot in this post -- Greg Sandow has a lot of interesting things to say, especially this article about new music. While I don't agree with everything he says, he surely makes many good points, and thank goodness there's a voice even talking about it without the dated hysteria of other journalists.

"Paranoia Goes Better With Coke " is the title of the AP story about a GPS/cellphone promotion that has got the military a bit scared. Sure, it looks like a campaign issue from 2000, but it's not. This ain't the biggest issue facing the US military, but it's sure getting it's share of press. A spokesman for Coke responded:

"It cannot be an eavesdropping device," he said.

Nonetheless, military bases, including the U.S. Army Armor Center at Fort Knox, Kentucky, are asking soldiers to examine their Coke cans before bringing them in to classified meetings.

"We're asking people to open the cans and not bring it in if there's a GPS in it," said Master Sgt. Jerry Meredith, a Fort Knox spokesman. "It's not like we're examining cans at the store. It's a pretty commonsense thing."

Is the Army saying that terrorists could infiltrate a company as apple-pie as Coca-Cola? What would John Kerry do about it?. I have a solution: Armed Forces Radio has got Rush Limbaugh but no Al Franken, obviously it's not a place in the universe that avoids unilateralism. How about No Coke, Pepsi?

Updated: 7.26 with image of the X-rayed cans.